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June 13, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:45
Don’t Eat The Homophobic Chicken | Ep. 559
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Leftists target Chick-fil-A again.
More fallout from the Trump-Kim summit.
And Speaker of the House Paul Ryan sets an immigration vote.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Plenty to get to today.
If you missed it last night, we had a great new episode of Daily Wire backstage with me and Andrew Klavan and Michael Knowles and Jeremy Boring.
It was a lot of fun.
You should go check that out on YouTube.
You can check it out as well on iTunes or SoundCloud.
If you subscribe, I believe it came up in your feed this morning.
And we have a lot to get to today.
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So in a little while, we're going to get to President Trump and the fallout from the North Korean summit.
President Trump has been tweeting some things which are, in my opinion, not the smartest, But with that said, obviously it's a big public relations coup for the president.
The president had himself a hell of a day in the last couple of days.
He had a hell of a 48 hours going to Singapore and walking around with Kim and then getting all sorts of good media coverage for it.
His approval ratings are going to rise because of it.
It's a very popular move.
Even those of us who are skeptical like me are still obviously hopeful that President Trump ends up being right.
And this wasn't a sop to Kim for a photo op, that it actually ends up Curbing Kim's nuclear ambitions.
And you know what?
Why don't we just jump right into that?
As President Trump this morning, he tweets out, quote, And listen, I think that if North Korea decides to integrate into the family of nations and liberalize and get rid of the nuclear weapons, I think that if North Korea decides to integrate into the family of nations and liberalize and get For President Trump to say preemptively there's no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea is obviously untrue.
There's not a single North Korean weapon that has been disarmed at this point.
They have not destroyed any of their nuclear capacity.
And this sort of preliminary triumphalism, I objected to it yesterday because I think that it boxes President Trump in.
I think if President Trump wants to actually get something good out of North Korea, It is trust but verify, but you actually have to verify.
And you can't trust that he's disarming when he hasn't disarmed.
He hasn't even set a timetable for disarming.
The North Korean headlines, the one they're putting out in North Korea, suggests that Kim is telling his own people that the United States and North Korea have agreed to joint disarmament.
What that technically means is that Kim Jong-un is claiming to his own people the United States is going to disarm nuclearly alongside North Korea, which, of course, is totally insane and never going to happen.
Trump also tweeted before taking office, people were assuming that we were going to war with North Korea.
President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem.
No longer.
Sleep well tonight.
Well, again, the sort of preliminary triumphalism, I think, is actually not useful and is pretty counterproductive.
Because here's the thing.
What President Trump did is he basically signed an advance against royalties.
So when you're in the book industry, right, when you write a book, then publishers typically give you an advance, and the advance is supposed to incentivize you to write the book, and then you write the book, and then you get royalties on the back end.
But you don't immediately get the royalties.
Instead, what happens is that you have to pay off your advance.
If they advance you $20,000 for an advance, you have to make $20,000 And then you make whatever royalties are on top of that.
Well, in negotiations, what President Trump effectively just did is he gave Kim Jong-un an advance against royalties.
He said, listen, I'm going to give you preemptively, preliminarily, a lot of credibility on the world stage.
I'm going to let you stand up here with me.
I'm going to give you the honor of shaking my hand.
I'm going to allow you to fly your flag alongside the flag of the United States.
I'm going to grant you tremendous international legitimacy, which does have a practical impact.
It means that a bunch of countries located around North Korea are not going to isolate North Korea.
Nearly as intensely as they were before.
Instead, it looks like they're going to try and move toward normalization of relations with North Korea.
All of that is a preemptive give by the president of the United States.
Now, as I said yesterday, maybe this ends up being a triumph.
The way it ends up being a triumph is if Kim Jong Un actually does want to come to the table and not just come to the table, but offer denuclearization in a real way.
If it turns out that President Trump Give an advance against royalties, and then Kim Jong-un doesn't earn out.
Kim Jong-un's book doesn't sell.
Kim Jong-un doesn't actually give President Trump what he wants in return.
Then President Trump got bamboozled.
And the real question is going to be, is President Trump willing to flip?
Is President Trump—because the mark of a good negotiation here, if you're going to give an advance against royalties, is you claw that back.
Right?
If Kim Jong-un is lying, if he's not telling the truth, then Trump claws it back.
Now, I have very little doubt that if President Trump is humiliated by Kim Jong-un publicly, that he will go after Kim Jong-un personally.
He has done that before with all the Little Rocket Man talk, which, by the way, I kind of liked, right?
I mean, I talked about it at the time, and I said that it was kind of hilarious and worthwhile, even.
You know, is the president willing to flip on Kim Jong-un?
Now, we know that President Obama was not willing to flip on people.
Who screwed him in talk.
So when it came to Iran, President Obama was so invested in the idea that he'd gotten a great deal that when it was very clear that Iran was using all of the money that they had now gotten for terrorism and long-range missile development, Obama kept proclaiming that Iran had been moderated, that something magical had been done in Iran.
He became the PR agency for Iran.
Well, what we don't want from the Trump administration is for them to become the PR agency for North Korea because they're so invested in the possibility of a deal that they start pretending that a deal exists when a deal does not exist.
That's why I don't think that it is worthwhile for President Trump to be going out there and preemptively saying that North Korea is no longer a threat or a problem, that we've solved everything.
That's not verification, right?
That's just trust.
You need trust, but verify.
President Reagan, people are comparing Trump to Reagan because Trump met with Kim Jong-un and Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev.
But Reagan never came away from a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev and said, listen, the USSR is no longer a threat.
They've been disarmed.
Everybody can sleep easy in their bed tonight.
Reagan never said that.
What he said is the negotiations are progressing.
We're working on something.
We're going to try and get them where we need to go.
It's moving in the right direction.
All of that, I think, would be more useful for the president than for the president to go out there and start preliminarily declaring victory.
He also said we save a fortune by not doing war games as long as we are negotiating in good faith with which both sides are.
Again, It's not up to the president to determine whether the North Koreans are negotiating in good faith.
We don't know that yet.
We just don't know that yet.
And to assume that they are negotiating in good faith is, I think, a fool's errand.
We actually have to assume they're negotiating in bad faith until they prove it to us.
This should be show me.
It's time for the Kim family to show the United States, to show President Trump that they really mean what it is they are saying.
And this is not me being critical of President Trump for the sake of being critical of President Trump.
I spent the last several weeks praising President Trump on issues ranging from the Jerusalem move to some of his domestic policies with regard to regulation.
Go back and listen to the show.
I've been doing it for weeks, right?
But the fact is that when President Trump is putting himself in a bad position vis-a-vis negotiations, He's putting himself in a bad position vis-a-vis negotiations, and he's putting the United States in a bad position vis-a-vis negotiations.
Now, is it possible that all this works?
Yes, but it's a high-risk, high-gamble, right?
I mean, this is a high-risk gamble that the president is making right now.
It's high-risk, high-reward.
Maybe he goes out there, he shakes hands, he takes it on himself.
He makes it look as though he's legitimizing Kim, and then it turns out that Kim is Mikhail Gorbachev, and something great comes out of this.
Maybe that's what happens here.
But I'm gonna wait for the great thing to come out of it before I start preliminarily praising.
And when I see the wild praise that's happening on TV, or the wild rips that are happening, oh, it's the end of the world, this is obviously stupid, when I see both of those things happening, It suggests to me that people are jumping to their partisan hackery.
That people are jumping to, I want this to be good.
I want this to be good for President Trump.
I like President Trump.
I trust President Trump.
Therefore, I'm not going to trust but verify about President Trump.
I'm just going to trust President Trump.
Well, I don't trust any president.
I trust President Trump on policy much more than I trusted President Obama, obviously.
But in the end, everything has to be verified, and the deal has to be verified.
So President Trump tweets out that we are losing, that we save a fortune by not doing war games as long as we are negotiating in good faith.
Number one, he shouldn't be using the term war games.
War games is a North Korean propaganda term for what it is the United States does with South Korea.
Those are military exercises.
They're military-naval exercises that we do with South Korea.
For preparedness for our troops.
I've talked to members of the military yesterday who talked about what it is that we do in South Korea.
Those war games, supposedly, are also directed toward China.
They're directed toward training up a group of folks who can work in concert with American troops if, God forbid, some sort of military conflict breaks out on the peninsula.
Look, we all want the same thing here.
We all want North Korea to disarm.
The question is whether you think that President Trump's original approach, the harsh approach with North Korea, was more likely to bear fruit, or if you think that President Trump has to Really give Kim Jong-un a bear hug in order to accomplish this.
I think that neither is particularly necessary.
I think that I would rather have President Trump wielding a big stick and letting his lower-level negotiators go and negotiate a deal rather than preemptively granting Kim Jong-un all this sort of international credibility and legitimacy and taking our allies in the region and making them more friendly to Kim Jong-un.
Again, high risk, high reward.
If it pays off, it's great.
If it doesn't, then it's not going to be all that great.
And we're not going to know that for at least several months, probably.
So President Trump didn't stop there.
Then he tweeted out, so funny to watch the fake news, especially NBC and CNN.
They're fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea.
500 days ago, they would have begged for the deal.
Look like war would break out.
Our country's biggest enemy is the fake news so easily promulgated by fools.
Now, you know, look, I think when President Trump ripped into the fake news, I think sometimes that's absolutely justified.
I think that it is absolutely justified for the president to point out that a year ago, everybody was deeply worried that North Korea was going to nuke us into obliteration, right?
We were going to get into a nuclear exchange with North Korea.
Just a few months ago, the media were proclaiming that Trump was somehow going to gin up a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula, and now it's Trump surrendering.
Well, which is it, guys?
I mean, either you like kind of more muscular Trump, or you like negotiating Trump, but you got to pick one.
You can't do this routine where Trump is either going to bring about world peace or he's going to bring about nuclear war.
This inconsistency from the media really is quite galling.
So I understand why President Trump is upset.
With that said, you know, when the president says our country's biggest enemy is the fake news, and then at the same time, like really within a couple of hours, he's tweeting out that North Korea is no longer our biggest and most dangerous problem.
Instead, they have great potential for the future and there's no longer a nuclear threat.
The North Koreans, that is still an evil regime.
As much as I dislike a lot of members of the mainstream media, as much as I think that they are lying on a frequent basis, or at least biasing their coverage on a frequent basis, I'm not going to pretend that I think of the anchors at CNN in the same way I think of Kim Jong-un.
Our country's greatest enemy are not the fake news.
Our country's biggest enemy are places like North Korea still.
At least until they prove that they are not our enemy, and they have not come close to proving that as of yet.
Mr. President, take a page from the Reagan playbook.
Trust but verify.
Trust but verify.
And in the case of Kim Jong-un, I wouldn't even trust but verify.
Nothing has been put on paper yet.
In the case of Kim Jong-un, I would distrust and verify.
And the verification protocols should be even stronger for Kim Jong-un than they normally would be.
I have a little bit more on this.
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Okay.
You know, again, should we be optimistic about what President Trump is doing with North Korea?
Sure.
Sure.
I think optimism is warranted.
I think everybody should be optimistic and hopeful.
The president needs to be the strong leader he has been on foreign policy.
I've been very critical of the president when I think he's wrong.
I think that there's risk the president is wrong here.
And I think the president needs to show the same sort of strength and fortitude as he did when it came to the Iran deal that he is with the North Korean deal.
Remember, he rejected the Iran deal.
He said the Iran deal is no longer good because we cannot trust the Iranians.
And that was after we had signed a deal.
He said we cannot trust them.
That was Obama's deal, so he wasn't tied to it.
What I'm afraid of is that President Trump is going to make a deal with the North Koreans that isn't that great, and then he's going to feel tied to that deal because he made the deal in the first place.
I hope that's not the case, and I think his advisors, I hope, will advise him that that should not be the case.
Mr. President, by all means, extend the warm hand to North Korea if you think that that's going to succeed.
But on the other hand, it's a velvet glove and inside there must be an iron fist.
And if the iron fist is gone already, then we've just handed Kim Jong-un a victory.
There's either going to be a Trumpian triumph or it's going to be a Kim coup.
And President Trump gets to decide how that goes.
Remember, this is not a negotiation between equals.
The United States is the most powerful country in the history of the world by a factor of 10.
There is no reason That the United States should have to stoop down to Kim Jong-un's level in order to get him to do anything.
And the fact is that President Trump is already granting some sort of concessions to the Chinese.
So listen, maybe I'm totally wrong here.
Maybe the president has in his back pocket a big win from Kim.
If so, then I look forward to seeing that big win.
So far, all I've seen is an advance on royalties from the president to Kim Jong-un.
I don't see that as a victory for the United States unless there is a back end to this deal.
If it turns out the president advanced a bunch of trust to Kim, and Kim actually wants to do something, everything will be fine.
If not, then the president made a big mistake and got bamboozled by Kim, and I'm not going to preemptively declare one way or another, as so many people seem to want me to, and so many people seem to be angry that I am not.
I'm not.
Preliminary celebration about negotiations is not my favorite thing.
I just don't think negotiations are worth celebrating preliminarily.
It's the outcome of negotiations that ends up mattering in the long run.
Now, with all of that said, this is a very popular move.
The polls show that this may be the most popular initiative that Trump has ever undertaken.
There's a new poll out right now about Trump and Kim, and it shows that Voters are somewhat skeptical that Trump is going to convince Kim to give up his nukes, but most Americans and South Koreans do in fact back the summit.
Nearly half of voters are confident Trump can handle threats posed by North Korea, but significantly fewer believe he'll be successful convincing them to get rid of their nuclear program.
With that said, the summit itself is very popular because people feel like something has to break the impasse.
I think the American people are basically correct about all of this.
Okay.
Well, meanwhile, the left is struggling to come up with a message to run on in 2018 and 2020, and the radicals on the left continue to drive the conversation.
So there's a big conference that's supposed to happen in the next couple of days.
It's Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
I believe Cory Booker's showing up.
All of the prospective 2020 Democratic nominees.
And they keep saying they have great ideas, and I'm waiting to hear their ideas because I don't really see their great ideas.
Instead, what I see Is that this party, which proclaims that it is mainstream, is constantly being driven to the far left by its base.
I think what's happening right now in American politics is a severe polarization that is leading to reactionary politics on both sides of the aisle.
It is most obvious not on the right, where people are talking about it a lot.
It is most obvious on the left.
And the latest iteration of this is the newfound campaign against Chick-fil-A.
So, you may have seen over the last few days that the left has started campaigning again against Chick-fil-A because it is Gay Pride Month, and that means that we have to stop homophobic chicken.
Stop it.
Stop eating your homophobic chicken sandwiches.
Those chicken sandwiches?
You know that those chicken sandwiches have engraved upon them.
They've branded upon them.
All the grills at Chick-fil-A have Leviticus 18.22 branded upon them.
So you have to make sure that you do not come anywhere close to those homophobic chicken sandwiches.
The latest comes from Noah Mickelson over at Huffington Post.
He writes a long piece called, Because apparently that turns you into some sort of papist or something.
So here's what Mickelson writes.
He says, So eating out was a rare treat.
So, what does that have to do with the chicken, exactly?
Genius food so alien to southern Wisconsin in the early 80s.
They seemed like a small, salty miracle to my tiny, still soft mind.
It was almost too much for me to take.
Still, as delicious as the Georgia-based company's fried foods were, they weren't my only weakness as a kid.
When I wasn't fantasizing about Greece, I was spending my young swishy days doing a really bleepy job of hiding my insatiable hunger for other boys.
So what does that have to do with the chicken exactly?
So Mickelson says, you can imagine how upsetting it was for me when Chick-fil-A's president, Dan Cathy, proudly came out as a homophobe in 2012 by claiming, quote, we are inviting God's judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say, we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.
And I pray God's mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about.
That is not a homophobic statement by Dan Cathy.
It's not, okay?
Homophobia is the idea that gay people should be put in jail, or that homosexuality should be punishable by law, or that you are afraid of gay people.
But the idea that you think that homosexual sex is a sin, or that same-sex marriage is an abomination in terms of sort of the biblical definition of marriage, that's a pretty mainstream religious view.
Many, many gay friends, right?
I am in favor of the government getting out of the business of marriage altogether.
As a religious person, I also believe that homosexual sex is a sin because I am, in fact, a religious Jew, right?
I mean, this is just part of the religious Jewish tradition.
It has nothing to do with quote-unquote homophobia.
Anyway, because Dan Cathy has these views, now we have to not eat chicken sandwiches from Chick-fil-A.
Now, has Chick-fil-A ever told gay people they can't eat at Chick-fil-A?
No.
Has Chick-fil-A ever fired an employee for being gay?
No.
Does Chick-fil-A cover the benefits of gay employees?
Yes.
Does Chick-fil-A actually provide?
Food to the victims of the Orlando shooting at a gay nightclub?
You bet.
But apparently, because Dan Cathy doesn't agree with Noah Mickelson, it is time for the entire LGBT community to boycott the entire company of Chick-fil-A.
Here is why this is so stupid and so problematic for the country.
When you have entire groups of people boycotting companies on the basis of the political perspective of the leader of that company, not based on the activity of the company, right?
You can boycott based on the activity of the company.
That, I think, is fair.
But boycotting based on the views of the company's owner, Or based on the fact that the company donates its profits to Christian groups who have particular viewpoints on sexual orientation.
I don't see how that's good for the country.
It is not.
It means that you are now going to be obligated to vet the political viewpoint of everybody you do business with and then we are going to break off into these hive-minded Little cliques of people who only do business with, hang out with, and have conversations with people with whom we fully agree, and we try to bankrupt everyone else.
That makes for a pretty terrible First Amendment environment in the United States.
Now, this isn't an implication of the First Amendment itself, this isn't government regulation of Chick-fil-A, but there's such a thing as a sort of a free speech attitude, and the free speech attitude in the United States is going by the wayside as we call for companies, members of companies, to change their own particular political viewpoint, not their action, their political viewpoint expressed by them In order so that they can earn our business.
It's really, really negative.
And that's not the only extreme viewpoint that's now being pushed by the left.
The left is also now pushing extreme viewpoints with regard to masculinity.
So the latest iteration of this comes courtesy of Sarah Rich over at The Atlantic.
So Sarah Rich has a long piece over at The Atlantic called Today's Masculinity is Stifling.
Let me just point out, today's masculinity is less stifling than at any time in the recent past because the fact is that today's masculinity has almost nothing to do with masculinity.
Masculinity used to be tied to the idea of obligation to protect.
Now, when I teach my son to be a gentleman, what I'm going to teach him is that it is necessary to protect those who are weaker than you are.
If you've ever seen the movie American Sniper, there's a long monologue where the main character talks about how basically people are either sheep, wolves, or sheepdogs.
Either they're going to be aggressors, or they're going to be followers, or they're going to be sheepdogs protecting the sheep against the wolves.
It is the job of men to be sheepdogs, essentially.
That is what being a gentleman is.
It's upholding a moral standard, a standard of values, taking the slings and arrows in order to protect others.
That's what being a man is all about.
We have sort of gotten rid of that, and instead, we've gone with sort of the affectation of manhood.
So the affectation of manhood is, I work out a lot, and I drink lots of beer, and this is what makes me a man.
I smoke cigars, and that's what makes me a man.
Okay, what makes you a man is whether you are willing to protect people who are weaker than you, and whether you are willing to instill a system of values that protects the liberties of others who are not you, right?
That is what makes you a good human being, and more importantly, it's what makes you a good man in terms of masculinity.
That's why it's more important for Men, right?
And when you rip away men's mission, men tend to become destructive.
But if the idea is that masculinity now is too restrictive, what's so restrictive about it?
Well, it turns out that when you identify masculinity with the affectation, there are a bunch of people who don't like the affectation.
So first, the feminists came for the idea that men should not protect women because that was sexist.
And then they came for the idea that men should not even engage in the affectation of manhood.
They should not dress like men.
They should instead dress like women.
Or if they do dress like women, that doesn't make you less of a man.
Okay, they've done this routine where masculinity was reduced to the appearance of masculinity and then that itself was attacked.
So that's exactly the case that's being made by Sarah Rich, except she is attacking.
She says, In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time.
For months, he wore dresses or his purple and green mermaid costume on weekends and after school.
Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast.
Finally, one morning, I brought him his clean pants and shirt and he looked at me and said, I'm already dressed.
He was seated on the couch in a gray cotton sundress covered in doe-eyed unicorns with rainbow manes.
He'd slept in it, and in his dreaming hours, I imagine, stood at a podium giving inspirational speeches to an audience composed only of himself.
When he'd woken up, he was ready.
He walked a half block to school with a bounce in his step, chest proud.
My friends are going to say dresses aren't for boys, he told me casually over his shoulder.
They might, I agreed.
You can just tell them you are comfortable with yourself, and that's all that matters.
I thought of all the other things he could tell them.
I began to list them, but he was off running across the blacktop.
I scanned the entrance to see whether any parents noticed us as they came and went.
I hadn't expected my stomach to churn.
I felt proud of him for his self-assuredness, for the way he prepared for this quietly and at his own pace.
But I worried about what judgments and conclusions parents and teachers might make.
And of course, I was worried that somebody would shame him.
Well, they shouldn't shame him.
They should shame you.
You're a bad parent.
Okay, I'm just gonna put this out there.
You're a bad parent.
You should not be allowing your young boy, who is not old enough, to figure out The ways of life because the kid was not hit puberty yet.
This is not a kid who's old enough to have figured out masculinity and femininity for you to have sent him to school in a dress so he can be made fun of by all the other kids is a nasty thing for you to do as a parent.
There is something to the idea that you should be inculcating, yes, even the appearance of masculinity and femininity in your own children.
Distinctions between the sexes are important.
And it is you who are confusing your child.
Your child is not going to be happier because your child is confused as a general rule.
There are exceptions, but as a general rule, being gender confused and being confused about the sort of appearances of gender, it is not a worthwhile thing.
You're pleased with his self-assuredness?
The kid's seven.
The whole self-esteem movement, the idea that you can subjectively define the reality around you and everybody is expected to adapt, that is not going to work out well.
And now that doesn't mean the kid should be bullied.
The kid should not be bullied.
Bullying is bad in all cases.
You shouldn't bully the kids.
But parents have an obligation to protect their kids from bullying, and they also have an obligation not to confuse their kids about basic concepts of sex and gender.
The idea that boys and girls dress differently is true in every society in the history of mankind.
Now, you may say that there are other societies where boys wear kilts or boys wear skirts or whatever it is.
That's not true in American society.
And it is true that in Scottish society, men and women do not dress the same.
Men and women do not dress the same because men and women are, in fact, not the same.
And it is important to re-inculcate those gender differences.
Those gender differences are a beautiful part of life.
Those gender differences make your child less confused.
You're telling me when the kid was three and put on a dress, you could have said, you know what, sweetheart, that's not really appropriate.
Let's go put on some boy clothes.
But even that statement is apparently too radical for the entire left.
And listen, I'll get a lot of flack for saying this, obviously, from the left, because the idea is that we're supposed to pretend that all choices you make for your child are equivalent.
They are not equivalent.
This article continues.
In the afternoon, he was still wearing the unicorn dress.
He skipped down the sidewalk, reporting that some kids had protested his attire, but he'd assured them he was comfortable with himself.
With that, the seal was broken.
Most days since, he's worn a dress from his small collection, though he also favors a light blue guayabara, the classic collared button-down worn by men and boys in Cuba and the Philippines.
Classmates' objections continue, but with less frequency and conviction.
One day, when my husband dropped him off, he heard a little girl stand up to a naysayer and shout, boys can like beautiful things, too.
But they can't.
Not without someone looking askance.
No, that is not right.
To embrace female dress when you are not a woman, it's not about that femalehood is less.
It is the idea that masculinity and femalehood are distinct.
These are not the same thing.
parts of the world being a woman has been a disadvantage.
No, that is not right.
To embrace female dress when you are not a woman, it's not about that femalehood is less.
It is the idea that masculinity and femalehood are distinct.
These are not the same thing.
And that when you blow through those distinctions, you are making life worse for your child.
Gender confusion in children is a dangerous thing.
It's a dangerous thing.
It is not a good thing.
And reinstalling that, reinstating that, I don't know why you would want to do this as a parent.
I mean, I understand why this person wanted it.
She can virtue signal about it in the pages of the Atlantic.
So she can prove what a wonderful person she is by giving her child the Rousseauian Emile childhood where the child gets to make every decision for themselves.
Children are not capable of making important decisions for themselves.
You have a four-year-old and a two-year-old.
They do not get to make important decisions for themselves because if they did, they would both make stupid decisions because little kids are stupid.
Little kids don't know anything.
The whole point of civilizing young barbarians into civilized people is to make sure that you set some sort of standard.
Now, is this the most important thing in the world that you don't let your kid dress in a dress?
I don't think it's like the most important thing in the world, but I do think that it is important to say that boys and girls are different.
And to reinstitute, again, the reason that it is important to reinstitute these differences is because biologically boys are different than girls.
This has ramifications for everything ranging from the sorts of activities in which they engage to the sorts of ways that they think.
These things are ingrained.
And reveling in the beauty of those differences is a good thing.
It's so funny.
The entire left that says multiculturalism is wonderful, that all cultures are created equal and we ought to celebrate each culture for what it is, says that cultural appropriation from males to females is totally fine and vice versa.
We shouldn't celebrate the differences between men and women.
We should obliterate the differences between men and women.
Well, this is one of the key distinctions in society that actually matters.
The distinction between men and women matters because boys are not the same as girls.
Boys must be brought up to be gentlemen.
It's not that you teach boys not to rape.
It's that you teach them to affirmatively be good men.
And you teach women to be good women.
And being a good man is not quite the same thing as being a good woman.
And then there's the broader category of being a good person.
Right?
Which encompasses some aspects of being a good man and being a good woman.
But being a good man and being a good woman are two different things.
But the left is pushing this obliteration of all distinctions that actually matter.
And the goal here is, of course, that once everything is done, we will all be the same.
We will all be widgets that we get to form from scratch.
People are so in love with the idea of human beings as the blank slate that they are going to pretend that human beings actually are a blank slate, or they're going to encourage all sorts of activities that look more like blank slate activities, as opposed to the biological differences that make humanity beautiful and wonderful.
And this is what the left is embracing on a large scale, and it really is disturbing.
It's bad for kids, okay?
This kid is not going to be healthier, in my opinion, as a result of his mother sending him to school in a dress.
The fact is, even if the kid happens to have gender dysphoria, 80% of all children who identify as a member of the other gender, I understand cross-dressing and gender dysphoria are not the same thing, but 80% of kids who have the most extreme form of body dysmorphia, they believe that they are a girl in a boy's body, grow out of it by the time they are teenagers.
They grow out of it over time.
Be a parent, okay?
It's not your job to be your kid's friend.
It is not your job to enable every choice your kid makes.
Be a parent.
Find a standard that actually makes your kid's life happier and that makes society around you better.
Okay, so meanwhile, the city of Seattle has decided they're going to do now an about-face on Amazon and the head tax.
I'm gonna discuss all that in just a second.
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Hi, I'm Michael Shermer.
I'm happy to be here on Ben Shapiro's Sunday special, where we'll be talking about, well, pretty much every big issue there is.
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"We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation." So as I said, the left has become rather radical and we're supposed to ignore that because the right is also becoming more reactionary.
But the left's radicalism means that they even have had to about-face on some of their own proposals.
So this is hilarious.
The Seattle Times is reporting that, if you remember just a couple of weeks ago, the Seattle City Council approved of a head tax.
They were going to tax Amazon and Microsoft and all of these other companies some huge amount, $275 per employee for homelessness.
They were going to tax all these major companies in the city of Seattle.
Less than a month later, they reversed it.
So in a stunning reversal without parallel in Seattle's recent political history, according to Daniel Beekman of the Seattle Times, the city council voted 72 on Tuesday to repeal a controversial head tax on large employers like Amazon.
Mayor Jenny Durkan plans to sign the repeal into law.
So that lasted for about five seconds.
The move came as a business-backed campaign to kill the tax prepared to submit petition signatures this week to qualify the referendum for the November ballot.
People on both sides of the head tax debate packed the council chambers, waving signs with the slogans, tax Amazon and no tax on jobs.
As the council members voted, they were drowned out by activists who chanted, housing is a human right.
Before the tally, council member Lisa Herbold said she felt like crying.
But she would side with the majority of her colleagues because the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce had managed to persuade the vast majority of voters to oppose the tax.
In other words, they knew that when the tax came up for a vote, it was going to lose, so they preemptively decided to kill the tax, and they all felt like crying.
Because it turns out that when you pass some of the world's stupidest policies, even the leftist voters of Seattle can't stand it, and you're going to have to reverse yourselves and then weep about it.
Herbold said she lost hope over the weekend after seeing poll results and talking with advocates.
Better to retreat now rather than see voters cancel the tax in November after a months long bitter struggle, she said.
Quote, this is not a winnable battle at this time.
The opposition has unlimited resources.
I love how the left in Seattle suggests that the Chamber of Commerce has unlimited resources.
It's the city of Seattle.
The city of Seattle is about as left a city as there is in the United States.
And yet even the city of Seattle has gone, nope, sorry, can't do that.
You're going to alienate all the businesses.
So as the left moves further to the left, they are alienating the center.
Well, you would assume from that that maybe the best move for the right would be to, you know, grab that center, since the left is apparently abandoning that center.
Well, instead, the right is having so much fun drinking leftist tears that some on the right have decided in primaries that it is worthwhile to simply go after the candidate Who is the most Trumpy in affect, the candidate who is most ensconced in sort of the radical language that ticks off the left, which is why last night Corey Stewart won his primary in Virginia.
So Corey Stewart was running against a guy named Nick Freitas.
The campaign was really close.
It came down to 2 percent.
And Corey Stewart, who was expected to win.
It should be said by double digits.
He'd run a very close race before in Virginia, I believe for the governor's seat.
And then he was beaten by Ed Gillespie in that governor's primary.
Well, now he's won the Senate runoff and he's going to run against Tim Kaine.
He will likely lose.
But Corey Stewart won and he won because he was sort of the most Trumpy guy in the race.
Now, Corey Stewart comes along with an enormous amount of baggage.
Corey Stewart has hobnobbed with some Pretty nefarious characters in the past.
He's tried to disassociate from those characters.
He went to a sort of neo-confederate ball.
He made one of his key issues the upholding of confederate monuments, which I think is a controversial issue at the very least.
Corey Stewart, he's a political animal for sure, and he's again likely to lose in the race to Tim Kaine.
But it seems like the right in its desire for a reactionary anti-establishment politics is embracing candidates who may not be the strongest candidates in the world.
The same thing holds true in South Carolina last night.
So Mark Sanford.
Lost his congressional primary last night.
He is an almost five-term member of the House of Representatives, and he lost his primary election to a political newcomer, State Representative Katie Arrington, by a 50.5% to 46.5% margin.
And Arrington was a Romney and Rubio supporter in the primaries.
She ended up supporting Trump and said she would do so in the House.
Sanford was a Trump supporter in the 2016 election.
The media's sort of take on this is that Sanford was too anti-Trump to win.
I don't think that's actually true.
I think what happened is that Sanford ran a really lackluster campaign in his own district, but the impact is going to be that Arrington is more militant in her approach, Sanford is a lot less militant, and also he said some pretty abrasive things about President Trump in the past.
So what does this mean for Republican primary voters?
What does this mean for the Republican Party in general?
Well, it means that I understand why there's caution on the part of Republican legislators going up against President Trump.
The fact is that you cannot be fully anti-Trump and win in the Republican Party right now.
End of story.
You cannot be fully anti-Trump in the Republican Party as a legislator and win.
And that makes a certain amount of sense in the sense that President Trump is in fact the President of the United States.
But it does mean cutting off your nose to spite your face because the fact is that Mark Sanford was voting 90% of the time with President Trump, including on some of his biggest priorities.
Katie Arrington is a bigger government proponent.
She campaigned against Mark Sanford being too small government.
Which suggests that if you are voting for a candidate based on their support level for President Trump's language rather than President Trump's agenda, or if you're voting for a Republican candidate based on how much they like Trump, not how much they like limited government, that should be a sign that you're doing something wrong, okay?
That's not actually a really good thing, I think.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about Immigration and AT&T Time Warner.
But let's get to this immigration story.
So this is an amazing story.
There's a lot of talk these days about President Trump being too harsh on immigration.
This has been specifically said about separating families at the border.
As I have made clear in the past, the law of the land requires that families be separated at the border when there is an illegal immigrant who brings a child across the border and you want to arrest the illegal immigrant.
The left's solution is don't arrest the illegal immigrant, which is no solution at all.
Illegal immigration continues to be a threat to certain areas of the country.
I don't think that illegal immigrants are generally coming across to commit crimes.
I don't think that illegal immigrants are bad people.
I know too many illegal immigrants to believe that.
But I do believe that any country that is worth its salt has to enforce its border.
And it is also true that we cannot vet the people who are coming through illegally.
We just can't.
And the latest case in point of this is a situation at a high school in apparently Maryland where MS-13 is now recruiting people.
This is according to the Washington Post.
Okay, this is not a right-wing source.
The boys had once been friends before MS-13 began recruiting one of them.
Now, as other students streamed to class one April morning at William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, Maryland.
This middle school, he's like 11 or 12.
The two teens squared off in the third story bathroom, a fight captured by another student on his cell phone.
The MS-13 recruit threw a punch at his former friend's head.
His opponent ducked and tackled the 15-year-old.
Their sneakers squealing as they tumbled to the green tile floor.
I like that someone shouted off camera as the recruit tried to cover his head.
That looks like it hurt, someone wrote under the video, which was uploaded to Instagram.
Gang-related fights are now a near-daily occurrence at word, where a small group of suspected MS-13 members at the overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George's County throw gang signs, sell drugs, draw gang graffiti, and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to This is a serious problem, okay?
It's a real problem.
students.
Most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.
Now, remember, when President Trump called MS-13 animals, many people on the left were very upset about all this.
This is a serious problem.
Okay, it's a real problem.
When MS-13 is recruiting in junior highs, that's scary stuff.
Although administrators deny Ward has a gang problem, the situation inside the aging overcrowded building has left some teachers so afraid they refuse to be alone with their students.
The Many said they had repeatedly reported incidents involving suspected gang members to administrators, only to be ignored.
Claims supported by documents obtained by the Washington Post.
This is why I'm not going to get on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for being harsh on immigration.
I don't think that he is wrong about his perspective on immigration.
bomb.
The gang's president worked comes at a time when the Trump administration has declared war on MS-13 and communities throughout the country are confronting a surge in MS-13 related violence.
This is why I'm not going to get on Attorney General Jeff Sessions for being harsh on immigration.
I don't think that he is wrong about his perspective on immigration.
So Jeff Sessions has gotten into controversial territory recently because he released a 31 page decision narrowing the grounds for asylum for victims of private crimes, So the asylum law is that if you are a victim of a government, that if you are coming to the United States because you're a political dissident, basically, that we are more likely to grant you asylum.
But we had broadened that out to include people who, for example, were victims of domestic abuse.
So you live in Guatemala and your husband beats you, and now we have to take you in for asylum.
Jeff Sessions has said this is not what the law is for, and here's what he had to say about it.
Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems, even all serious problems, that people face every day all over the world.
So today, I'm exercising the responsibility given to me under the INA, and I will be issuing a decision that restores sound principles of asylum and long-standing principles of immigration law.
Okay, this makes some sense.
I mean, people are ripping on him, but this makes a fair bit of sense considering the fact that if you're a victim of domestic violence, that should not be your entry ticket to the United States.
The question really is whether the government is failing to protect you from domestic violence, for example, or whether the government is upholding the rights of the domestic violator.
You know, that sort of stuff is sort of a different story.
But if the goal here is that anyone who has ever suffered in the world can come into the United States, I think that that's a mistake.
Now, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't find ways to help them, that private charities particularly shouldn't find ways to help these people escape from domestic violence situations.
And there are private charities that do help this to happen.
But just because the United States is a great place and there are a lot of people suffering doesn't mean that it's the responsibility of the United States to take people in without vetting them or determining whether they're going to be in addition to the United States.
Unvetted immigration is a problem.
It is a problem.
And it's a problem that has to be dealt with seriously without all the sloganeering that seems to accompany all of this.
OK, so it's time for a couple of things that I like and then a couple of things that I So, a couple of things that I like.
You gotta love the fact that Alec Baldwin still thinks that he is a relevant player on the American political scene.
So Alec Baldwin is of the weird opinion that if he ran for president, he would beat President Trump.
If I ran, I would win.
You would?
I would absolutely win.
If I ran for president, I would win.
Hands down, I would win.
Because you would not?
It would be the funniest, most exciting, most crazy campaign.
OK, that is not true.
If Alec Baldwin runs, he will not win.
Alec Baldwin barely has the support of a few people on the left, let alone anybody on the right.
He's deeply off-putting.
But if everybody, if this is how the left wants to turn, if the Democrats want to turn to a celebrity candidate because they think they need a celebrity to beat Trump, More power to him.
Enjoy yourselves.
Keep campaigning on Bernie and Alec Baldwin.
Keep doing it, guys.
I really am appreciative.
Okay, other things that I like.
So there's a ruling that a lot of people don't like that came down from a district court.
The Trump administration had been challenging the ability of AT&T and Time Warner to merge.
There's no reason to challenge this merger.
Legitimately no reason.
So I am very much an advocate of free market capitalism, and that means that I am generally anti-antitrust law.
So antitrust law is the idea that you have to break up companies when they get too large.
The only time there is such a thing as a true monopoly is when there is a company that owns 100% market share in a particular industry and then can raise the prices to a sky-high level.
That's a true monopoly.
AT&T Time Warner would not be a true monopoly.
In terms of market value of new media, Amazon.com is now valued at $817 billion.
AT&T Time Warner would be valued at $282 billion.
So, it's not that they control 100% of the market.
and Warner would be valued at $282 billion.
So it's not that they control 100% of the market, they don't even control 10% of the market.
Okay, Verizon is worth 203 billion.
Netflix is worth $157 billion.
Disney is worth $155 billion.
And what you're going to start seeing is some of these companies consolidate to fight AT&T Time Warner.
Now, the people who are objecting are saying, well, the reason AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner is they're trying to buy their entertainment content and then, in accordance with the new net neutrality rules, which have been gotten rid of, Now, AT&T is going to be able to use Time Warner Entertainment as sort of their base of operations.
They're going to use and privilege Time Warner Entertainment, and put it on their own distribution mechanisms, and privilege that content.
Okay, fine, so?
So what?
So then Verizon partners with Netflix, or Verizon partners with Disney, or Verizon partners with Fox, or something.
That's fine.
This is what competition does.
If they really want to charge me more for non-Time Warner content, and there's another company offering me a better deal, then I'll go to that other company.
And the fact is, we are now getting more entertainment for cheaper than ever in human history.
I mean, if you go to Netflix or Amazon, I subscribe to both.
The amount of entertainment that is available at the touch of a button is just astounding.
It's just astounding.
And the fact is, all these cable companies are going to die anyway because people are cutting the cord at incredibly rapid rates.
So what's going to happen then?
Well, you're going to need a new way to make revenue.
And one of the ways to make revenue is to own the entertainment producing fora that are actually making the entertainment.
And then you distribute them online.
I don't see a huge problem with that.
The truth is that President Trump has demonstrated that he's not a big fan of the folks over at Time Warner because he doesn't like CNN.
But that has nothing to do with this particular merger.
And as a free market capitalist, I think that the merger is absolutely fine.
OK, time for some things that I hate.
Alrighty, so it now turns out that Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Dennis Rodman with a message of thanks from President Trump for his involvement in the negotiations in North Korea.
This is utterly unnecessary.
Dennis Rodman is a crazy person.
And I understand, does this do any real harm?
No.
Is it stupid?
Yes.
You know, I criticized the president for his associations with Kim Kardashian.
Dennis Rodman is eight times as crazy as Kim Kardashian.
Now, if the idea is that Dennis Rodman got Kim to the table, How about this?
How about we say congratulations to one another?
Ones can actually make some concessions.
Can we wait for that?
Otherwise you end up with tape like this.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the phone congratulating Dennis Rodman in an alternative universe where Biff eventually actually went back to 1955 and actually bet on the sports book.
Here is Dennis Rodman being congratulated by the White House.
Hi Dennis, this is Sarah Sanders.
How are you?
What's going on?
Well, I just was calling.
I know the President had seen some of your comments over the last several days and just wanted me to reach out and thank you for some of the positive things you've said and appreciate you being helpful in this process.
Thank you.
I know he appreciates it and again we appreciate your support, you being here and being so vocal about it.
So I just wanted to call Okay, so there's Dennis Rodman being congratulated by the White House.
We now live in the most stupid timeline, I think it is fair to say.
Listen, can you use people like Dennis Rodman for diplomacy?
I suppose you can, but yeah, I just, I gotta say, I sort of object to the degradation of the White House to the point where they're calling Dennis Rodman a legitimate crazy person to talk about his relationship with Kim Jong-un.
Maybe it's practical.
I'm open to arguments that I'm wrong on this, but you know what?
I think it's not a thing I hate as much as a thing that I'm uncomfortable with.
How's that?
Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with all the latest news.
We'll be broadcasting from Dallas.
We'll see you then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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