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June 22, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:16
I Really Don’t Care, Do U? | Ep. 566
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Time Text
Time Magazine proves you can't trust the press, Politico runs the worst story in human history, and Melania dons a very weird jacket.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, many things to get to today.
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Alrighty, so.
A lot happening.
Today, we begin with Time Magazine.
So, you recall that Time Magazine put out a cover yesterday.
The cover of their new magazine is all about why Trump is an evil, terrible person who hates children.
Because this is what Time Magazine does.
Every other Time Magazine is some sort of nasty take on President Trump.
Sometimes merited, most often not.
So, here was Time Magazine's cover, in case you forget.
It was, in fact, a picture of a little girl who's crying as her mother stands there with Border Patrol.
And then everything is erased and it becomes red.
And then in front of her, you can see President Trump.
And then it says, welcome to America.
So it's a tiny two-year-old kid screaming and crying.
And President Trump kind of smugly grinning down at her because he doesn't care about the children.
Well, well, well, it's a little bit of a picture.
It turns out that this entire cover is a lie.
Not only is the cover wrong about President Trump's policy, which of course has been the policy in the United States since a 2016 court decision from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, so dating all the way back to the Obama administration, kids have been forcibly separated from parents who are arrested for federal charges.
It is also not true because this girl was not even separated from her mother.
So they took a picture of a little girl and then they photoshopped it in to an all red cover with President Trump in the foreground.
And it turns out none of this is true.
The little girl is from Honduras.
She was not separated from her mother at all.
She was crying because her mom was crossing illegally into the United States at about 11 p.m.
and the little girl was tired and thirsty according to Border Patrol.
Here's a Border Patrol agent explaining to CBS what the actual story here was.
We asked her to set the kid down in front of her, not away from her.
She was right in front of her.
And so we can properly search the mother.
So the kid immediately started crying as she set it down.
I personally went up to the mother and asked her, are you doing okay?
Is the kid okay?
And she said, yes.
She's tired and thirsty.
It took less than two minutes.
As soon as the search was finished, she immediately picked the girl up and the girl immediately stopped crying.
OK, so the media took this photo and they blew it up and they made it seem as though the kid was crying because mommy had just been trucked away to the Nazi death camp by President Trump.
This is what the media did.
They ran with this story.
They ran with the picture.
They didn't tell you the rest of the story.
By the way, the guy who's speaking there, his name is Carlos Ruiz.
So clearly this is a white alt-right racist from the Border Patrol who's talking about this situation.
Hey, here's Reuters reporting.
Reuters, not Daily Wire.
Reuters, quote, The Honduran toddler pictured sobbing in a pink jacket before US President Donald Trump On an upcoming cover of Time magazine, was not separated from her mother at the U.S.
border, according to a man who says he is the girl's father.
Quote, My daughter has become a symbol of the separation of children at the U.S.
border.
She may even have touched President Trump's heart, Denis Valera told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Valera said the little girl and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, had been detained together in the Texas border town of McGowan, where Sanchez has applied for asylum.
And they were not separated after being detained near the border.
Honduran Deputy Foreign Minister Nelly Jerez confirmed Valera's version of events.
Well, not only was this kid not separated from mommy, it turns out that mommy was falsely claiming asylum.
She is not, in fact, a political dissident in Honduras.
In fact, she ran away from her other three children in Honduras.
She left them there with dad.
Dad has a good job.
Mom was working.
And yet, all of this was passed around the internet endlessly, and we were told that this Time magazine cover was just demonstrative of how America has gone the wrong way, about how everything is falling apart.
Our moral status has been completely decimated.
It's been completely decimated thanks to President Trump and his evil.
And you see people on the left.
Repeating this idiotic routine ad nauseum.
So, for example, there's this one woman who tweeted out one of these stories that has now become ubiquitous on Twitter, where you ask your five-year-old a woke question.
So this woman whose name is Bethany Oakley, she tweeted out, I asked my five-year-old if she wanted to come to a protest with me this weekend.
First of all, the answer is always no.
Your five-year-old does not want to come with you to a protest this weekend because why would a five-year-old want to go stand in the heat for some cause they have no idea what it is?
Once I had explained what we were protesting, she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, I don't know how to have these conversations with my kids.
That's what Bethany Oakley tweeted out.
You see this kind of stuff all over Twitter all the time.
This thing had 15,000 likes, another 14,000 retweets, because asking woke five-year-olds about immigration policy is the way we ought to make immigration policy in the United States.
I know that when I have a serious question about health care, I immediately go to my four-year-old and I ask her to break down Medicaid spending for me.
It's a crucial element to know.
I need to know what my four-year-old thinks about the future of Social Security.
But more than that, I like to lie to her.
It's my favorite thing.
Just like Bethany Oakley, I like to lie to my child.
I like to say, Honey, if Social Security isn't reformed, by the time you grow up to 30, you'll be living in a deathly hellscape in the United States, in which small children are fed to dogs.
And then when she cries, then I say to her, Honey, I don't know how to have these conversations with you.
I just don't.
Now, here's the real way you have this conversation with your kid.
Your kid says, Mommy, are they going to take me away too?
And you say, No, honey, I didn't commit a federal crime.
That's the actual way that that conversation goes.
Because the separation of parents and kids, it ain't happening unless some federal crime has been committed.
In this case, the lady claims asylum, and she wasn't even separated from the kid.
So the lady falsely claimed asylum, she wasn't separated from the kid, she didn't come up for political dissident reasons, and she wasn't mistreated by Border Patrol.
So this story tells exactly the reverse.
It tells exactly the reverse of the story that the media wanted to tell, that the media ran with it anyway, because this is what they do.
And then they wonder why we hate the media.
They wonder why so many Americans look at the media and say, we can't trust you.
They wonder why when President Trump shouts, CNN sucks, and everybody starts chanting along with him, that people are chanting.
That's not because of Trump.
It's because the media have been fibbing about stories like this for my entire lifetime.
And it's not just with regard to the immigration issue.
There's an amazing story today that Hamas paid off a woman to claim that her baby was dead during an Israeli tear gas attack.
This is a story from the Times of Israel.
This is how corrupt the media are.
This is from the Times of Israel.
A 20-year-old Palestinian indicted Thursday on terror-related charges told Israeli investigators during his interrogation that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar paid his relatives to falsely tell the media that his baby cousin died of tear gas inhalation.
The story of baby Lila Gonder's death, purportedly from inhaling tear gas fired by Israel at the Gaza border, made headlines around the world last month and intensified global criticism of Israel's handling of Hamas-spurred violence at the fence.
On May 28th, IDF forces arrested Mahmoud Omar, along with another member of Fatah's armed wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
It's a terrorist group.
After they attempted to infiltrate into Israel and torture an unmanned IDF post, Omar had been acting as the lookout.
The group did not manage to carry out the attack as they came under IDF fire during his questioning.
Omar told interrogators the details of the planned attack and detailed his involvement in other terror-related activities.
The suspect also disclosed that he was related to Laila Gandor, the eight-month-old baby whose May 14th death was originally reported to have been caused by inhalation of tear gas sprayed by Israeli forces at Gaza border protesters.
The story of the baby's purported death dominated global media, and it turns out that two weeks prior to the arrest, this guy was part of the giant border riot.
And he said that Lila had died of a blood disease similar to the one that took the life of the deceased infant's brother, who succumbed to the condition at the same age in 2017.
The entire media ran with the story that Israel had murdered this child, and it turns out the kid died of a blood condition.
And then you wonder why no one trusts the folks in the media?
It's because the media suck at their jobs.
Stop sucking at your jobs and we'll trust you more.
Or when you get it wrong, correct it.
But running with blanket stories that are provided by Hamas, or running with stories about a picture that isn't even based on reality, You know, in which a mother put down her kid for two minutes and the baby was hungry, and then the mother picked the baby back up, and then you take that picture and you make it look like the kid is crying about Donald Trump's immigration policy.
No wonder we don't trust you.
My favorite, my favorite story about lack of trust in the media today comes courtesy of Politico.
So, you know that the media may be out to get you when they start dredging up people you went to third grade with.
I am not kidding.
This is what Politico did today.
Politico found some idiot named John Mueller.
John Mueller, who is the head of a new Mueller investigation.
He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard Law School, which says very poor things about my alma mater.
And he writes and studies philosophy in Wisconsin.
He wrote a story today, quote, I sat on the other side of Stephen Miller's first wall.
Stephen Miller, of course, is President Obama's chief consultant when it comes to immigration issues, very close with Jeff Sessions.
Originally, he was Jeff Sessions' chief of staff before he moved over to the Trump administration proper.
This story is just insane.
So here is a 900 word story in Politico by a guy who went to third grade with Stephen Miller.
Now, you might think, well, maybe he has something revelatory to tell us about Stephen Miller.
Maybe it turns out that Stephen Miller in his off hours killed puppies in the backyard.
Maybe Stephen Miller was the kind of kid who tortured animals, right?
Like that would actually be like a relevant story.
But no, that's not what the story is at all.
Here's the story.
Quote.
It was the year he sat next to me in third grade.
It's hard to say how much a kid's behavior in third grade can really tell you about the inner workings of his soul.
No, it's not.
Third graders are idiots.
They're stupid little idiots.
The idea that it's going to tell you anything about the working of a third grader's soul, again, unless they're torturing puppies or engaging in pathological behavior, There's, it tells you nothing, okay?
Third graders like pee on themselves.
They smell.
Like, I love kids, but let's not pretend that third grade, like, I looked at you in third grade and I knew from that moment that you were destined to be the immigration leader in the United States.
Okay?
No.
Third grade was so stupid I skipped it.
Okay, so here is what this idiot says.
But here is what I remember.
This idiot says, surely the well-documented indicators of Miller's alt-right beginnings in middle school, high school, and college have less impressionistic connections to his current behavior.
But here is what I remember.
I'm going to read you the rest of the story in a second because it is so good.
And when I say it is so good, I mean it is so intensely stupid for me.
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Okay, so back to this idiotic article.
From John Mueller and his Mueller investigation.
It's the new Mueller investigation over Politico.
About Stephen Miller being a third grader.
Because of our last names, Stephen and I shared a desk.
We were not friends, though we weren't exactly enemies either.
Our teacher, Miss Fisk, had the class write stories each week with vocabulary words and sometimes she let us read them aloud.
I wrote a series of stories about a mixed up chicken named Jeremy.
I am not kidding, this is in Politico.
I felt proudest that year when I got to read my stories in class and they made the other kids laugh.
But it was difficult to make Stephen laugh.
You understand?
Really, this is what it says.
Not joking.
It was difficult to make Stephen laugh.
He wouldn't laugh at the kids' mixed up chicken stories.
This is how he knew, from the very beginning, that Stephen Miller wanted to imprison illegal immigrants in Japanese internment conditions.
I found him difficult to reach at all, and so it seemed in most everyone else.
He was frequently distracted, vacillating between total disinterest and everything around him, my stories, of course, included.
This person's really pissed that Stephen Miller didn't laugh at the mixed-up chicken stories.
My goodness!
He showed total disinterest in everything around him, my stories included.
This is a highlight of his life, these mixed-up chicken stories.
It was all downhill from the mixed-up chicken stories about a guy named Jeremy, who was a mixed-up chicken, and complete...
Why don't we trust the media?
I don't understand.
And complete obsession with highly specific tasks that could only be performed alone.
He was especially obsessed with tape and glue.
Again, this is in one of the most prestigious political magazines in America.
Along the midpoint of our desk, Steven laid down a piece of white masking tape, explaining that it marked the boundary of our sides and that I was not to cross it.
The formality of this struck me as odd.
I was a fairly neat kid, at least at school, and I had never spread my things to his side of the desk.
Stephen, meanwhile, could not have been much messier.
His side of the desk was sticky and peeling, littered with scraps of paper, misshapen erasers, and pencil mubs.
If this adhesive division kept Stephen on his side of the desk, I was all for it, as unfriendly as it seemed.
But instead, the tape became an attractive nuisance.
Stephen picked at it with his fingernails, methodically, in a mixture of absentmindedness and what seemed like channeled hostility.
You can sense how much he hated Mexicans by the way he was picking at the tape in third grade on his desk.
Unbelievable, this guy's insight is just incredible.
This process left, this process of effacement left a thin layer of sticky grime, not altogether dissimilar from the rest of Stephen's desk.
He was grimy, he was disgusting in third grade.
Stephen rubbed his fingers over this layer of grime, rolling it into little gray pellets until it too was gone.
Then he applied a new piece of tape, along with a renewed warning that I was not to cross it.
Don't rinse, but do repeat for months.
When Stephen was not picking at the tape, he was playing with glue.
Dead serious, guys.
This is actually an article.
Okay, I'm gonna continue with this story in just a second.
"Tilted glaciers in the valleys of his palms.
"Glue rustily in hand, he deployed his deepest powers "of concentration to watch these pools harden.
"The first sign would be a rippling on the surface "as if from a winter gale.
"This would produce a precarious moment "as Stephen's urge to stick a finger "into the filmy layer became palpable "and his immobilized palm began to tire." Okay, I'm gonna continue with this story in just a second.
First, I just have to say, what the actual F?
Okay, there's another 400 words of this story.
Okay, there's another 400 words of this story about Stephen Miller liking to play with tape and glue at age 8.
Again, the Mueller investigation continues, right?
This is the actual Mueller investigation, John Mueller's investigation into his time in third grade with Stephen Miller.
Quote, invariably, Stephen succumbed to this urge before the glue fully hardened, at which point the prior game transformed into a new one, the game of spreading still viscous glue across the remainder of his hand.
Then, once the glue dried, he picked it off in long strips, the glue pulling the skin on his palm outward as he tugged it with his other hand, with skin snapping back into place when each strip broke off.
Still, the sticky adhesive beneath the strips of glue remained on his palm.
So Stephen rubbed his hands together to produce more little gray pellets, which he collected and rolled together into a mound.
This, in turn, was used to blot at and thereby clean, or perhaps dirty, his portion of the desk.
Okay, now you might be thinking, okay, well, so where's, like, the actual meat, Uncle Eddie?
Like, where's the actual meat of the story?
When do we get to the part where Stephen Miller, like, kills cats in the backyard?
Like, where do we get?
That, for better or worse, is the full extent of my memory of Stephen that year at Franklin Elementary School in Santa Monica, California, where the sign out front reads, be a friend, not a bully.
Oh, the irony.
The irony that an elementary school has a sign that says, be a friend, not a bully, but Stephen Miller turned out to be the world's worst Frontally balding bully.
It's just, it's unbelievable.
I heard stories about him from friends as we got older, but I wasn't around to witness things firsthand.
I switched to a different school after sixth grade.
What to make of this now, 25 years later?
We were all grimy kids at some point, of course, with sticky hands and short attention spans, but it is at least poetic that Steven was bent on building a nonsensical wall even back then.
A wall that had more to do with what lay inside him than what lay beyond.
He thought he was trying to keep out the chaos of the world, when really, what he was looking for was a way to explain away the chaos on his own side of the desk.
For that was where chaos had always been.
That's an actual article in Politico.
Yeah, that's really, that's it.
Now, we won't find out until later that the Mueller investigation will end with an actual pee tape of Stephen Miller, you know, peeing his pants in third grade.
But it's just...
Amazing.
Like, why don't people trust the media?
I don't understand.
Why wouldn't we trust people who decide that that is print-worthy?
The National Enquirer wouldn't pay five cents for that piece.
But Politico somehow thought, you know what?
What people deeply need to... It's deeply important.
People must know, people must know that Stephen Miller once took a piece of tape and put it across the center of his desk when he was eight years old, and then removed that piece of tape and liked to put glue on his hands and take it off, just like every other third grader in the history of the world since Elmer Glue was invented.
No, it's just, yes, but why don't people trust me?
I don't know, I don't know.
It must be, it's Trump, it's Trump.
Trump is so evil.
That's all I've got, that's all I've got.
I trust the media more now because I've read that story.
Because now I know that deep in the recesses of Stephen Miller's mind is the little boy, that grimy little evil child who liked to take eraser nubs and stack them on his desks, who chewed on pencils, who liked to go over and grind his pencils, those giant pencils that fit in the palm of your hand in that little pencil sharpener that you used to actually have to hand grind like some sort of organ.
Ooh, Stephen Miller.
Media.
Love you.
Never change, media.
Never change.
And speaking of stupid things in the media, so yesterday, everyone went nuts because Melania Trump wore a jacket.
Okay, I don't know what timeline we fell into, guys, but it is the stupidest timeline.
I don't know what...
Every day, we stray further from God's light.
So Melania Trump went to visit a bunch of child refugees or illegal immigrant children along the border.
And before she got on her plane on the East Coast in Bethesda, Maryland, before she got on her plane, she wore this jacket.
It's a jacket from Zara that is $39.
And it says, I really don't care, do you, on the back of it.
Suffice it to say, this is not a smart move.
This is not a smart thing to do.
Right?
Because you're trying to go and demonstrate how much you do care.
And now you're wearing a jacket that says, I really don't care.
Do you?
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Okay, so Melania Trump yesterday wears this jacket.
This I-really-don't-care-do-you jacket.
Now, obviously she meant to wear the jacket.
There's a lot of talk today, oh, it's just she didn't really mean to wear the jacket.
Like, she just sort of put on a jacket.
Melania Trump wearing a $39 jacket?
The last time Melania Trump wore something that inexpensive, she was naked on the cover of the New York Post.
Melania Trump has never worn something that costs $39.
Legitimately, her pinky rings cost $39.
The ankle bracelets that she does or does not wear, those cost $39.
So she wore a $39 jacket that said, I really don't care, do you?
And so this became the mystery the media had to solve yesterday.
Why did she wear this?
Why?
So Stephanie Grisham, who is her spokesperson over at the White House, tweeted out, Today's visit with the children in Texas impacted FLOTUS greatly.
If media would spend their time and energy on her actions and efforts to help kids, rather than speculate and focus on her wardrobe, she would get so much accomplished on behalf of children.
Hashtag, she cares.
Hashtag, it's just a jacket.
Yeah, well, listen, Melania Trump knows what she's wearing.
And the hilarious part of this is that Trump then responds, and Trump jumps into the fray.
So Trump feels that he needs to discuss Melania Trump's Where?
He has to jump in.
This is so funny.
So Trump, everything is so stupid, man.
It's so dumb.
Trump tweets out, quote, I really don't care, do you?
Written on the back of Melania's jacket refers to the fake news media.
Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares.
So her own spokesperson's like, you shouldn't focus in on the jacket, and Trump's like, screw the media!
It's so great.
It's so great in every way.
Now, does this mean that Melania doesn't care?
No, it just means that someone was dumb in allowing her to wear that, or she was dumb in picking that.
It's just stupid, right?
You don't wear a jacket like that when you're about to go visit refugees.
It's not the brightest move.
This is the part where Melania should say that her command of the English language is not that great, right?
That would be the proper defense here.
Or, she didn't see the back of the jacket, she turned it inside out or something.
But like, is it a big deal?
No.
Did the media go nuts over it yesterday?
Of course.
Is it bad optics?
Absolutely.
Is it dumb on every level?
You bet.
But everything is dumb on every level right now.
Everything is incredibly stupid on every level.
Which is too bad because there's some pretty serious issues that are happening here, right?
Some of the things that are happening here, Actually matter, right?
The policy with regard to our border actually matters.
Now, President Trump has it right when he rips into Democrats when he says, listen, what you really want is to release as many illegal immigrants as humanly possible.
Cynthia Nixon proved this yesterday.
So Cynthia Nixon, you recall her from being the most irritating member of the caste and sex in the city, which says a lot.
I mean, you really have to work to be the most irritating member of the cast in Sex and the City.
But Cynthia Nixon is now running for governor of New York.
She will lose horribly to Andrew Cuomo, of course.
But she says that her program is that she definitely, definitely wants to abolish ICE.
Right?
No borders.
So when Trump says that Democrats don't want borders, and then the media says that's a lie, Cynthia Nixon pretty much just said out loud what you're not supposed to say out loud.
They're being separated throughout this country by ICE.
Yes.
I think we need to abolish ICE.
That seems really clear.
They have strayed so far from the interests of the American people and the interests of humanity.
We need to, we need to abolish it.
Okay, and your solution to people crossing the border illegally would be what?
And the answer is the solution would be just to let people cross the border illegally.
So when President Trump rips into Democrats, he is not wrong about this.
Here is Trump yesterday saying Democrats are by not deterring border crossing, they're creating a child smuggling industry.
There is some truth to this.
People are suffering because of the Democrats.
So we've created, and they've created, and they've let it happen, a massive child smuggling industry.
It's exactly what it's become.
Okay, I do like how President Trump pronounces industry.
Industry.
He does it just to piss people off, I think.
But he's exactly right here.
And he's also right when he says, listen, the media have been complaining about the inhumane treatment of children.
Well, what about the inhumane treatment of children under Obama?
Now, there was some attention paid to this in 2014, 2015, but it wasn't on the cover of Time magazine.
Obama frowning down at a crying child wrapped in aluminum foil blankets.
Here was President Trump going off on the media.
You look back at 2014, during the Obama administration, they have pictures that were so bad.
They had a judge that said it was inhumane the way they were treating children.
Take a look at some of the court rulings against the Obama administration.
They talked about inhumane treatment.
I read them.
I looked at them.
They're all over the place.
Inhumane treatment.
They were treating them terribly.
Okay, he's totally right about this.
Now, the left has, of course, responded by saying that Trump is a uniquely evil individual.
Cory Booker, who is just the most... I mean, if Cynthia Nixon was the most irritating member of the Sex and the City cast, Cory Booker is the most irritating person in the United States in politics.
I mean, Cory Booker and his virtue signaling, he is just awful in every way.
You remember when he started shouting at, who was it that he was shouting at in his, it was Kirsten Nielsen, makes perfect sense.
He was shouting at her and now he is saying this is moral vandalism of our values.
I love how everything that Cory Booker says was written by Aaron Sorkin.
Here is Cory Booker. - We just have to do this and stop doing this moral vandalism on our values that you see is going on that's just unacceptable. - And it's barely English, but I guess the point is clear.
It's moral vandalism.
And then Nancy Pelosi, a woman who is for aborting babies pretty much until you actually die as a full human being, like Nancy Pelosi is so pro-abortion that if you're 78 and you've been born for 78 years, she still thinks that there's a question as to whether your mom should be able to abort you.
Nancy Pelosi, she says this right here is outside the circle of human behavior.
It's outside the circle of human behavior.
Dentures are quacking around.
Go for it, Nancy.
The president is either Not knowing, not caring, delusional and denial about his own policies being outside the circle of civilized human behavior.
He's a monster, do you understand?
He's an absolute monster.
And then, here's the hard part for Democrats.
Jay Johnson.
You remember that guy?
He was the Department of Homeland Security secretary under the Obama administration.
He sort of admitted that in 2014 they expanded family detention.
Oops.
In 2014, to deal with the spike then, with the families, we did a number of things, including, by the way, working with the government of Mexico and obtaining their cooperation on securing their southern border.
But we also expanded family detention.
Which was, I freely admit, controversial.
Oops.
Oopsies.
So it turns out that all of Trump's evil Nazi-esque policies, well, it turns out the reason that they are so evil and Nazi-esque is because the Obama administration was keeping families together in detention.
And then a court said you have to separate the families, and then Trump abided by the court ruling.
And now Trump is trying to reverse the court ruling, go back to the Obama administration policy, and he's getting ripped every step of the way.
So in other words, he follows the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, he's evil.
He follows Jeh Johnson, he's evil.
It seems to me that maybe the Democrats' program here is just to call Trump evil.
They don't actually care about these kids particularly much.
So that is just ridiculous.
OK, so in just a few minutes, I want to go into the mailbag in a few minutes, and then we have some stuff I like and stuff I hate coming up.
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All right, so I'm going to jump right into the mailbags.
So let's get into it.
All right.
Kieran says, I've recently been labeled alt-right on a very public forum by a notoriously pretentious SJW.
My views are countercultural for a 21-year-old woman, considering I'm a lifelong conservative, but I am nowhere near alt-right.
I am apparently anti-feminist, only third wave, racist, because I wouldn't announce your Arabs in open sewage tweet after recommending your show to said SJW, and opposed to all immigration.
Facepalm, my parents were immigrants and a white nationalist, which is so far from truth, I didn't even know how to begin entertaining the debate, let alone his BS.
How do I combat claims like this or argue with a liberal about anything without stooping intellectually?
Thank you for your brain.
Well, thank me for my brain.
Thank God for my brain.
I didn't make it.
But as far as how you argue all of this stuff, first of all, I'd just like to note that that tweet that you reference in that email, Karen, I wrote an entire column explaining that tweet, and there were a bunch of follow-up tweets that explained that tweet.
This is like 2010, circa 2010, so just to give a little context for that.
But beyond that, The reality is that not every argument is worth having.
Being labeled an alt-right personality by an idiot SJW on a public forum, you should make your statement, you should let it go at that, and then you shouldn't waste more of your time because the person's never going to admit they were wrong.
You should determine in every conversation what the purpose of the conversation is.
It works, by the way, in real life as well.
Like, I try to determine whether a conversation is worthwhile here in the office, which is why I rarely deign to speak to those around me.
I mean, I mean, come on.
Very, very few of these conversations are worth it.
But even when it comes to when it comes to my marriage, my wife and I have a great rule that I love, and that is tip to dudes, OK?
Tip to guys out there who are dating ladies or married to ladies.
If you are Having a conversation with your wife or your girlfriend and she starts complaining to you about a particular situation in her life.
Your first tendency is going to be to try and solve the problem for her.
This is probably not what she wants.
What she probably wants is for you to listen.
Now, I know you don't want to listen.
I get it, but...
The way to solve this problem is to say, is this a solving conversation or a listening conversation?
And if you say that, then you know the purpose of the conversation.
If you can apply that same sort of logic to all of your interactions, particularly political interactions, you'll be a lot better off.
Not every conversation is worth having.
Joel says, Ben, even though environmentalists are radical, their movements lead to better tech like LEDs, electric cars and biodegradable materials.
Can there be beneficial effects of radical movements?
Well, sure.
I mean, I think there are a lot of radical movements that have had beneficial effects, even if their overall effect is a net negative.
I would suggest that, you know, the idea that efficient vehicles were an outgrowth of the environmental movement I don't think is exactly correct.
I think that efficient vehicles were an outgrowth of high gas prices in the 1970s and the fact that nobody wanted a clunker when there were going to be all of these escalating gas prices thanks to OPEC choking off the oil supply.
This is why you see bigger cars on the road when gas prices are cheaper and smaller cars on the road when gas prices get more expensive.
With that said, because the truth is that environmentalism, the only way that environmentalism can really make LED lights, for example, more fiscally feasible is by artificially raising the price of incandescent light bulbs.
I kind of like incandescent light bulbs, to tell you the truth.
But, you know, I do appreciate that radical movements, if you channel all of your efforts toward one particular end, sometimes you'll come up with a few good effects.
It's not like everything that is associated with a movement I consider bad is bad.
Sometimes there are good outgrowths.
Right, the fact is that there are a lot of vaccines that were developed originally from an aborted fetus, right?
That doesn't mean that the abortion originally was good, but to ignore that the vaccines are useful would be to deny science.
Okay, Ariel says, hey Ben, I'm a big fan.
I could really use your advice.
I'm volunteering at a day camp next week.
I was told that one of the girls I will be working with considered herself a boy sometimes depending on the day.
Well, that's great.
She's five.
Well, I mean, it depends, Ariel.
Do you want to keep your job?
I mean, really, this is a priorities question, because the reality is, I think that it is unhealthy to humor the delusions of small children.
I do not think that it is healthy.
If a five-year-old claims something that is factually untrue, I don't think that humoring that is worthwhile or good.
My kids claim things that are untrue all the time and it is my job to disabuse them of those notions.
Doesn't mean you have to be rude or terrible, but you have to check in with the camp because it's possible that the camp doesn't want to get sued or that you will be fired.
So it really depends on, and if you're uncomfortable with this situation, maybe you ask to be moved out of this situation.
Maybe you ask to counsel other kids, for example.
Or you have one of your colleagues take over with regard to this kid because you feel that it's immoral to abide by the rules that are set by the camp.
But as a general matter, I think it's immoral to treat five-year-olds with great respect when they say things that are actually delusional.
And humoring delusion is not good for kids.
Fully 80% of kids who have transgender feelings grow out of it by the time they reach young adulthood.
Scott says, Hey Ben, do you ever feel guilty about the abuse you lay upon Knowles?
If not, have you provided him a safe space away from the daily torment you inflict on him?
No, I've never felt guilty about the abuse that you lay upon Knowles, just as I would never feel guilty about the abuse that I lay on Paul Potter, Kim Jong-un.
I mean, there are just certain people who deserve abuse, and Knowles is one of them.
And by the way, I pay Knowles, okay?
So for all the abuse that I lay on Knowles, he ain't too worried about cashing the paycheck, apparently.
As far as the safe space that is provided for him, he does have a small office off the main hall here, and we lock him in there.
We have padded the walls so that he can really have himself a good time in there.
Alright, Brandon says, Do you think that religion as a whole could experience a resurrection similar to that of Christ in the Bible, or are religious and communal groups doomed to decline in the years to come?
I do think that religion as a whole is going to experience a resurrection, and I think that that is going to happen specifically because there's a great crisis of meaning that is happening in the West.
People believe that their lives are purposeless, they believe that there is no actual goal to their life, there's no telos, there's no Greek teleology to their life.
And there's also no religious nature of their life.
And so we are bogging ourselves down in hedonism and political anger and partisanship.
And it's leading to a worse America and it's leading to worse interpersonal relationships.
So I do think there's going to be a religious revival in the country because I think there's a religious instinct in people that has been forcibly removed from them by a secularist society.
And I think that that's a There will be a backlash.
Jeremy says, what is your take on Milton Friedman's negative income tax?
It's not something I've heard you address and would love your take on it.
So Milton Friedman's negative income tax, for people who don't know, is basically his suggestion that we cut checks back to people who are poor enough that they don't pay income tax.
And his suggestion is that this should replace the welfare system.
As a replacement for the welfare system, I would much prefer a negative income tax to the welfare system itself, because the welfare system is quasi-means-tested.
Not really.
It's too complex.
It disincentivizes good, responsible behavior.
The negative income tax basically signs you a certain amount of money based on the amount of money that you are making.
to bring you up to a certain average amount of money.
It makes a lot more sense, Milton Friedman's negative income tax than the welfare system, but any sort of government redistribution system is going to be subject to corruption and political interplay, which is why in the end, I prefer private charity and local government as opposed to a federal negative income tax, for example.
Noah says, hey Ben, a few weeks ago, you said something about the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that got me curious.
I'd love to hear your opinion.
efforts to remove God from the pledge, currency, etc.
Is invoking the name of God in government not a violation of the Establishment Clause?
I'd love to hear your opinion.
It's not a violation of the Establishment Clause specifically because the Establishment Clause was designed to prevent the imposition of a specific religion on any human being.
So if, for example, it was mandatory from the government that you use God every time you went out in public or that it was mandatory that you say under God in the Pledge of Allegiance or that it was mandatory that you stand for God bless America or that it was mandatory to put your hand over your heart, anything that mandates that you worship God is against the establishment clause.
There's nothing in the Establishment Clause, however, that says that government cannot prefer, in general, a religious outlook on life to a non-religious outlook on life.
There's nothing In the constitution that suggests this.
In fact, if you go back to the original founding of the country, obviously there are prayers that were being given by people on a regular basis in the halls of Congress.
George Washington regularly prayed.
He gave prayers at his inaugural address.
It is also worth mentioning that There were a bunch of states in the United States.
The Establishment Clause, this is something people don't know about the Federal Constitution.
The Federal Constitution originally did not apply to the states.
So, there's an Establishment Clause that says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech or establishing religion.
Okay, that's Congress shall make no law.
It applied to the Federal Congress.
There were states in the United States that actually had quasi-official religions.
At the very beginning of the Republic.
And then over time, that sort of drained away.
I think it was a good thing that drained away, but it obviously, the Federal Constitution did not bar even state-sponsored religion, like specific sects of religion, in particular states in the United States originally.
So, no, the Establishment Clause does not prevent you from saying, we trust in God on our coins or something.
And if you really feel that badly about it, saying we trust in God on our coins, then I suggest that you investigate American history, in which God has played a pretty significant role.
Cassandra says, Oh, there's so many of them.
So I think that there's a great movie or miniseries to be made about John Brown, just because there's so much moral complexity with regard to John Brown.
So John Brown is, if you remember from your Civil War history, John Brown Was the guy who was involved in something called Bleeding Kansas originally in 1856, 1857.
There's something called Bleeding Kansas in 1854, 1856.
Basically, what happened is that there was a bill in Congress called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and it suggested that Kansas and Nebraska were going to be admitted as states to the Union, and the way that these states were going to be admitted as either free states or slave states Is there going to be a referendum held in these states as to whether the states ought to be slave states or free states?
And what that led to was an enormous number of people rushing into these states in order so that they could vote specifically on the issue of slavery.
Well, John Brown and his sons went to Kansas and they there engaged in acts of brutal violence against slaveholders who are also engaging in brutal acts of violence against people who are in favor of the freedom of these states.
So he's involved in that, and then John Brown, of course, took a bunch of his sons and some former slaves, some ex-slaves, and he went to Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and he freed a bunch of slaves.
He thought he was going to lead a slave uprising against slaveholders in Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and there he instead was basically surrounded in a bunkhouse, basically.
His sons were shot to death.
The other people who were fighting with him were shot to death.
A couple of slaveholders were murdered as well.
And John Brown eventually was hung.
Or he was hanged, rather.
And it's a really fascinating story.
The actual commander of the Union forces at Harper's Ferry was a guy that you may remember by the name of Robert E. Lee.
So it's really historically repeated.
It's really fascinating stuff.
And as the soldiers in the Civil War went to battle, they actually sang the original lyrics.
To the Battle Hymn of the Republic, you know, glory, glory, hallelujah.
The original lyrics to that song were not what they eventually became.
The song was called John Brown's Body.
The original lyric was, John Brown's body is a moldering in his tomb.
John Brown's body is a moldering in his tomb.
John Brown's body is a moldering in his tomb.
His soul, his truth goes marching on.
So it was about John Brown, who was an actual rebel who killed people, right, trying to free slaves.
Fascinating, fascinating stuff about, you know, when is sort of zealous violence necessary?
Was it necessary in this particular case?
Really interesting stuff.
The other one, and this is a great question, so I have another one that I love.
I really want somebody to make a full-scale dramatic film about the Frasier-Ali fight.
There's a great documentary that I've recommended before.
It's an HBO documentary about the Frasier-Ali fight called Ghosts of Menil.
That's quite good.
There's a book about it as well that's really good, but it's...
Joe Frazier's tale is well worth telling because he was a guy who grew up in Philadelphia, dirt poor.
Rocky's character in Rocky is actually based in part on Joe Frazier.
He grew up in Philadelphia, dirt poor.
Muhammad Ali grew up middle class in Louisiana and Joe Frazier gave Muhammad Ali a fight.
Muhammad Ali was banned from fighting for several years and when he wanted to come back, Joe Frasier gave him a fight.
He didn't have to at that point.
Joe Frasier was an undefeated heavyweight champion.
He didn't have to give Muhammad Ali a fight.
He gave him a fight.
He encouraged Muhammad Ali's ban to be removed so he could fight, and then he beat him in the first fight.
But Muhammad Ali used that fight as a weapon against Joe Frasier.
So he would go out in public and he started calling Joe Frasier a gorilla, and he suggested that Joe Frasier was a sellout, and that Joe Frasier, because Joe Frasier was very pro-America, That Joe Frazier was a bad guy, and the entire black community, or at least large segments of it, swung behind Muhammad Ali and against Joe Frazier, who five minutes beforehand had been a hero to many members of the black community.
It was a real culture war.
And that culture war extended all the way through the third Frazier-Ali fight in which — the thrill in Manila — in which Frazier and Ali basically went to war.
They both almost died on the canvas.
And Frazier really — I mean, he said he wanted to kill Ali in the ring because he was so angry with Ali for having destroyed his legacy and for having Contributed to his his unpopularity in the black community.
It's really fascinating Ang Lee was supposed to make a movie about all of this and Ang Lee did did not end up doing it I'm trying I think like this would make a good it wouldn't be along the lines what he normally does But I think that Peter Weir could do a really good job with something like this The guy who did Master and Commander and as far as the the Harper's Ferry story that the John Brown story Christopher Nolan would do an amazing bang-up job with that because he could do all sorts of flashbacks and time stuff would be really interesting okay, so Let's see.
Noah says, oh, we're doing Noah.
Okay, Thomas says, hello from the Republic of Korea.
What are your thoughts on the development of Space Force?
A worthy endeavor or a waste of taxpayer money?
Thank you for bringing reason to politics and for all that you do.
Sincerely, Thomas.
Well, first of all, I just love that there is now a Space Force.
I just hope that we can ship man crates up to Space Force.
That's all I really want in life.
So, first of all, I think all the ads should be cut from Starship Troopers.
It would be just fantastic.
And I love that Donald Trump is so into Space Force.
Listen, I like it.
I'll admit, I'm fond of Space Force.
I think that there will be battles in space eventually.
And if there aren't, then we've all been shortchanged by the movies for the last 30 years.
So, I'm okay with the idea that the United States should be investigating how we defend ourselves from threats that are space-imminent.
Plus, how else are we going to ensure that if there's an asteroid hurtling toward Earth, that we can prevent it?
I mean, are we going to send Bruce Willis up there with Ben Affleck?
And if so, why exactly would Bruce Willis die to save Ben Affleck?
Why?
Hey, that's the real question there.
Who wants to save Ben Affleck in any circumstance?
And why would Bruce Willis do so?
Foolish, foolish move, Bruce Willis.
Don't worry.
Liv Tyler will get over it.
But, you know.
Oh, well.
Andrew says, hi, Ben.
I was wondering what your opinion on the CIA intervention in Latin America is.
I hear many claims about how this was true imperialism of the United States, even that it should be justified for affirmative action and open borders for people from those countries.
Was it U.S.
profits or to save Central and South America from the horror of Marxism?
It was to save Central and South America from the horror of Marxism.
Okay, the Sandinistas were evil.
Okay, the Sandinistas, the Marxist Sandinistas, they were bad people, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
There were Marxist movements that murdered, slaughtered, literally tens of thousands of people.
In these areas, does that mean that all the people the United States sided with in those conflicts were wonderful human beings?
No, it doesn't.
But it also happens to be true that the dictatorships that existed in those regions, pretty in relatively short order, you know, speaking in terms of global timelines, devolved into something much more closely resembling Western democracy than states that fell to Marxist tyranny.
Marxism is a great, great evil.
And backing freedom movements against Marxist tyranny seems to me worthwhile.
And even backing bad guys against Marxist movements very often ends up being worthwhile in the shorter run than it would be if you've got a Marxist regime running in place.
I mean, Cuba's still being run in Marxist fashion.
So is North Korea.
Bayley says, "Hi Ben, with the rise of the Trump wing "of the Republican Party, with the ever-growing extremism "of the Democratic Party, do you see the possibility "of the American political scene moving "beyond a two-party system?" Not the way that it's built.
So the fact that we have a first-past-the-poll system, in terms of how our elections work, tends to bias toward a two-party system, because two people are usually going to be near the top of the list.
And that means that if it's the first person past that poll wins, whoever has the most money and the most infrastructure is likely to have benefit.
Michael says, Hey Ben, I'm a fan of the show.
I know there's been a lot of criticism from the right and from President Trump on Jeff Sessions since he became AG.
So my question is, what would be your grade for AG Sessions so far?
Thanks, Michael.
I like A.G.
Sessions.
I think Sessions has done a pretty good job.
I think that Sessions is an honest guy.
I disagree with him about the drug war.
I think that...
His words about marijuana, I don't agree with on a scientific basis.
But I think that as a guy who's trying to enforce the law in honest fashion, I don't understand the hatred for Jeff Sessions.
I think that he's doing his best and he's trying to be an honest broker.
I know that a lot of people are very angry at Sessions for not protecting Trump in the way that Eric Holder protected Barack Obama.
But that's because Eric Holder was not supposed to do that.
That's not the job of the AG.
And I think that it's too bad that people now think that all of these areas of government ought to be weaponized because the other side has weaponized them.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Yesterday, I did a Dvorak piano quintet.
So sticking with the Dvorak theme, I mentioned this yesterday on the show.
The second movement of his New World Symphony is very famous.
You'll recognize it probably when I play it.
But it is a magnificent piece.
The Symphony No.
9 in C minor.
The New World Symphony is one of the great pieces in the Western canon.
It is just fantastic.
And the second movement is just heartbreakingly beautiful. . .
. . .
It's just amazing music.
And, yeah, check that out.
When people ask me, you know, what's a good piece for the introduction of people who don't like classical music into classical music, this is a great piece to recommend.
The New World Symphony, from beginning to end, it's just terrific.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So, the first thing that I hate is, you know, kind of in line with that music.
Charles Krauthammer passed away yesterday, so Charles Krauthammer died.
Truly, I think, the thought leader for an entire generation of people who are growing up on political commentary.
When I say that I grew up Reading Charles Krauthammer.
I don't mean just that I grew up reading Charles Krauthammer as I got older.
I mean that Charles Krauthammer helps you grow up.
When you read Charles Krauthammer, you realize this is a person who examines all sides of issues.
He was a nuanced writer and a nuanced thinker.
He was somebody who really deeply thought about things.
One of the things that was interesting about Krauthammer that I happen to know is that Krauthammer was not all that much into the daily headlines.
I remember the first time that I met him was in his offices in Washington, D.C., along with some colleagues from Breitbart, where I was working at that point.
And he was really not up on the day's news, which I thought was really weird because he was on Fox News like every day.
And then I realized that the reason he wasn't up on the day's news is because Charles spent so much time reading about deep philosophies and ideas.
He was much more focused on sort of the rock bed underneath the ocean than he was worried about the ripples on the daily surface of politics.
More than that, he was not tribal in any sense.
This is a guy who was an independent thinker.
He had interesting ideas on a variety of subjects.
He was an animal rights guy for one.
At the same time that he was against stem cell research, fetal stem cell research, even though he himself was, of course, a paraplegic from the from the chest down.
Right.
He's he's just an amazing human being.
I talked about him a little bit when it was announced that he was going to pass away.
He's somebody who I want to emulate.
When you're younger, you want to be a provocateur.
When you're 17, 18 years old, you think that the way you're going to make your way in politics is by saying provocative things.
You know, things that get the headline, things that get the click.
I get it.
I was there.
If you read my early writing, it's a lot more provocateur-ish.
And as you get older, you realize it's less worthwhile to be a provocateur and more worthwhile to try and be like Charles Krauthammer.
Krauthammer was also a real craftsman of the word.
He's somebody who really spent time on his writing, and you can read it.
I mean, he had a real gift for making hard work seem as though it was easily written.
If you read his stuff, it feels like this is so natural to read, but apparently he went over every column that he ever wrote something like 15 times.
And you always got the impression that he thought things through.
I remember, you know, if you didn't know what to think on an issue, he was somebody who you always read.
And even if you disagreed with him, he was somebody who was making a great argument.
He was also deeply intellectually curious.
I remember the second time, I only met him twice.
The second time that I met him, I met him over at the PragerU offices.
This is probably just a year ago.
And he was doing a video for PragerU about building the wall, actually, suggesting that President Trump was right when he said that we ought to build a wall on the southern border of the United States.
And I was talking with him a little bit, and we were talking about, I guess healthcare was in the news at that point, and he asked me the distinction between the Australian healthcare system and the Canadian healthcare system.
Now, both are nationalized healthcare systems, and there are some minor nuances to them that are different.
Like in Canada, it's universal healthcare from top to bottom.
In Australia, you are basically supposed to, you're incentivized to buy a private healthcare plan.
But, you know, I will say that I felt insufficient in my answers, and I remember coming away thinking, Was he grilling me?
Like, was he testing me?
And then I realized he wasn't grilling me or testing me.
He actually wanted to know.
And that was the thing about Krauthammer.
He always wanted to know from a lot of people who knew him a lot better than I did.
This is a guy who is insatiably curious intellectually.
And, you know, when he passed away, before he passed away, he put out a statement where he said, I leave this life with no regrets.
It was a wonderful life, full and complete, with the great loves and great endeavors that make it worth living.
I'm sad to leave, but I leave with the knowledge that I lived the life that I intended.
You can't ask for more than that.
You can't ask for more than that.
And may we all feel that way when we go.
So Baruch Dayan Haimet, he's a Jewish guy.
That just means blessed is the true judge in Hebrew.
We always say that when somebody dies.
And, you know, I think that his work is going to live on.
And the Washington Nationals did a nice tribute to him last night.
He was a huge baseball fan.
The Washington Nationals held a moment of silence for him last night.
Which was just great.
Okay, so final thing that I hate today, and then we will break for the weekend so I Have to say do not people who get deeply invested in politicians.
I Can't I can't go there.
I can't go there politicians are just like a plumber there people who have a job and you get that deeply invested in politicians as the avatar of your emotions and the avatar of your feelings and the avatar of your values I think you're making a big mistake.
We should we should Be invested in members of your family.
Be invested in people you know.
Be invested in people not telling lies.
But when you get deeply invested in, like, the personal travails of a particular political figure, I think that we're verging on something that's not great.
So here's some video of some Trump supporters at a recent rally.
And as I said, I mean, I started the show today by saying the media have been lying routinely about President Trump.
So this is not about the media not lying about Trump.
They do lie about Trump on a routine basis.
But the sort of emotional response that people have to President Trump, it was true of Obama, too, on the left.
I don't think it's healthy for any political leader.
Family means a lot to us, so we have to do it.
I see you getting emotional.
Why is that?
Because... we didn't... I just... yeah.
You know, listen, I understand you're emotionally invested in politics, but President Trump can handle it, okay?
He's a tough guy.
He's a big, strong guy.
President Trump has taken a lot of slings and arrows.
He'll be fine.
We should not be so invested in our political leaders that we start to get emotional about what great men, how could they possibly be?
That's the nature of the game.
You get in the game, that's the way the game works.
It is like crying every time your favorite quarterback gets sacked.
That's part of the game.
You may be upset that he got sacked, but, you know, this is part of the acceptable risk of the game, and I think that we all ought to be a little more tough-minded about our voting politicians on any side of the aisle.
Okay, well, we will be back here on Monday with all the latest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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