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June 29, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:21
You’re Blaming The Wrong People | Ep. 571
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After a shooting in a newsroom, the media jumped to anti-Trump conclusions, Supreme Court talk heats up, and we'll check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, tons to talk about today, and we'll get to all of it First, I want to remind you that we have a special live stream coming up this Monday, July 2nd, 7 p.m.
Eastern, 4 p.m.
Pacific.
We're going to be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day because he's the world's foremost Canadian.
God King Jeremy Boring is going to host a new edition of Daily Wire backstage with me and Andrew Klavan and the ex-Gribble Michael Knowles to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future with an ignoramus like Knowles and a very well-informed Canadian like Jordan Peterson.
Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air again.
That is this Monday, July 2nd, 7 p.m.
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You can find our special livestream on Facebook and YouTube.
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Okay, so yesterday there was a horrific event.
It happened at a newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland at a place called the Capital Gazette.
Nobody's ever heard of the Capital Gazette newspaper because it's a local newspaper.
And a shooter walked into the building and proceeded to gun down a bunch of people, killed at least five people.
And this shooter was a peculiar human being, shall we say, aside from being evil.
He apparently damaged his fingers so that he could not be identified.
And then the investigators had to use facial recognition to identify him.
And the shooter had a history with the newspaper, it turns out, because he had sued them in 2012 for defamation after there was a story by a person Who wrote for the paper about how this guy had basically harassed her online and then he sued for defamation and he lost.
The Capital Gazette reported in 2015 the suspect's lawsuit against the newspaper had been thrown out by a judge because the article is based on public records and the suspect presented no evidence that it was inaccurate.
The Capital Gazette reported at the time So why is this national news aside from the fact that it's yet another mass shooting on American soil?
the court of special appeals, which upheld the ruling in an opinion that was filed that day.
A lawyer would almost certainly have told him not to proceed with the case the court wrote.
It reveals a fundamental failure to understand what defamation law is, and more particularly what defamation law is not.
So why is this national news aside from the fact that it's yet another mass shooting on American soil?
The reason it's national news is because everybody decided it was very important to jump to conclusions.
So a bunch of people decided online that they were going to jump to the conclusion that this person had been inspired by Milo Yiannopoulos.
Now, I've been loathe to say the name Milo Yiannopoulos because I find him a loathsome human being.
But Milo Yiannopoulos has been sort of an alt-right provocateur for several years.
He's the kind of fellow who once sent me, on my son's birthday, a picture of a black child because I was a cuck, right?
I was somebody who didn't care enough about the whiteness of the United States and thus I would not have minded if my wife slept with a black person and had a black child.
That's the kind of person Milo Yiannopoulos is.
Well, Milo had said a couple of days ago, he was in a couple of exchanges with journalists, and he had written back to a journalist that he hopes the journalist gets shot.
So the entire left decided that this was Milo Yiannopoulos' fault, the shooting.
And then they decided also that it was Donald Trump's fault, the shooting.
This is before we actually knew why this guy had gone and committed the shooting in the first place.
And as I say, it turns out the reason that he committed the shooting is because a nut job who had filed suit against the newspaper and had a vendetta against the newspaper.
That did not stop the media from trying to blame Donald Trump Yesterday, over all this.
Now, none of this is to say that Milo Yiannopoulos' words about journalists aren't excreble and terrible.
They are excreble and terrible, but lots of people say excreble, terrible things.
That does not mean that they are responsible for the actual shooting of other human beings.
Unless you are actually telling people to go shoot journalists, you're not responsible for somebody going and shooting journalists.
This is why when Bernie Sanders was blamed for the congressional baseball shooting by some, I said, this is not on Bernie Sanders.
I don't like Bernie Sanders.
I don't like anything that Bernie Sanders says.
But we're on a very dangerous slope here if we're going to blame speech for the actions of people who are crazy who go out and shoot other people.
Well, the administration immediately came out and condemned the attack.
Of course, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about it, and she condemned the attack.
She said, And it wasn't just Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
violence in Annapolis, Maryland, a violence attack on innocent journalists doing their job as an attack on every American.
Our prayers are with the victims and their friends and families.
And it wasn't just Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
President Trump also tweeted out and tweeted, prior to departing Wisconsin, I was briefed on the shooting at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland.
My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.
Thank you to all the first responders who are currently on the scene.
Okay, so that's a perfectly nice tweet from President Trump.
Mike Pence did the same.
The Vice President, he tweeted something out.
Just arrived in Guatemala.
We're monitoring the horrific shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis.
Karen and I are praying for the victims and their families.
We commend the swift action by law enforcement and all the first responders on the scene.
Okay, so how did the media cover all this?
Did they cover this as a nutjob went into a newspaper he had a vendetta against with a shotgun and murdered a bunch of people?
No, they covered this as though it was Trump's fault, because they have no sense of perspective, because they have no sense of their own hypocrisy.
These are the same people who are, in many ways, defending Maxine Waters and her call for sort of mob confrontation.
A lot of these folks are the same people who are laughing about, you know, the various Kathy Griffin stunts with the heads of Donald Trump and such.
These same people are saying that it is Donald Trump's fault when a person who is totally unassociated with Donald Trump goes out and shoots up a newsroom.
And they dug up a tweet from 2015 in which the guy suggested that anti-Trump bias could be met with violence.
But again, he had tweeted something like that.
You can bring that tweet back up.
He had tweeted something to the effect of, Uh, that the, uh, he had tweeted something like, the newspaper was unqualified and it could end badly again.
He tweeted something, the shooter tweeted, referring to Donald Trump as unqualified could end badly again.
Okay, well, he wrote that in 2015, which is about the time that he had filed his lawsuit.
His lawsuit against the newspaper had been dismissed, uh, and Donald Trump had filed a lawsuit against Univision.
So basically, you know, the only threat that I can see there is a lawsuit threat, even though this guy was a complete nut.
But a bunch of people in the media decided this is Trump's fault.
Trump's language about journalists, the fact that journalists are booed at all of his rallies, the fact that people chant CNN sucks.
This is responsible for some unrelated nut job going out and shooting up a newsroom, even though it's very obvious that this guy went and shot up the newsroom because he had a vendetta against the people at the newsroom.
So Brian Stelter, for example, on CNN, he says this is the moment that so many journalists have feared.
It's a moment that I think so many journalists have feared for a long time.
Regardless of whether this newsroom was targeted or not, this has been a fear on many journalists' minds.
Okay, so it's not a fear on many journalists' minds.
Okay, it isn't.
As a journalist for nearly my entire life, an opinion journalist for my entire adult life, I can say that I don't have significant fear that people are going to randomly come into our Daily Wire offices and start shooting the place up, unless I were talking about an actual politically motivated attack.
For Stelter to say that, as though journalists have a special fear, is just weird, okay?
The fact is that journalists are not routinely targeted by the general public, and what he's really implying there is that the tenor of anti-media activity has grown so strong that people are going to go out and shoot people.
So he's attempting to, in backhanded fashion, I think, blame President Trump.
And it's not just him.
There's a political reporter, Josh Meyer in D.C., who tweeted something out similar.
He said, every journalist and those who support us should retweet this.
I can't think of a single other president in my lifetime who would have acted like this.
Perhaps he fears questions about whether his anti-media rhetoric played a role.
And that was Josh Meyer referring to President Trump being asked about the Maryland shooting.
So here are reporters harassing Trump about the Maryland shooting yesterday.
Any words about the dead in Annapolis?
Any words about the dead in Annapolis, Mr. President?
Can you talk about the active shooters in Annapolis?
Can you please talk to us about the dead reporters in Annapolis?
Okay, so the reporters are screaming at him and they're yelling at him.
This happens virtually every day, okay?
I've been to the White House several times and every day the president comes out and reporters scream at him and he doesn't answer their questions.
It's actually pretty rare that the president breaks off and does like an impromptu press conference over this whole thing.
He tweeted out what he thought about it, but this is being taken by Politico and others as evidence that Trump doesn't care if journalists get shot.
And then Maggie Haberman, whose reporting I generally think is good, she came out and she did sort of the same thing.
She tweeted this out.
She tweeted out, This is the New York Times reporter.
The New York Times reporter blaming Trump.
Trump.
As Maggie Haberman saying, supporting local journalism is important.
What happened today is sickening.
This alleged government appears to have had a longstanding grudge against the paper and little else is known so far.
But Trump is the only president in memory to call the press the enemy of the people.
Well, there's no connection between Trump doing that and the guy shooting up the newsroom.
The attempt to make a connection, to strain, to make a connection between Trump's language and the shooting, I think is foolhardy.
Now, again, I don't like Trump's language with regard to the press.
I've been very critical of President Trump's language with regard to the press.
When they report on fake news, I think that that is perfectly...
I think it's perfectly appropriate for him to say that fake news is fake news when it's fake news.
But his tendency to call the press the enemy of the people, I don't like.
I never have liked it.
I've always thought that it was a serious problem.
But the attempt to paint that as responsible for a shooting that he had nothing to do with is really quite amazing.
It really is.
And again, it was many members of the media doing this routine yesterday.
For example, the editor-in-chief of Reuters tweeted something out.
Along these lines, this is the tweet from, this is 17.
So this is the statement that was put out by Steve Adler, who's editor-in-chief of the Reuters, regarding the Rob Cox tweet.
So the Breaking View's editor, Rob Cox, actually tweeted about the shooting in Annapolis.
Let's see the tweet first, and then the response from Reuters.
So he said, this is what happens when Donald Trump calls journalists the enemy of the people.
Blood is on your hands, Mr. President.
Save your thoughts and prayers for your empty soul.
At least four people killed in Maryland newspaper shooting reports.
Okay, so he's blaming President Trump for all of this, and the fact that the media are eager to leap to this.
But, for example, when President Obama was incentivizing riots in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, or when cops were shot in Dallas, the media rightly said that this is not Obama's fault.
It's not Obama's fault the cops got shot in Dallas by a Black Lives Matter ally.
That's not Obama's fault.
It's not even Black Lives Matter's fault, I think.
But the media was in a real hurry to defend President Obama over that, but they are in a real hurry to blame President Trump for this particular shooting.
So, all of this is just disgusting.
Because if you're going to blame somebody for actual violence against somebody else, you ought to have some evidence that the violence is connected to the thing that somebody said.
As in, journalist should be shot, somebody goes out, reads that tweet, says, great tweet, now I'm gonna go shoot journalists.
Okay?
That is a fair connection.
But to connect vague language with regard to how much you dislike the media and how you hate the media with somebody going and shooting up members of the media, if we're gonna do that, then every shooting in the United States can be tied to somebody else's First Amendment-protected rhetoric.
Because here's the reality.
Incitement is not protected under the First Amendment.
If I say, Mathis, shoot Senya, okay, that is not protected under the First Amendment.
If Mathis goes and shoots Senya, I actually bear some criminal liability for incitement.
Okay, but the same thing is not true if I would say, you know, Senya's a really terrible producer, and something bad should happen to Senya.
Like, that's actually First Amendment protected.
It'd make me a piece of crap, right?
It'd be a bad thing to say, but it doesn't actually mean that I'd be responsible for something bad happening to Senya.
By the way, nothing bad should happen to Senia.
Senia's wonderful.
But all of this said, it's amazing to watch as the media immediately mobilize to make a narrative out of something that does not meet the standards for that narrative.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about how the left is, again, embracing a certain level of violent rhetoric and violence that is really disturbing.
They're going to talk about President Trump being violent in his rhetoric.
The left certainly does not have clean hands on this.
I have a clip from Michael Moore I want to show you in just a second all about this.
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Okay, so while the media have focused deeply in on President Trump's rhetoric about the press to suggest that he is responsible for a whack job who had a vendetta against a newspaper shooting up the newspaper, you've got people on the left who are mainstreaming mob action.
One of those people is Michael Moore.
Michael Moore has a new movie out called Fahrenheit 11.9, or it soon will be out, Fahrenheit 11.9.
Of course, this is a play on Fahrenheit 9.11.
11.9, of course, this time refers to the fact that Donald Trump was elected because this is an emergency for our republic.
The clip that he showed from his movie, by the way, is just awful.
Now, I'm supposed to be on Bill Maher tonight and I'm really disappointed because I can only be on Bill Maher for the first 15 minutes of the show.
I would love to be on Bill Maher's show for the full hour because then I'd be on a panel with Michael Moore and I could ask him about his terrible preview.
But I can't actually do that because Sabbath is coming in early so I can do the first 15 minutes of the show.
And I'm looking forward to that.
But Michael Moore will be on the show tonight as well.
Michael Moore was on Stephen Colbert last night pushing his new movie, and he started talking about incivility in our culture.
Listen to how Michael Moore describes incivility, because it really is telling.
The same left that says that we should really ratchet down the rhetoric, something with which I generally agree, the same left will at the same time say, well, but I don't really apply that to, you know, like treatment of conservatives or treatment of Republicans.
Like, that's a different thing entirely.
Here's Michael Moore.
Calls that are coming from the uncivil, asking Democrats who are usually so wimpy and weak and, no, it's okay, you know, we'll take half of universal health care, we don't need the whole thing.
You know, that's how our side sounds all the time.
We're constantly giving in.
And then a few people want to stand up and say, no, I've had enough.
That's it.
And we don't have to be violent.
We have to remain non-violent.
But, you know, the worst that's going to happen to anybody in the Trump administration is that they don't get to have a chicken dinner in Virginia.
I mean, I don't know.
The only way that we're going to stop this is eventually we're all going to have to put our bodies on the line.
You're going to have to be willing to do this.
It is funny.
I was having lunch with a particularly famous Hollywood player yesterday whose name shall remain anonymous so he can continue to get jobs.
And we were doing so at a restaurant in the middle of Beverlywood yesterday.
And I was just looking around.
We were talking.
He was a Trump supporter.
And we were just looking around.
And noting that this is a Tony Ritzi restaurant.
Everybody in this restaurant is earning significant six-figure money.
This is a very, very glamorous place.
And we're sitting, I'm looking around, and I realize that everyone who's there sipping their bubbly water, everybody there who is sipping their Chardonnay in the middle of the afternoon, all those people think that we are living in the middle of a civil war and in the middle of a crisis.
As they're sitting there sipping their Chardonnay, they think that we are living in the middle of a fascist takeover of the United States.
And it's just astonishing that this is how they think.
Like, all those people would be nodding along to Michael Moore saying, we need to put our bodies on the line, as they sit there eating their $200 lunches, having driven there in their Porsches.
And it occurred to me that this is all delusional.
This is all delusional.
Listen, we're in the political space a lot.
We spend all of our day in the political space.
I spend all my day in the political space.
And it's easy to get caught up in the back and forth.
It's easy to feel that politics is really fraught right now.
But the reality is, if you took somebody from 1930 and you plunked them down in the middle of 2018, they would literally think they died and went to heaven.
They would literally think that.
They can get anything they want, at any time, for any reason.
They are not going to be poor, because poverty in the United States is better than wealthy people were living in 1920.
And yet, we still think that we're in the middle of this massive civil war.
That has to stop.
In a second, I'm going to explain why that has to stop.
So the reason that we have to stop with the crisis mentality is because crisis mentality leads people to the belief that harsh, sometimes evil action is necessary.
And sitting around in a place like Los Angeles while the sun streams through the big windows and everybody is eating their lobster, you know, I had a Coke, while everybody is doing that, It just, it occurs to you that the more we think that our neighbors are our enemies, the more likely we are to start anticipating tactics that are bad.
So the shooting that happened in Maryland has nothing to do with President Trump.
But I don't think that it's, I don't think it's questionable that the temperature in the country has risen to a certain extent.
I'm trying to be reflective about this as I possibly can, and honest with you.
I think the temperature in the country has risen to a level that is unsustainable.
And I think it's based on nearly nothing.
I think our political differences matter an awful lot.
I think politics matter an awful lot.
I think our rights matter an awful lot.
And I think that some of our rights are at crisis point in terms of our defense of those rights.
But I don't think that we are at the point where Americans are ready to put their bodies on the line, as Michael Moore says, that it's time to see this as a civil war in any real way.
And there may be an intellectual civil war going on, but that intellectual civil war has been going on for generations in the United States.
Maybe it's a little worse now than it was any time since 1960s, but I don't buy into the idea that this is a time that is deserving of the kind of vitriol and insanity that we are seeing.
And it's being promulgated by people on both sides, but particularly on the left right now, because what the left is doing is they're doing what Michael Moore does, which is, I love civility.
Civility is great, but I can't be civil with these evil Republicans, so civility must end.
Maxine Waters is the case in point of this.
So Maxine Waters has now said, the representative who said just earlier this week that there should be mob justice against a bunch of people going to gas stations if you disagree with them.
She said on Thursday she's seen an increase in threats since she made controversial comments encouraging protesters to heckle and harass members of Trump's cabinet in public spaces.
She said that she got threatening messages and hostile mail at her offices.
She canceled two scheduled appearances in Alabama and Texas.
She said she got one very serious death threat on Monday from an individual in Texas.
And she says, as the president has continued to lie and falsely claim that I encourage people to assault his supporters while also offering a veiled threat that I should be careful, even more individuals are threatened, leaving threatening messages and sending hostile mail to my office.
I mean, this is indicative of the way that our politics is working right now.
Maxine Waters doesn't like when anybody attempts to assault her because no one would like that because it's terrible stuff.
But then she'll go out and encourage people to assault people at gas stations.
And she did encourage people to assault people at gas stations.
The word assault, by the way, does not mean battery.
In the legal terminology, she encouraged people to get in people's faces at gas stations and threaten them.
Okay, that is not battery.
Battery is when I hit you.
Assault is when I threaten you.
She did encourage that.
There's no question she encouraged that.
And she felt okay encouraging that because it was somebody on the other side.
So in other words, everybody is in favor of civility as long as it applies to people on their own side, but nobody is in favor of civility when it's applied to people on the other side.
And the reality is that we live in the most civil of times.
Violence in the United States is at 50-year lows.
It is.
The level of vitriol may be at a 50-year high, but violence in the United States is at a 50-year low.
We're living in a pretty paradisiacal situation.
The economy is doing great.
There is no excuse for this level of insanity in our current politics.
And yet, everybody continues to go insane.
And that's only being exacerbated, of course.
by the situation with the Supreme Court, because now that Justice Kennedy has stepped down, the left is fully convinced that the right is coming for everything that they hold dear.
Not understanding, of course, how the Supreme Court works in the first place, having used the Supreme Court as the tool of their leftist politics for nigh on 80 years at this point.
The Democrats are now firmly convinced that the Republicans are going to come in, they're going to swoop in with the Supreme Court at their behest, and they're going to run roughshod over everybody's rights, and we'll be living in a Nazi state.
This kind of insane, over-the-top talk is not good for the country.
And again, I think there are a lot of people in the country who right now feel justified in being uncivil.
Incivility can bleed into violence.
I'm not going to blame people who are uncivil for violence.
But I will say that when you raise the temperature every so often, you are going to get the pot boiling over.
When the temperature is room temperature in the pot, it doesn't boil over ever.
When the temperature is a little bit high and then you put the lid on, then it is more likely that the pot is going to boil over.
I think that the likelihood the pot is going to boil over right now is a lot higher than it has been in the past and there is no real excuse for it.
So I'm going to talk in a second about this fallout from the Supreme Court.
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As I mentioned, with the temperature on politics so high, the Supreme Court retirement of Anthony Kennedy is raising the temperature even higher.
And I encouraged people yesterday to calm down about this.
The reason I encouraged people to calm down is because it is not the job of the Supreme Court, according to conservatives, to implement their preferred policy prescriptions.
The Supreme Court is not going to rule tomorrow that abortion is banned across the land.
It was the Supreme Court that ruled that abortion was legal across the land because the leftists on the court decided to use the Supreme Court as a tool of their will instead of a tool of judgment.
The same thing was true of same-sex marriage when the Supreme Court decided unilaterally that same-sex marriage was now mandated by a document that was ratified in 1791 and an amendment that was ratified in 1868.
That was the Supreme Court that did that.
The way conservatives view the Supreme Court is that it's the job of the Supreme Court to essentially get out of the way when it comes to what states have to do, so long as it is in consonance with the Constitution of the United States.
So the Supreme Court is not an activist Supreme Court.
When conservatives run it, it strikes down a lot fewer laws generally.
It gets involved in national mandates almost never.
The fact is that because the left has used the Supreme Court as a tool for so long, they think that now the right is going to use the Supreme Court as a club.
And what they are most worried about, of course, is the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
They're under the wildness impression that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, that immediately makes abortion illegal across the United States.
Would that it were so, but it is not.
The reality is that if Roe v. Wade is reversed, as it should be, then what happens is that all of these laws go back to the states.
All of these laws go back to the states.
And so California will have abortion on demand and Alabama will not.
That's that's the way that this will work.
And if you want an abortion, you will simply cross state lines and you'll go get an abortion.
That's that's the high likelihood as to how this thing ends up working out.
Federalism ends up prevailing unless there is some sort of constitutional amendment or federal law to bar abortion across the board, which You know, it would be hard to pass, I think.
But that's not stopping the insane rhetoric coming out of the left.
So the left is in full panic mode.
I think one of the reasons they're in full panic mode is because, again, I think that they thought that there was going to be a thousand-year rule by the left.
After Obama, they thought they're never losing an election again, so why would we even worry about Donald Trump?
And then it turns out not only did they lose the election, they lost the Senate, the House, most state houses, and most governorships.
And they turned around and looked around and said, wait, this isn't the America Obama promised.
Well, Whoopi Goldberg is leading the charge against overturning Roe v. Wade.
The level of insanity in this rhetoric is extraordinarily high.
And again, I just, I don't know why any of this is good for the country.
But here's Whoopi Goldberg going after Meghan McCain.
Okay, Meghan McCain is not a, she's a Republican.
Meghan McCain is certainly not an extreme conservative by any stretch of the imagination.
Meghan McCain is a moderate conservative at best.
And Whoopi Goldberg is telling Meghan McCain, who's pro-life, to get out of her vagina, which I can safely say most people are very happy to do.
Here is Whoopi Goldberg.
If you take my right away from me to judge what I do for my family and my body, I got a little problem with that.
You got a problem?
You don't want people to take your guns?
Well, get out of my behind!
Get out of my vagina!
Okay, no one wants to be there, Whoopi.
That's not a thing.
And again, this is the idea that Republicans are suddenly going to be doing Handmaid's Tale stuff, that they're interested in putting things up Whoopi Goldberg's vagina in search for babies she cannot have because I assume she's postmenopausal.
What?
But but this is the tenor of the rhetoric that we have now reached.
Now, with that said, right.
And like Nancy Pelosi says the same thing.
Right.
Nancy Pelosi says that the Supreme Court is doing violence to our democracy, violence to our democracy.
Well, if you're going to equate speech with violence, is it any wonder when violence is is a response to that?
When people say, OK, well, the Supreme Court is doing violence to us.
What if we do violence to the Supreme Court?
This is the problem that I have with a lot of what's going on in college campuses.
I visit 25, 30 college campuses a year.
And when people say my speech is violent, well, then their answer very often is, OK, Antifa's answer is, well, what if I use violence against the violence that is the speech?
Nancy Pelosi, by the way, said that the Supreme Court did violence to our democracy.
How?
They did violence to our democracy by saying that the government could not point a gun at you and force you to pay dues to a union.
That's really what she's saying here.
And then we're hearing from the left that it's Trump whose rhetoric is extreme?
Guys, do you own mirrors?
Here's Nancy Pelosi.
With this decision that it announced yesterday, the Supreme Court became the Supreme Corp.
Their decision does violence to the First Amendment, cheapening it and using it, stretching it as a rationale for this decision.
Okay.
You know, the Supreme Court is doing violence now.
And yet, again, the left will blame Donald Trump for shootings at a Maryland newspaper.
So it's all good.
It's all good.
Everything's fine.
Nothing to worry about here.
Now, as far as the Supreme Court seat, The only possibility that President Trump does not get his pick that he wants for the Supreme Court seat is if Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who are the two most left-leaning members of the Senate caucus, decide that they are going to somehow hold up any Trump nominee unless that Trump nominee pledges fealty to Roe v. Wade.
I don't think that's actually what's going to happen here.
Susan Collins says that Roe v. Wade is settled law because she's wrong, but here's Susan Collins making that case.
From my perspective, Roe v. Wade is an important precedent and it is settled law.
Okay, it's always funny how people say things are settled law when they like those things, but the minute they don't like those things, those things have to be overturned.
So it turns out that one of the things that was settled law in the United States for legitimately the entire history of the United States is that traditional marriage was the only way marriage was done.
Nobody said that was settled law.
The minute that Obergefell happened, it was settled law.
The minute Roe v. Wade happened, it was settled law, according to people like Susan Collins.
But is Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski actually going to hold up the show on President Trump's Supreme Court pick?
I think not.
And the reason is because no Supreme Court Possibility is going to answer straight the question as to whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade.
This is one of the sad outcomes of how we've done judicial nominations since the Bork era, which is that every judge now has the absolute interest in hiding their opinions for as long as possible so they don't get Borked.
Judge Bork, who was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Reagan, he was very obvious about his opinions and he openly answered questions about legal cases.
And then he was basically thrown out and not given a Supreme Court seat because of it, thanks to the machinations of people like Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.
Well, the reality is that most judges now are simply going to evade the question.
So none of these judges are going to have to answer straight the question as to whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade, because no judge has had to answer that question in So do I think that this is going to end up with Murkowski and Collins holding up a Trump nominee?
I don't.
I really don't, which is a good thing.
So Trump ought to go for Bro.
Trump ought to go for the most The most originalist, textualist judge you can find.
You should go for the home run, because there's no excuse for not to get a home run out of all this.
Okay, so, in just a second we're going to jump into the mailbag, but before that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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All righty.
So let's do some mailbag.
It has been a long week.
Let's Let's take a little bit of time with the mailbag this week.
So if you got live questions, now's the time to send them in.
John writes, Hi Ben, I was wondering if since the First Amendment dictates that Congress cannot make a law restricting the freedom of expression, could the left make such laws such as hate speech, religious expression restrictions at the state level and have them be upheld by the Supreme Court?
P.S.
I wish we could vote for Supreme Court justices.
You'd be my top choice.
Thanks, love the show and your work, John.
Okay, so the First Amendment, So, there are two questions here.
One is, does the First Amendment, as it is currently constituted, does it stop hate speech laws, religious expression restrictions, etc.?
The answer there is yes, unless the left takes hold of the court and uses the court as a club to beat to death the First Amendment like a horse in the street.
Hate speech laws are unconstitutional because there's no actual definition of hate speech.
There are a bunch of people on the left who think that my show every day is hate speech.
It is not, but they're idiots and they think that, and so they could try to outlaw my speech.
In the state of California, presumably they would try to outlaw it if I say on the show that a man is a man and a woman is a woman and a man can't become a woman, then they would try to outlaw that.
Hey, that would be a violation of the First Amendment.
Now, you're asking about what's called incorporation doctrine.
So incorporation doctrine is the idea that the First Amendment really should have applied only to the federal government.
Clearly, that's true.
This is why we have state constitutions, not just a federal constitution.
The state of California has its own constitution.
Texas has its own constitution.
Every state has its own constitution that have sort of mirror provisions with regard to the First Amendment protecting, you know, the state version of the First Amendment.
Originally, the federal constitution did not protect free speech rights at the state level.
So the state actually could Quash First Amendment rights at the state level, and the federal government would have nothing to say about it.
Then there was something called the Incorporation Doctrine.
The Incorporation Doctrine really came about in the early 20th century when people began trying to use the 14th Amendment, which applies to the states, to read the First Amendment into law.
So the 14th Amendment suggests that everyone at the state level, not just the federal level, everyone at the state level, is guaranteed due process and equal protection of the laws.
And the Supreme Court basically said, well, We're also going to say the due process requires that your First Amendment rights be respected.
Now, I don't think that incorporation doctrine actually is legally justifiable, even if I like the outcome on a lot of it, but it has been incorporated.
So the First Amendment is incorporated.
The Second Amendment has been incorporated.
All of the First Amendments have been incorporated into state constitutions, essentially, or into state law via the so-called incorporation doctrine.
Brian says, Hi Ben, I was born and raised in the Midwest.
I'm visiting California for the first time.
My perception has always been that California is a bastion of liberal and hippie ideals.
Having been here, those stereotypes have been confirmed.
From the feces on the streets, to the rampant homeless, to the trash strewn streets, the liberal ideal is everywhere.
My question is, how did California turn from a state created by the pioneer spirit, the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, to this?
Thanks, and Shapiro for Supreme Court.
Well, I'm glad that the groundswell for me for Supreme Court has been so successful.
If it doesn't work out, then I'll just be here with you every day crying myself to sleep.
But the reality is that California started down this sort of path in the 1990s.
The last kind of gasp of California conservatism was Pete Wilson.
And then after Pete Wilson, we got Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And there had been a significant move in the California legislature to the left over the previous decades anyway.
California had always been a little more liberal than the rest of the country, I would say, although for a while it had sort of a conservative streak with regard to the governors that it elected.
That ended in the 1990s.
There's a solid case to be made that as the demographics in California shifted, so too did the electoral politics.
That as the state became more immigrant-based, that a lot of those new immigrants were voting Democrat more often, and that changed the constituency in California pretty massively.
I think that case is pretty good.
I don't think it's dispositive.
Texas, for example, has had a lot of immigrants as well.
The Hispanic population in Texas has grown massively.
Texas remains a very red state.
But California is also extremely urban in the sense that most of the population lives in like two or three big cities, right?
Most of the population lives in L.A.
or San Francisco, and big cities tend to tend to toward the left, just generally speaking.
Now, Phillips says, why do we have gun laws?
Any gun law should infringe on the amendment.
We should be able to conceal open carry anywhere in public.
How are gun laws not infringing on the second amendment?
Well, the general, the general traditional sort of interpretation of the second amendment is very similar to the interpretation of the first amendment, which is the first amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
That does not apply to It does not apply to libel.
It does not apply to incitement to violence.
Virtually every amendment has certain curtailments of the amendment that allow for public policy to be made.
The question is, are those public policy curtailments as minimal as humanly possible in order to achieve the public policy that is being pursued?
There is no such thing as any right that is untrammeled.
Even First Amendment rights, right?
Freedom of religion is not untrammeled, given the fact that if you pass a neutral, facially neutral statute that has nothing to do with religion, that may not necessarily violate religious rights, even if those religious rights are in fact curtailed by the operation of that law.
I don't know enough about that to answer that question.
That is extraordinarily specific.
So I will check that out and get back to you, Justin.
time would be a crisis period of ideological subversion?
I don't know enough about that to answer that question.
That is extraordinarily specific.
So I will check that out and get back to you, Justin.
Ronald says, Dear soon to be Justice Shapiro, is there an actual difference between sex and gender or is this an artificial distinction created by the left?
Thanks and love the show.
Well, the answer is that it is an artificial distinction created by the left.
The way they've defined.
So the left does this this thing where they say there's a difference between sex, which is your biological sex and gender, which is the way that you're sort of your sex manifests.
So, in other words, are you an effeminate man?
Well, then maybe you are, your effeminacy is now part of your gender.
If you're a woman who likes to wear pants and a butch haircut, then this is some part of your gender.
So they create this sort of false distinction, they use the word gender to encompass all of this, but then they do this weird trick where they say gender is sex.
So they'll say sex is not gender, but gender is sex.
So in other words, gender has nothing to do with your biology, right?
You can be a biological male, but your gender can be female because you can be really effeminate and you want to wear dresses and you are a female in your mind, but your sex is male, but your gender is female, right?
And this is when you are non-cisnormative, right?
You're non-cisgender.
The gender that you express is not the sex that you were born with or the gender you were assigned at birth, as they like to put it.
And then they will say, but it's biological.
This was built in.
So in other words, sex is not built in, but gender is built in.
Which makes no sense at all.
And they also like to say that sex and gender are completely disconnected.
So there are all these inherent contradictions in the way that the left defines gender.
If the left just wanted to say, listen, there's your sex, your biological sex, and then there's how that biological sex manifests in your daily behavior, There's nothing even remotely arguable about that.
Of course, that's true.
But the attempt is to say that you are a gendered female, but a biological male.
And unless you are biologically intersex, there is no basis for this whatsoever.
There's no basis for this.
Because the left's argument is that if I think of myself as a female, I am a female.
They're not saying that if I did a brain scan and it turned out that my brain worked like a female, then I'm a female.
They're saying that the way that that manifests in my behavior and my choices and my thinking, that's what makes me female.
And that cannot be sustained on any logical level.
Joe says, hey Ben, in my once a week graduate class, the professor's students bashed Trump for about two hours and then we watched Justin Trudeau YouTube videos for another hour.
I'm sorry to hear that and I'm sorry for the loss of your brain cells, the late lamented brain cells you used to have.
As a former teacher who is conservative, I didn't find it very difficult to stay away from preaching my political agenda.
Why do you think the left seems to be guilty of doing this much more regularly and blatantly in the classroom?
Thanks.
Well, I think the reason is because many people on the left have a very difficult time distinguishing between their opinion and fact.
I think this holds true across political boundaries.
I think there are people on the right who have this trouble, too.
But when you live in an echo chamber like the educational system is, then you start to think that everything that you think about life is actually a fact because all your friends believe the same thing.
This is why you'll hear people say things like, Trump is a Nazi.
That's just a fact.
You can't argue with that.
Well, no, that's an opinion, and I certainly can argue with that.
There are certain things that are facts.
2 plus 2 equals 4.
This is a fact.
It is not a fact that Trump is a Nazi.
That is an opinion and a wrong opinion in my belief of that.
So I think that echo chambers tend to create a belief that your opinion is a reflection of reality rather than just a subjective interpretation of reality.
Greg says, Hey Ben, if Mike Lee were nominated for Supreme Court, Well, that's actually really unclear.
So, theoretically, he could recuse himself, but I'm not sure that he actually has to recuse himself.
So, he theoretically could vote for himself.
Even if he were to recuse himself, that slot would immediately be filled by the governor of Utah, who's a Republican.
So, he'd have a Republican senator in there voting for it.
Plus, the Republicans have 50 votes.
They would gain another couple of votes from the Democrats.
I think Mike Lee would be easily confirmed.
I don't think there's a lot of question about that.
Jeremy says, Hey Ben, since Roe v. Wade is now front and center in the news, would you please explain the legal argument of the majority opinion in the ruling and what about it you think is so flawed?
Thanks so much.
Huge fan.
Love the show.
OK, so we can go through Roe v. Wade in a little bit of detail here.
Let me actually bring up the case.
So Roe v. Wade.
It was a case in which the Supreme Court decided that abortions had to be legalized across the nation.
The case was Roe, who later, it turns out, became a pro-life person, sought to terminate her pregnancy by abortion.
This is according to Oyez.org, which is a really good place to summarize these cases.
Texas law prohibited abortion except to save the pregnant woman's life.
After granting cert, certiorari, the court heard arguments twice.
The first time, Roe's attorney could not locate the constitutional hook of her argument for Justice Potter Stewart.
Her opponent, Jay Floyd, misfired from the start.
Weddington sharpened her constitutional argument in the second round.
Her new opponent came under strong questioning from Justice Potter Stewart and Thurgood Marshall.
The court held that a woman's right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy, recognizing Griswold v. Connecticut protected by the 14th Amendment.
So, as I pointed out yesterday, I said, emanations from Penumbra.
And somebody said, right, that's from Griswold v. Connecticut.
That's an earlier case.
Griswold v. Connecticut was a case in the 1960s in which the court decided that the—it may have been 1958—in which the court decided That there was a right to contraceptives for single people.
So, I believe it was Vermont, or Connecticut, rather.
It was Griswold v. Connecticut.
It was Connecticut decided that there's a law in the books that single people could not obtain contraceptives.
And the court said, there's a right to privacy that allows you to buy contraceptives.
Now, where in the Constitution does it say you have a right to buy contraceptives regardless of your marital status?
It doesn't, right?
None of that is there.
But they say there are emanations from penumbras.
What they meant was that if you look at the Fourth Amendment search and seizure provisions, And you sort of look at them with squinty eyes, kind of, like a magic eye puzzle, then you can get out of the prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure that there's a right to privacy.
And then from that generalized right to privacy, we can then read into that that there is a right for you to buy a contraceptive if you're a single person.
Now, I think that decision is wrongly decided.
And by the way, I think single people should certainly be able to buy contraceptives, but this is why I think legislatures are not judges and judges are not legislatures.
With that said, you know, the stupidity of the idea that the Constitution mandates that is evident.
There is no right to privacy, generalized right to privacy, in the Constitution.
There are several different aspects of what you could term a right to privacy.
The right against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to free speech, right?
There are certain things that you could look at the Constitution and say, that has to do with privacy, but there's no generalized right to privacy you can then take and implement.
And that certainly would not apply to a rather non-private decision like having an abortion with the use of a medical provider.
Right.
It's so funny when it comes to medical provision of services, the left believes that is completely public act.
Right.
The left believes that the government should pay for that.
Then my dealings with my doctor should be subject to government regulation every single way, except when it comes to abortion, in which case that is completely private.
You have no business saying anything about it.
So Roe v. Wade was decided on right to privacy grounds.
And then they made a secondary argument in Roe v. Wade about the issue of viability, the viability of the fetus.
And so they said that laws in the third trimester might be okay, because if you have laws in the third trimester, then you're talking about the viability of the fetus.
Maybe the fetus can survive on its own, so maybe the fetus has some rights.
They basically fudged the entire decision.
It's one of the worst constitutional decisions in American history.
Just from a purely legal perspective, it's incredibly, incredibly stupid.
So there is your brief summary of Roe v. Wade.
Anybody who says Roe v. Wade is legally justifiable has never read the case.
It's an insane case.
Or they're so ideologically driven that they believe that anything is justifiable so long as they reach the conclusion they want.
Elise says, "Hey Ben, in the last episode "of the conversation, you said your hot doctor wife "likes to rip on you, which prompted me "to ask this very important question.
"Has the thug life also chosen her?" I would say that the thug life chooses her a little less frequently than the thug life chooses me.
But the thug life lives within her, just as the doctrine lives within Amy Barrett, who I hope President Trump nominates for the Supreme Court.
The thug life lives within my wife.
It comes out at random times.
My wife is legitimately the nicest person ever.
Like anyone in the office who's met her knows, she's an extraordinarily nice human being.
And it is so funny because every so often, it's usually once every couple of years, she will say something that is so cutting And I'll look at her and we'll both just start laughing because it's so out of character.
It's really, really funny.
I had to marry a nice person.
Otherwise, our kids would have been just the worst.
So, Jeremy says, let's see, we did Jeremy already.
Spencer says, which Supreme Court cases, in your opinion, contributed most to the expansion of federal power beyond the constraints defined in the Constitution?
Furthermore, aside from the rulings, you obviously violated the civil rights minorities, Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu.
Which cases would you rank as the worst three in Supreme Court history?
Wow.
Okay, so there have been a lot of bad decisions in Supreme Court history.
As I mentioned, Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu.
I would say Wickard v. Filburn is one of the worst cases in Supreme Court history.
That is a case in which a guy was growing grain for his own consumption in 1940s America under FDR.
And FDR had passed all of these new laws that attempted to restrict the amount of grain that you could actually grow because he was trying to artificially boost the price of grain on behalf of farmers.
And this person said, wait a second.
Like, I'm not, in Wickard v. Filburn, the farmer said, I'm not even growing this for interstate shipment, right?
I'm not shipping this across state lines.
What does the federal government have to do with me growing grain for my own consumption, right?
Or even growing grain for intrastate commerce, like I'm just trading it inside the state.
What does the federal government have to do with that?
Wickard v. Filburn said, anything you do that could possibly have an impact on a market is now considered interstate commerce for purposes of federal regulation.
What that basically means is anything you do any day has federal implications.
Which is an insane, it's an insane standard, right?
I mean, that standard basically suggests that you are, uh, every time I flush the toilet, that has an impact on the water prices in the state of California.
And that water price in the state of California has an impact on federal water regulation.
And therefore, the federal government has the right to regulate how I flush my toilet.
Legitimately, this is what the case was in Wickard v. Filburn.
The Commerce Clause, which was designed to constrain the federal government, has instead been read to allow the federal government to run roughshod over everybody's rights as far as humanly possible.
So Wickard v. Filburn is an awful, awful case.
Other cases that are really bad, there's a case called Skinner v. Oklahoma that is famously awful.
Skinner v. Oklahoma, if I'm not mistaking, the case was decided by, was it Oliver Wendell Holmes?
I'm trying to remember who actually wrote the decision in this.
It was, let's see, written by William O. Douglas.
So this was a law that permitted the, sorry, Skinner versus Oklahoma was correctly decided.
It overruled another decision.
Okay, so the other decision that it overruled was the three generations of imbeciles are enough decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
I'm trying to remember the name of the case.
I don't want to screw it up.
That would be Buck v. Bell.
So Buck v. Bell, 1927, is the one that I'm thinking of that's really bad.
Not Skinner v. Oklahoma.
Buck v. Bell was a decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was a proponent of eugenics.
And the case basically said that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the mentally disabled for the protection and health of the state did not violate the Constitution of the United States.
That's an insane decision.
It's a fully crazy decision.
A decision so bad, the Nazis actually cited it at the Nuremberg trials to show that they were not outside the mainstream of Western political thought when they started using sterilization against their political opponents.
So Buck vs. Bell would be up there.
So I've done Wickard, Buck vs. Bell, and I mentioned Roe already.
So Roe, I think, is obviously If it's not the worst Supreme Court decision in American history, it's top two.
It's either Dred Scott or Roe.
I was hoping that you could explain this.
It says, one aspect of the Bible many people I know criticize is that of slavery in the book, as well as being degraded to women, such as Genesis, where Adam is to be Eve's master.
I was hoping that you could explain this.
Thanks.
Okay, so a couple of things about slavery in the Bible.
So slavery in the Bible is not mandatory, right?
There's nothing in the Bible that says you have to own slaves.
In fact, the Bible has pretty strict restrictions on how slavery is supposed to operate.
If you own somebody who is sold into slavery and they are a fellow Jew, right, then the way that it works in the Bible is that you must release them after seven years.
And if they don't want to be released, then you actually have to pierce their ear with an awl, because the idea is that they should want to be released.
They should want to be a free person.
Also, the Restrictions on slavery in the Bible suggest that you have to treat your slaves with an extraordinary amount of care and decency.
Now, all of that said, is slavery in the Bible a wonderful thing?
No.
But the question is, and this is a general question about the Bible, obviously, is what was designed for the time and what is designed for now?
And it's pretty clear in the Bible that what the Bible is trying to do, because it's speaking to a particular group of people at a particular time and place, it is trying to curb slavery.
It's moving in the direction of curbing slavery, just as the Constitution of the United States The Bible has provisions outlawing the importation of slaves after 1808, and that is a move away from slavery, not a move towards slavery.
The Bible is trying to move people away from slavery and has heavy restrictions on how slaves are to be handled and how they are to be taken.
And again, slavery is universal in the world at that time.
It is not that it is a thing that only exists under the Bible.
It is something that is literally universal.
So when you're talking about something that is literally universal throughout all of human history and has only recently changed, Then you have to ask yourself, was this document attempting to move us away from slavery, or was it attempting to enshrine slavery?
There's a reason that all of the abolitionists use the Bible as the impetus for their anti-slavery zeal.
And that goes all the way up to and including John Brown, who actually used the Bible as an excuse to go and kill slave owners.
So the idea that the Bible is a pro-slavery document, I think, is a wild misread of the Bible.
As to the idea that women are mistreated in the Bible, again, when it comes to some of the laws with regard to women in the Bible, you have to see them in the context of the time, which is to say they are wildly progressive for the time in which they're written.
And as far as the idea that Adam is to be Eve's master, well, no, her curse, right?
She's cursed with the idea that he's cursed with the idea that he's going to have to till the land.
And then it's not that Eve has to submit herself to Adam.
The idea is that the curse is that he that Adam is going to lord it over her and that she is going to long for him nonetheless.
That's a description.
That is not normative.
It's not an order that Eve has to become Adam's slave.
Right.
That she is that he is supposed to be her master.
Read the text.
What the text actually says is that your curse is that he will lord it over you.
It's a descriptive thing.
The description is that men are going to treat you like crap and you're still going to want to be with them.
Which seems to be Fairly accurate as to how men have acted for most of human history.
So, you know, the state of absolute equality that existed in the Edenic pre-Exilic period was ended with the Fall.
And basically what the Bible is saying is that your curse is that this is the way the world is, and it is your job to try and get back into Eden, right?
It's your job to try and make your life better.
It's men's job not to treat women that way, and it's women's job to be better human beings as well.
So I just, I think, again, that's a deliberate misreading of the Bible.
Okay, so that brings us to the end of the mailbag.
So let's get to a quick thing that I like and then some things that I hate.
Alrighty, so the thing that I like today is a book by Antonin Scalia.
If you are into constitutional jurisprudence, then one of the classics in the field is Justice Scalia's A Matter of Interpretation, Federal Courts and the Law.
It describes his judicial philosophy.
I would say that my only quibble with Justice Scalia is that Justice Scalia was a little too attached to stare decisis.
I don't like stare decisis, the idea that the case has been decided precedent.
I don't think the precedent ought to rule because I think there have been a lot of bad precedents.
I just mentioned a couple of them.
I think Buck v. Bell was a bad precedent overturned by Skinner v. Oklahoma.
And that is a worthwhile way to... Bottom line is, if a decision is bad, it's bad.
But Justice Scalia, obviously one of the great minds ever to sit on the court, certainly one of the best writers ever to sit on the court, in his book, A Matter of Interpretation, is a really good description of how it was that he thought.
So go check it out.
Antonin Scalia's book, A Matter of Interpretation.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So you'll recall there's a guy named Michael Bennett.
Michael Bennett plays for the Seattle Seahawks, and he levied a bunch of accusations of racism against the Las Vegas police.
And it turns out that he was not telling the truth about this.
So Michael Bennett suggested that the police had attacked him for no reason in Las Vegas just because he was black.
What actually happened is the police received a report of an active shooter and Michael Bennett started crouching and then hiding behind a slot machine.
He ran to hide behind a slot machine.
And when officers took note, he jumped up and took off at a full sprint and failed to listen to officer commands to stop.
He said this was all because of racism.
And now he's trying to lecture President Trump about racism.
If Trump is really wanting to listen and to, you know, find out why we're taking a knee, that would be something that I'd be down to do.
If it's an opportunity to change the way that America is or change my communities, I'm always going to take those opportunities to express my knees and express the passion of other people.
OK, so listen, I'm fine with people talking about racism.
I'm fine with people talking to President Trump about racism.
I'm fine if Trump wants to talk with people about racism.
But using people who have lied about police officers as the spokespeople for the anti-racism movement seems deeply counterproductive.
That is not how we are going to reach any sort of consensus in the country.
There are better spokespeople for the anti-racism cause than people who fib about police officers for political gain.
OK, well, we'll be back here next week.
We may have a new Supreme Court justice nominee on our hands by that point.
So keep an eye out for that.
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 Carmina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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