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July 24, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:09
Of Virtue Signaling And Vice | Ep. 587
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The New York Daily News fires half its staff and every Democrat vows to help.
Millennials virtue signal on issues that don't matter.
And President Trump both loves tariffs and also wants to somehow fix the impact of the tariffs.
It's all confusing.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
And we'll go through his Twitter feed, which is just lit, as the children say these days.
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All right, so every morning I wake up and I prepare for the show.
And I have to figure out, what am I going to talk about today?
And then President Trump does my show prep for me because he goes on Twitter.
And that's what happened this morning when the president decided to tweet about tariffs.
And here's what the president tweeted.
And it is pretty spectacular.
He tweeted, tariffs are the greatest!
Either a country which has treated the United States unfairly on trade negotiates a fair deal, or it gets hit with tariffs.
It's as simple as that.
And everybody's talking.
Remember, we are the piggy bank, scare quotes, that's being robbed.
All will be great, capital G.
Wow, there's a lot there to unpack.
Okay, so we could talk about the fact that tariffs are not, in fact, the greatest.
The last people who thought the tariffs were the greatest were a couple of guys named Smoot and Hawley.
They were responsible for a tariff regime that ended up lengthening the Great Depression by probably eight years.
So tariffs are not, in fact, the greatest, specifically because they're artificially increasing the price of products that you pay for on the shelves, and they are also artificially increasing the prices of inputs for American companies.
They also draw retaliatory tariffs, so that means that American companies can't ship their products overseas.
Well, it's not theory.
According to Bloomberg, Harley-Davidson has now cut its profit margin forecast for this year because of tariffs.
This is breaking today.
Harley-Davidson has cut its forecast for profit margin by an amount that suggests it's finding a way to cope with the damage done by President Donald Trump's trade war.
Operating margin this year will drop to about 9.5 percent.
That's a midpoint of a range.
The Milwaukee-based manufacturer gave in a statement on Tuesday, citing the expected impact of tariffs.
They had been projecting a margin of roughly 10 percent.
So this is a little bit lower than their normal margins.
And they're also moving some of their factories to Europe.
Also, Whirlpool has now announced that they are lowering There are estimates for this year.
The maker of home appliances said rising raw material costs hurt results in three out of four of its regional markets in the second quarter, including North America, Asia, and its struggling Europe, Middle East, and Africa division.
The only region where it didn't cite input cost inflation was in Latin America, which faced its own problems in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg, including a Brazilian trucker strike.
According to Chief Executive Officer Mark Robert Bitzer, he said, our annual steel contracts and hedging contracts with our base metals Give us some protection, but do not insulate us from these more material trends.
So in other words, all of those manufacturing jobs that President Trump wants to protect are actually being hurt by the tariffs that he loves and thinks are the greatest.
Technically, by the way, Muhammad Ali is the greatest.
I mean, we all know that.
But according to President Trump, tariffs are, in fact, the greatest.
Also, I do love that everybody is talking.
I didn't realize that that was a school of economics now.
The everybody's talking school of economics.
And I was also under the impression that everybody was talking about the bird.
Because, of course, the bird is the word.
But the fact that the President of the United States continues to tweet out about this stuff suggests that he doesn't actually know what he's talking about.
We are not a piggy bank being robbed.
Again, for the 1,000th time, when I make a trade with you, you are not robbing me.
Robbing me involves you using force or deception in order to take products Or services or money from me without my knowledge or without my consent.
That is not what happens in a trade.
If I have a trade deficit with you, that's because I gave you money and you gave me a product.
I have a trade deficit with lots of people.
Overall, I do okay fiscally.
That's true of the United States as well, but I have a trade deficit with my dry cleaners, I have a trade deficit with our nanny, I have a trade deficit with our gardener, I have a trade deficit with the Local restaurants around here, a pretty massive trade deficit with the local restaurants around here.
That doesn't mean the solution is for me to stop shopping at those restaurants or stores at the grocery and instead artificially increase costs.
Now, how do we know that this is actually having an impact?
I know there are a lot of people right now who are shaking their heads.
No, if Trump says tariffs are great, it's because tariffs are great.
Because he's making tariffs great again or some such.
If this were the case, then why exactly is the president now announcing that he is going to be providing aid to farmers?
So according to Politico today, The Trump administration is planning to ease fears of a trade war by announcing later on Tuesday billions of dollars in aid to farmers hurt by tariffs, according to two sources familiar with the plan.
The administration's plan will use two commodity support programs in the Farm Bill, as well as the Agricultural Department's broad authority to stabilize the agricultural economy during times of turmoil.
The plan has been in the works for months.
It seeks to ensure U.S.
farmers and ranchers, a key constituency for President Trump and Republicans, don't bear the brunt of an escalating trade fight with China, the European Union, And other major economies as the administration pursues an aggressive course to rebalance America's trade relationships.
Trump's move to slap tariffs on imports from some of America's largest trading partners have prompted retaliation against U.S.
farm goods like pork, beef, soybeans, sorghum, and a range of fruits.
So what's happening is that President Trump decided he wanted to tariff Cars, for example.
And these countries that we are now tariffing have decided they're going to tariff America on agricultural exports, which means that our farmers don't have any place to ship their goods, which are now withering on the vine.
So now President Trump is going to borrow from the future in order to pay off those farmers.
This is exactly what FDR did.
This is exactly FDR's policy.
FDR's policy from 1933 all the way until the war began in 1941 was this policy.
The policy was that we were going to leverage tariffs against People who are screwing us in trade wars.
We're going to fight those trade wars.
And then we are going to somehow make up for all the farmers who are losing money by artificially boosting prices.
Now FDR went so far as to actually regulate farmers and force farmers to actually burn off their excess grain supply in order to boost prices.
So he provided them with all sorts of subsidies and then he also regulated them up the wazoo so you didn't have an oversupply of grain.
This led to a very famous case at the Supreme Court called Wickard v. Filburn where a guy was growing grain for his own consumption and the federal government said you have to burn off the grain for your own consumption because you're artificially lowering the price of grain.
You're creating too much grain.
It's lowering the price in the global market because you are eating that grain instead of buying it from somebody else.
And the Supreme Court, idiotically under pressure from FDR, found that the federal government could actually regulate your ability to grow grain in your own backyard for your own use.
Somehow this impacted interstate commerce.
Trump's policy here is FDR policy.
And this is one of the problems with the areas where the president has sole control.
The Constitution of the United States does not delegate tariff power to the president of the United States.
It delegates tariff power to the legislature.
Now, originally, the legislature delegated tariff power to the president of the United States because they wanted the presidency, they wanted the executive branch, to lower tariffs.
And they figured that it would be easier to have a president who could unilaterally lower tariffs than it would be to have a legislature that had to lower tariffs by fiat, by legislation.
Well, the problem is, once you give a lot of power to the executive, the executive can use it however he wants.
So the President of the United States can simply play with the tariff rates.
This is what FDR did in the 1930s.
It was a disaster area, and Donald Trump is doing it now.
None of this is particularly good policy, and the President should reverse this as fast as possible.
Larry Kudlow somewhere is spinning in his grave.
Wait, he's still alive, right?
Okay, Larry Kudlow somewhere is spinning in his office, but...
All the people in the administration who are pro-free trade are looking at tweets like this and thinking, why would the president undercut his own strong economy with this sort of foolishness?
And you can't...
You can't hope that the economy holds out forever when you are taking measures that are designed to tamp down the economy.
Tariffs are not, in fact, great.
And the president is going to find that out the hard way if he continues along this path.
Now, all of this has some impact on the generic congressional ballot.
Right now, it looks like the Democrats do have the momentum again in the congressional races.
The president's approval ratings, as I discussed yesterday, continue to be very high.
But the congressional races are starting to open up in favor of Democrats, at least on the generic ballot.
And part of that is because the president is unpopular.
If, as I said yesterday, the Democrats are going to climb back into this thing, if the Republicans are going to climb back into this thing, it's going to be reliant on the Democrats overstepping their boundaries.
Fortunately, there is a good shot of that.
I think solid critiques that could be leveraged against policies of the Trump administration have gone by the wayside in favor of completely unhinged Insane sort of critiques.
So Kirsten Gillibrand leads the way.
She suggests that it's time for the Democratic Party to abolish ICE.
If she wants to ensure that the Democrats never win back Congress, there's a pretty solid way to do it right here.
I think we should get rid of ICE.
We should separate out two missions and do the anti-terrorism mission, the national security mission, and then on the other side, make sure you're looking at immigration as a humanitarian issue.
These are civil issues.
These are families.
Look at it as the economic engine that it is, that immigration is our strength.
Our diversity is what makes this country and our economy so strong.
OK, so she wants to abolish ICE.
That's obviously going to be a very unpopular point of view.
But she's nothing compared to Andrew Cuomo.
So Andrew Cuomo wants to run for president of the United States, which would be amazing.
He'd be the first inanimate object ever to be president of the United States, Andrew Cuomo.
That'd be like an actual incredible thing.
I used to think that Chris Cuomo was the dumber of the Cuomo brothers.
And it turns out that Andrew is actually the dumber.
What they've done at the border is an example of it.
What they've done in Puerto Rico.
I mean, like, I really didn't think that was possible.
Yesterday, Andrew Cuomo was speaking, and he said that President Trump had declared a jihad.
He'd put a jihad on you.
He declared a jihad on immigrants to the United States.
Yeah, this kind of language is definitely going to win Democrats a lot of friends and supporters.
What they've done at the border is an example of it, what they've done in Puerto Rico.
And they are on a jihad to deport as many people as they can who they believe are not in the United States legally.
Okay, so they're on a jihad.
First of all, I would just like to point out that if a Republican ever said that any politician was on a jihad against anything, people would immediately call them an Islamophobe, right?
You're only allowed to use the word jihad when you are specifically referring to an internal struggle, because that's what it means according to the Quran.
Okay, so guys, get that right.
But Andrew Cuomo says that Trump is on a jihad against immigrants.
Yeah, that's a way you're going to win over all those people in the middle of the country who are attempting to cope with falling wages in particular industries.
If you really think that any of that is going to win back the base of Trump support to the Democratic side of the aisle, you have to be crazy.
In a second, I want to talk about the elitism that is evident in some of these particular comments, which is translated over to the reaction to the New York Daily News.
I'm going to talk about that in just one second.
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Okay, so I guess when you look at President Trump's trade policy, and then you look at the Democrats' response to President Trump on immigration, there's a bigger message that comes out from it.
As much as I dislike President Trump's trade policy, and I do, I think it's garbage.
I think that President Trump doesn't understand basic economics when it comes to trade.
I think he has a bizarre version of how trade deficits actually work.
I think that this is likely to be harmful to the economy that he is president during.
I don't like using the phrase his economy because I don't think the president runs the economy, but the economy over which he presides.
I think it's going to hurt him to pursue this policy.
With that said, if you have to contrast President Trump's Apparent like for sort of the manufacturing base and the people in the middle of the country.
What the Democrats dislike for those people, there's a reason that President Trump won Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio going away.
There's a reason that he did that.
And the reason that he did that is a feeling of sympathy for these workers.
Now, I think the tariff policy he's pursuing hurts a lot of those workers.
And I think the president ought to understand that.
I think he's going to lose votes in these states with his tariff policy.
But it's pretty clear that the president's heart is with a lot of those people, even if the policy he's pursuing doesn't actually And the same is not true of a lot of the folks in our media.
How do I know this?
Because take a look at the reaction to the Failing New York Daily News.
Okay, so the New York Daily News is having some serious problems.
The President of the United States always likes to say the failing New York Times this, the failing New York Times that.
The reality is that there is one major newspaper that is failing in New York, and it is the New York Daily News.
The New York Daily News decided they were going to cut 50% of their editorial team.
They announced this on Monday.
They sent a letter to their entire staff.
They said, we're reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50% And refocusing much of our talent on breaking news, especially in areas of crime, civil justice, and public responsibility.
This is according to Tronk, which is the parent company.
The editor-in-chief, a guy named Jim Rich, he tweeted out his disappointment.
He said, if you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you.
Because that's clearly what the parent company was thinking.
They weren't thinking about the profit margins.
They were thinking, how do we make room for local government to operate in the dark and unchecked?
Let's fire half our staff.
That's probably what was going on at Tronc.
But the part that's really telling is the reaction from all of these leftist politicians in New York State.
So a bunch of journalists get fired over the New York Daily News, and it's kind of amazing how these politicians react.
So here's how the politicians react.
Bill de Blasio is the New York mayor.
And he says, quote, It's no secret that I've disagreed with the Daily News from time to time, but Tronc's greedy decision to gut the newsroom is bad for government and a disaster for New York City.
Tronc should sell the paper to someone committed to local journalism and keeping reporters on the beat.
Well, thanks for your advice, communist mayor of New York who's never run a business.
Really, really appreciate that.
And then Andrew Cuomo also issued a statement.
So, a block of wood known as the Governor of New York, he issued a statement as well.
Again, mostly amazing that blocks of wood can become animate and issue statements like this.
But I guess...
You know, anything is possible in today's world.
He identifies as a human.
By the way, do I think that Andrew Cuomo would react the same way if Fox News fired half its staff?
This is a free country.
When is the last time?
If I fire someone at this company, I don't actually have to notify Jerry Brown, the governor of the state of California.
First of all, I assume Jerry Brown would be happy if people, if we lost employees at the Daily Wire, but that in itself is a bizarre statement.
Then he says, He says, If you don't see profit as a bottom line, then that's because you're bad at business.
If you don't see profit as a bottom line, then that's because you're bad at business.
But in New York, we also calculate loss of an important institution, loss of jobs and the impact of families affected.
I hope Tronc does the same and recalculates its decision.
New York State stands ready to help.
First of all, let me point out the conflict between the editor in chief of the New York Daily News saying, if you want heavier scrutiny on government, what happened today is terrible.
And then the government saying, we'll help you rehire all those reporters.
Do you think maybe those reporters might go easy on Governor Cuomo if Governor Cuomo is the person who gets them rehired at the New York Daily News?
You think maybe a corrupt relationship between the government and the press is probably a bad idea?
But that's really not the point that I'm seeking to make.
The point I'm seeking to make is that the level of outrage over the firing of these journalists is wildly outsized.
There are industries in the United States where people legitimately have lost their jobs.
We're talking about dying industry towns.
We're talking about production factories that existed in the Rust Belt that have gone empty, that have turned into ghost towns.
And there are those of us who are free market people who say, you know, there are certain things that just happen under a capitalist system.
Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction, where every time there's a new technological development, certain people in certain industries lose jobs, and we have to try and grease the skids so that they can get new jobs in a different industry or move out of those dying towns, right?
We have to do something to help those people move out of a dying industry, but that's just the way the economy works.
But there are a bunch of people in the press who just ignore those people completely.
Who sort of have scorn for all those people who are working in factory towns.
Look at these rubes who voted for Donald Trump.
These stupid rubes who voted for Donald Trump.
Don't they understand how the economy works?
Don't they understand creative destruction?
Don't they understand that the economy moves on and these are low IQ idiot plumbers showing their butt cracks?
Don't they understand?
But then, when it's journalists, then the world ends, right?
When it's journalists, then we all have to cry about it.
We have to deep tears, pity, rage.
Now the thing is, The journalistic industry is actually not in all that much trouble.
The New York Times is doing fine.
The Wall Street Journal is doing fine.
It's just that everybody is moving over to a subscription basis online as opposed to free online content.
The New York Daily News thought that they could cover for a bad press strategy and a bad business strategy by just printing nasty covers about President Trump incessantly.
They thought that was going to raise their profile and their circulation.
It did not.
But because they made a bunch of bad decisions, they laid off a bunch of people.
But it is indicative of a certain self-censoredness that exists on the coast and in particular industries that journalists' jobs are more important than the rest of your jobs.
That somehow these journalists losing their jobs is a tragedy for the country, but the factory worker in the center of the country losing his job is just fine.
Now, my view on this is that anybody who loses a job, that's a sad thing, but we have to determine whether that is a free market force at play and whether we can help those people out on the back end, but without actually regulating all of these other industries into sort of subservience to keeping
Lacking industries alive, but the but the fact that there is this dichotomy in the cultural attitude toward various jobs I think is very telling and one of the reasons the president of the United States continues to be very successful There's a feeling people the New York Daily News don't care very much about you if you're in Ohio and the president does even if the policy the president is pursuing on trade is Just not correct.
Okay now meanwhile I want to talk a little bit about something that Nikki Haley did last night that I think is really spectacular.
So, President Trump's ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, did something that is quite great.
She was speaking to a bunch of high schoolers at the TPUSA, the Turning Point USA High School Leadership Summit.
And she spoke specifically about owning the libs.
Now, we'll talk about this in just a second.
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Okay, so Nikki Haley.
U.S.
Ambassador to the U.N.
and my spirit animal, as I have suggested before.
I'm a big Nikki Haley fan.
She also happens to be absolutely charming in person.
And she spoke yesterday at the Turning Point USA event in Washington, D.C.
And I've spoken at many Turning Point USA events, and it's filled with great kids who really want to help push America in a more conservative direction.
I mean, these are really motivated kids.
One of the things that's become very common among the younger set, and I know because I'm still one of the younger set, is this notion that what we ought to do here in the conservative movement is own the libs.
If you've ever been on Twitter, this is all we talk about all day long is owning the libs.
And here at The Daily Wire, we are not averse to owning the libs.
Right?
We have this.
The leftist here is hot or cold Tumblr.
And it comes free with your membership for 99 bucks a year, right?
The whole point of the Leftist Heroes Tumblr is that we own the libs, okay?
But the thing is that when you're going to own the libs, meaning own the liberals, when you're worried about owning the libs, you actually ought to own the libs by purchasing them at a fair market rate.
And the way that you do this is by actually making a good argument and convincing them, right?
That is the way that you own the libs.
And Nikki Haley understands this.
Unfortunately, a lot of folks in sort of conservative circles think that triggering the libs is the same as owning the libs.
Triggering the libs is not, in fact, owning the libs.
You can tick off people on the left very, very easily.
All you have to do is say something basically factual about men and women, and people on the left get very, very upset.
That's fine.
But triggering people on the left, you can do that just by being a jerk as well.
And I think it's very important to recognize that the way that you win people over is not always by being a jerk.
So Nikki Haley was speaking at TPUSA and she said, And everybody raised their hand because this is the thing that you do on Twitter and Facebook.
And then Nikki said, "I know that it's fun "and that it can feel good, but step back "and think about what you're accomplishing "when you do this.
"Are you persuading anyone?
"Who are you persuading?
We've all been guilty of it at some point or another, but this kind of speech isn't leadership, it's the exact opposite.
Real leadership is about persuasion, it's about movement, it's about bringing people around to your point of view.
Not by shouting them down, but by showing them how it is in their best interest to see things the way that you do.
Not only do I think that message is eminently correct, I said basically the same thing at a TPUSA event just a few weeks ago at the Young Women's Leadership Summit.
I think that we ought to, here on the right, take Nikki Haley's words to heart.
That doesn't mean that we have to be weak in how we promote our viewpoint.
Not at all.
We should be strong.
We should be powerful.
We should be forward with how we promote our viewpoint.
But we should also recognize that just doing things to tick off people on the left is not actually going to win over the people in the middle that you need in order to win elections and in order to win the day.
The reason I bring this up is because the President of the United States yesterday decided that he was going to think about pulling the clearances of various Trump critics from previous administrations.
Now, here's the thing about security clearances.
I think that they should automatically expire upon you leaving the government.
This is normally the way that it works.
If you are fired, like James Comey was fired, he lost his security clearance, I believe.
The same thing happened with James Clapper as well.
When you leave an administration, very often, your security clearance goes away with it.
But there are certain people who are allowed to keep their security clearance.
Now, just because you have a security clearance doesn't mean that you can access classified material.
It's not like Susan Rice can stroll into the White House any day of the week.
And then just start accessing the computers and looking up classified materials.
The idea is that she retains her security clearance in case somebody in the government needs to talk with her or in case there's another Democrat who's elected and they want to bring her back in so she doesn't have to be cleared again.
She retains her security clearance.
There's a fair argument to be made by the Trump administration that security clearances should just go away as soon as you no longer work for the government, and if we have to redo it later, then we redo it later.
That's a fair argument.
But instead, it seems like the Trump administration is talking about removing security clearances from various actors they perceive as bad, and many of whom are bad, simply out of some sort of retaliatory anger.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders talked yesterday about what President Trump was going to do with regard to the clearance.
The president is exploring these mechanisms to remove security clearance because they've politicized and in some cases actually monetized their public service and their security clearances and making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the president is extremely inappropriate.
So what that sounds like is Trump is simply removing security clearances from anyone who has one who has been critical of him with regard to Russia.
Okay, that's not good stuff.
Now, again, I think that there's a case to be made that if you actually think that James Clapper or Susan Rice are using their security clearance to get access to information that they are then using to lie about on national television, first of all, we probably ought to discuss whether there's a legal violation that is prosecutable by the DOJ.
But if there is not, then this sounds like simple trollery.
Now, is that owning the libs?
Well, it ticked off a lot of people yesterday.
I ticked off a lot of people on the left.
So Adam Schiff, who literally has a pup tent that is actually pitched at the CNN headquarters.
This is what he does all day.
He's no longer a congressperson.
He's a congressperson in name only.
And he actually sits out there drinking from a thermos and then he just waits outside until they call him in for his latest hit on CNN.
So Adam Schiff, he says that this is just like authoritarian regimes.
So the libs have been in fact triggered by President Trump and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Suggesting that we will punish critics of the president by stripping them of their security clearance.
That is not what you see in a democracy.
That is exactly what you see in authoritarian regimes.
Okay, it is not exactly what you see in authoritarian regimes.
Typically in authoritarian regimes, you arrest your opponents.
You don't strip them of a security clearance to which they have no actual solid claim.
So Schiff is triggered.
It's not just Schiff who's triggered.
CNN's Gloria Borger was also quite triggered.
Here's what she had to say on CNN yesterday.
Look, the president wants to silence his critics.
Period.
I just think the president is sort of stunning and petty, small, and doesn't speak well for a president of the United States who is supposed to be able to handle his critics.
Okay, so, again, triggering, triggering everywhere.
And people on the right celebrate this because when CNN is triggered, that means something good is happening.
Well, sometimes that's true.
Sometimes it's true that when you trigger CNN, it's because something good is happening.
The president has triggered CNN before for good reason, and I've pointed it out when he has done so.
The question is whether this is actually beneficial or whether this is just, you know, trolling to troll.
Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, who is outgoing, so he can now speak some truths, he says that this is basically just President Trump trolling people.
I think he's trolling people, honestly.
This is something that's in the purview of the executive branch.
I think some of these people have already lost their clearances.
Some people keep their clearances.
That's something that the executive branch deals with.
It's not really in our purview.
You can see he's just really annoyed at this point.
And honestly, I'm kind of with Paul Ryan here.
It is one thing to pursue good policy that happens to trigger people on the left.
To take them off, to own them.
It is another thing simply to trigger them and then assume that you have done something good based on this reaction from the left.
What you end up with in this case is a pure reactionary policy on both sides of the aisle.
And it's happening on the left too, right?
The left will do stuff just to trigger the right.
The left will say things like, let's abolish ICE.
Now, how do I know they're lying about abolishing ICE?
Because they brought it up for a vote, right?
The Senate, Mitch McConnell, cocaine Mitch, he actually brought this thing up for a vote.
So Democrats proposed, what if we just abolished ICE?
And Mitch McConnell was like, let's do that.
Let's put that up for a vote.
It went down unanimously.
Not a single Democrat voted to abolish ICE.
Even people like Kirsten Gillibrand, who said that they want to abolish ICE.
Why do they say it then?
Because they're triggering the cons.
So on the one side, you have people triggering the libs.
On the other side, you have people triggering the cons.
And at no point do you have anybody who's actually having a real rational conversation.
Now, in just a second, I want to talk about what the cost of that is.
Why that stuff actually matters.
Because maybe it's all just fun and games.
And listen, on Twitter, I do it too.
Right?
It is fun and games to a certain extent.
But I want to talk about the real cost of this.
In terms of public policy in just a second.
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So what is all of this triggering the libs, triggering the concept?
Isn't it all just in good fun?
Well, there are two reasons that it matters.
Reason number one, when people are very interested in triggering the libs and triggering the cons, they're also very interested in sometimes, sometimes, Going too far.
So there are those of us who understand that a lot of this is just jokey and sort of gamey.
And yes, you want to fight the leftist positions as hard as possible because those positions are wrong and in some cases are actually evil.
You want to fight those positions as hard as you can.
But that's not the same thing as I'm just going to say something to say something because it made Whoopi Goldberg mad or whatever.
Whoopi Goldberg's mad about a lot of stuff.
I don't have to say much to get her mad.
If you're focused solely and completely on making the other side mad all the time, then it stands to reason that you're also going to be more likely to want to do things that cross the bounds of civility.
You're more likely to want to destroy people's lives based on giant nothings, for example.
You're more likely to say, well, I won a grand victory because the ends justify the means.
After all, I triggered them.
And if I triggered them, that means I did something right.
Well, that doesn't make for good dialogue.
Also, it is true that it brings you to a certain sort of crisis mentality.
The whole triggering phenomenon basically assumes that people on the other side of the aisle are the worst that humanity has to offer.
So simply by dint of you making them angry, you've done something good and done something right.
That you making them angry is in and of itself an achievable and easy goal, and therefore it's something that we should aim at.
But what if it turns out that the stuff that we're triggering each other over is actually rather minor?
That the stuff we spend most of our time agonizing over is actually relatively unimportant?
The reason I think about this is that, you know, I live in Los Angeles and everybody in my immediate vicinity, everybody within a nuclear blast radius of this office is on the left.
And all of those people invariably, invariably think we're living in a crisis scenario.
You look around LA, people are living pretty good.
Living pretty high on the hog.
Everybody has a nice house.
People have nice cars.
Aside from the mass number of homeless people brought in by the left in this city, which is a serious problem, people are living pretty well, okay?
People are, you can be born in this society and expect to live a full eight decades.
Things are good.
Things are good.
And yet we think that everything is a crisis.
Because we think everything is a crisis, every headline becomes an excuse to fight the daily battle by triggering the other side.
But what if the real crises that our society is facing are crises that are much deeper than that?
Crises of, for example, entitlement spending that is going to cripple our ability to do anything in the future.
Crises of a young population that is losing its purpose amidst all of this internecine warfare.
What if it turns out there are broader issues at stake and serious conversations are merited?
Well, if you're too busy triggering the other side, you can't have those serious conversations because it's more important to slander the other side as something terrible than it is to have conversations that are actually productive.
It's been very telling, I think, the last couple of weeks.
I try to make a point, as much as I enjoy triggering the occasional Lib.
And I do have a stock of Libs in my garage.
I mean, it's sort of like Season 2 of The Walking Dead.
I actually have in my garage a bunch of Libs.
You just sort of wander around in there, because I own many of them.
But, you know, when you One of the things I've been trying to do, and I've been really, this is not new, I've been trying to do this since law school, is have substantive conversations with people on the left.
The reason I want to have those substantive conversations is because it at least clarifies where we stand and where the real rifts in our society are going to be when it comes to solving these serious and deep issues.
And if we can't have those conversations, then what we end up doing is trying to simply destroy each other for purposes of the latest news cycle.
And that means making people lose their jobs, and it means destroying people's careers, and it means going back through everybody's old tweets and destroying them one by one.
This is what it means.
It becomes a war.
We treat it like a war.
Guess what?
America is not actually at war.
I know there are a lot of folks on the right who want to say that we're at civil war.
There is an ideological battle that is going on, and it is meaningful, and it is deep.
But it is not the conversation that we are having today.
The conversation we're having today is how angry are you at X?
And X invariably is something stupid and something small and something petty and something worthless.
There are real societal issues that require us to have real societal discussions that cannot be happening.
That's not going to happen if all we worry about today is winning this particular battle of the headlines.
And that's not to say again that we don't fight that battle of the headlines, but we fight it in good faith and good spirits.
We fight it with a smile on our face.
We don't fight it with this kind of sour outrage and this vicious glee in, oh my gosh, the other guy got really, really, really, really mad.
If you don't like it on the left, you shouldn't like it on the right.
And I promise you, you don't like it on the left.
And when you see people on the left who are pettily suggesting that the president is in the pocket of the Russians, you're angry, aren't you?
You should be angry because that's unbased.
They don't actually have evidence for that.
And they are doing this to win the headline of the day.
How many people on the left honestly believe that the President of the United States is in the pay of the Russians and that we're being run by Russia?
How many people actually believe that?
And how many people believe that because our tribal need to own the other is too strong?
How many people actually believe that folks on the right are truly, deeply evil?
They don't believe it about members of their own family.
They don't believe it about people they know on the other side of the aisle.
They just believe that this sort of other that's out there is truly terrible.
And social media exacerbates this because you get to hide behind your computer screen all day, you get to hide behind your phone screen, you get to pretend that you're somebody that you're not.
You say things to people on Twitter that you'd never say to anybody in real life.
You know, Louis C.K., the comic who no longer gets to work, Louis C.K.
has a very funny routine about how people are in their cars.
And what he suggests is that you scream things at people in your car that you would never say to them in an elevator.
And if you're in a car and somebody cuts you off in traffic, you will curse a blue streak.
You'll say things like, I hope you die.
Whereas if you're in an elevator and somebody brushed up next to you, you wouldn't turn to that person right in your face and go, I hope you die.
Right?
You just wouldn't do that.
Social media does that to people.
Because you feel a certain level of disconnect.
You can always turn off the social media and it goes away.
But here's the thing.
The problems that creates in the country do not go away.
And that's why Nikki Haley is right.
We ought to be operating in good faith and we ought to be a lot less focused on trollery and a lot more focused on solving substantive issues.
Now, speaking of substantive issues, I want to talk about a substantive issue that very few people are going to talk about today.
And that is the New York Times has a long piece about childless women and men.
This is a substantive issue because there are just too many people in American society who are not having children.
I know.
Unpopular viewpoint with the left.
This is a true thing I'm going to say that is going to trigger the lebs by virtue of it being true.
Americans are not having enough children.
We're not having enough children to support our giant social welfare state.
We're also not having enough children just generally because we're replacing ourselves at barely replacement rates.
Europe is dying.
Europe is falling apart.
The reason Europe is reliant on mass immigration from the Middle East is because they don't have enough people to actually do the jobs.
The United States is falling into the same trap.
Why?
Because people have found meaning not in what does the future hold and building a better future, but in this sort of self-obsession.
How can I live a more satisfying personal life?
So, the New York Times has this fawning article about a bunch of old people who don't have kids.
Now, you might think that that's sad, a bunch of old people who don't have kids.
They don't have kids to visit them.
They don't have grandkids to visit them.
And in fact, there's a picture leading this piece of four old people sitting on a bench looking out into the ocean.
Right, which is really depressing just in its sort of context.
You put a child in that photo and suddenly it's charming.
But without a child, it just looks like a bunch of old people that are soon going to turn into tombstones.
That's essentially what it looks like.
And here's what the article says.
The vast majority of American women have children, yet fewer women are deciding to become mothers.
The fertility rate is at a record low.
When we ask people who don't plan to have children about the reasons for an article in the Upshot, the top answers were the desire for more leisure time, the need to find a partner, and the inability to afford child care.
Many women said motherhood had become more of a choice, and they were choosing to forego it, whether for personal or economic reasons.
In response to that article and related one about a woman who was happily child-free, we heard from many older childless women and some older childless men reflecting on their lives without children.
Many celebrated their decision.
Some wondered what might have been.
Others said they had moved from feeling heartbroken to feeling grateful.
Now, let's just face a basic fact about humanity.
A basic fact about humanity.
You will always justify the decisions you made.
It's very rare to find human beings who look at the decisions they've made in their life and say, you know what?
Really botched that one.
That was a mistake.
And I think the first step toward becoming a better human being is saying, I made a mistake and maybe I can do better.
But people have a real stake in doubling down on the stuff that they've already done.
Here are some of the comments.
Joanne from Georgia.
She is 62.
"Over my life of 62 years, "I've gone from being heartbroken to relieved "to proud that I never had children." Why would you be proud that you never had children?
What sort of contribution to society have you made by not generating a second generation?
That's one thing if you obviously can't have children, if you have that sort of trouble.
But to choose not to have children is an inherently selfish act.
Again, this is a very controversial proposition in today's day and age.
The reason it is a selfish act is because you are voluntarily disconnecting yourself from the future of the human species.
You no longer have a stake in what happens next.
The world stops turning the moment you die.
Once you have kids, you start realizing that your decisions mean something more.
Nothing changes human beings more than having children.
Nothing makes you rethink the decisions that you've made in your life more than having children and deciding what to pass on to those kids.
Nothing makes you care more about building a better society than having children.
Nothing makes you more protective of the things that we have that are good than having children.
And when you sacrifice all that because, hey, I had a good time and my kids weren't a pain in the ass, at least I didn't have to deal with little Timmy's drug problem when he was 16.
Yes, having kids is a risk.
But it's that risk that not only makes life worth living, it makes civilization worth preserving.
Hey, Carson from River Heights, she's 66, she says, Right, that means that you are basically mooching off of someone else's kids.
old woman who chose not to have children and I've never regretted it for a minute.
Friends, lovers, professional colleagues, siblings, nieces and nephews, neighbors and other people can be constants in a person's life too.
Right.
That means that you are basically mooching off of someone else's kids, implying that women who don't have children are doomed to loneliness is ignorant.
No, it's not.
By poll data, it is certainly not ignorant.
The vast majority of women want to have kids and they want to have kids for a reason.
And just because human beings have an enormous capacity for self-deception and may want to suggest to themselves that everything is hunky-dory when they're 60 years old living at home with no one else there, you know, in a house by themselves with no kids.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Good luck with that.
And then the fact the New York Times is pushing this is pretty telling.
This is fine.
The real question is why is the New York Times actually pushing this?
This is fine.
The real question is, why is the New York Times actually pushing this?
And the answer is because the New York Times believes that this inherently self-absorbed culture is something good for the country.
This is something we need to talk about.
How do we instill a culture of purpose and meaning again in people that they want to contribute to the next generation and that they actually want to be part of the great chain of history that leads backward toward a time when people did not live in prosperity and decency with safety for their children, toward a time when people will live in ever-increasing prosperity and decency with a sense of meaning for their kids.
Those are the conversations we need to be having.
And that's not going to be happening if we are so focused on the triggering of the libs.
Okay, all that stuff's just not that important.
Okay, time for things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things I like today.
So, I've been doing jazz all week, which is to say yesterday.
We're doing another piece of jazz today.
Ella Fitzgerald, of course, one of the great jazz singers of all time.
So, my grandfather, a guy we call Papa, he was a jazz drummer.
So, my dad is a jazz pianist, my grandfather was a jazz drummer, sort of in his spare time.
And he used to go down to a club where Ella Fitzgerald would sing, and he would bring her corned beef sandwiches right before she would perform, actually.
And Ella Fitzgerald is considered by many, probably most, to be the greatest jazz singer who ever lived, at least on the female side of the aisle.
Here's Ella Fitzgerald from her album, Ella in Hollywood, I've Got the World on a String.
I've got the world on a string Sitting on a rainbow Got the string around my finger What a world, what a life Ha ha ha I'm in love.
I've got a song that I sing.
The biggest problem with playing Ella Fitzgerald is you don't actually want to stop playing Ella Fitzgerald.
She's just terrific.
First-rate, first-rate musician and beautiful voice.
Yeah, she's just great.
Okay, now let's go to a bunch of stuff that I hate because now I'm in a good mood.
I gotta put myself back in a bad mood.
As you know, I have a rule on this show.
I cannot end the show in a good mood.
So let's do some things that I hate.
So...
We begin with the story of a Texas waiter.
This Texas waiter decided that he was going to tell everyone that there was a racist message on a receipt.
Okay, this guy's name is Khalil Kaveel, a 20-year-old server for Saltgrass Steakhouse in Odessa, and he claimed in a post on Facebook that a customer had left a racist note on a receipt.
The post, along with a photo of the receipt, quickly went viral.
It said, we don't tip terrorists.
Kaveel claimed the message had left him sick to his stomach.
He said the experience tested his faith, but then he added that he wanted to let it inspire him to change the world.
Okay, now I will give you three guesses as to whether this receipt was fake.
Oh, you got it on the first try.
Okay, here is a basic rule of thumb.
Whenever anybody posts a receipt, it's fake.
Unless it's somebody giving a giant tip.
If it's something bad that somebody wrote on a receipt, no one writes nasty things on receipts as a general rule.
Do you know anyone who's ever done that?
I never have.
Like, really.
The nastiest thing that I've ever done to any sort of waiter or waitress is undertip them if the service was really, really poor.
This is my grandfather's thing also.
When he wasn't bringing corned beef sandwiches to Ella Fitzgerald, if the service was really poor and he thought the waiter was a jerk, he'd leave them like a nickel tip.
Just to just to show them up.
I don't actually do that.
I tend to over tip because these people are working really, really hard.
But it's amazing how the entire media will fall for these stories time after time.
Oh, my gosh, we don't know who did it.
But somebody wrote on the bottom of receipt.
We don't tip terrorists.
Do we have any verification?
No.
Do we know who did it?
No.
But we know that the receipt is real.
How do we know the receipt is real?
Because.
Because America's racist!
That's the answer.
The answer is because they think America's racist, and therefore, the tip, the receipt has to be real.
Once again, this receipt was not, in fact, real.
It's just a bunch of stupid.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, this is a crazy story.
So there's a shooting in Florida.
A guy named Michael Dreschka gunned down Marquise McLaughlin.
He's a 28-year-old father of three.
McLaughlin is black, Dreschka is white.
And there is some video that was shown on Good Morning America.
It's kind of disturbing, so if you don't want to see it, then don't watch.
But basically what the video is going to show is that this guy Dreschka walked out to a car and he apparently started berating McLaughlin's girlfriend.
Outside the store, he yelled at her for parking in a handicapped space without a permit.
So he was the do-gooder who was going to virtue signal by telling these people to get out of the handicapped spot.
And instead of just walking by and saying, you know, Miss, do you mind moving this?
You're in a handicapped spot.
First of all, there are a thousand spaces open in the parking lot, like it's in the video.
So it's bad to park in a handicapped spot, but it does not justify what happens next.
Michael Drezka tells this lady to get out of the handicapped spot, and then it turns into a shouting match.
Her boyfriend comes out of the store, And it appears that this guy's yelling at his girlfriend, and so he pushes the guy down.
And then what happens next is that the guy pulls out a gun, points it at the guy who just pushed him down, and the person who pushed him down, McGlockton, he starts to back off a little bit, and then Drezhka shoots the guy in the chest and kills him.
So here's what the video looks like.
It's really disturbing.
Britney Jacobs was sitting in her boyfriend's idling car when, she says, 47-year-old Michael Dredgeka approached to tell her that she illegally parked in a handicapped spot.
You can see McLaughlin walk out of the store, he sees and hears the argument, runs over, and pushes Dredgeka to the ground.
But that's when the irreversible happens.
Okay, now this is nuts.
out a gun and shoots McLaughlin.
McLaughlin, holding his chest, runs back into the store, Jacobs and the children watching from the car.
He collapsed in front of my son, and within 30 minutes, he was gone.
Okay, now this is nuts.
Now, the reason it's nuts is because they decided not to charge the shooter.
They decided not to charge the guy.
The reason they decided not to charge the guy is because they invoked the Florida Stand Your Ground law.
That is crazy.
Okay, the Stand Your Ground law does not say that you get to shoot anybody who pushes you down on the floor.
Now, if he had taken out the gun and threatened the guy with it, the guy backed off, and then he'd call the police or something, then we're not talking about the same thing.
He shot a guy to death after being Pushed to the ground.
The Standard Ground Law does not actually say that.
And this is the part that's a little bit crazy, is the fact that the police decided not to charge him based on this mis-invocation of the Standard Ground Law.
Standard Ground Law, there has to be a deadly threat to you, and then you are allowed to stand your ground.
Now, the media routinely mis-covered the Standard Ground Law, so they said that, for example, in the Trayvon Martin case, stand your ground was implicated.
Stand your ground was not implicated in the Trayvon Martin case, because Trayvon Martin was shot in self-defense, according to the jury.
By George Zimmerman.
He was having his head pounded against the ground by, according to witness testimony and forensic evidence, but that the Stand Your Ground law actually was never actually invoked by the defense in that case.
In this case, for the police to invoke Stand Your Ground to say that it's okay for this guy to shoot this other guy, Who's basically backing away when he pulls the gun is just crazy and demonstrates how the police sometimes get it wrong.
I do not understand the logic behind this and I'm having some trouble understanding it, frankly.
Okay, so that brings us to the end of our show.
We'll be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
Hopefully we won't be in a full-fledged trade war by the time that happens, but we'll find out.
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.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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