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Aug. 3, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:04:27

Why Don’t People Trust The Media? | Ep. 595

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Time	Text
	New New York Times editorial board member Sarah Jean keeps her job despite racist tweets.
	Jim Acosta loves that dude some Jim Acosta.
	And President Trump argues with Ivanka over the media.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Oh, man, we have a fun show for you today.
	So many things to talk about.
	But first, I need to remind you that you need to stock up on some precious metals.
	The reality of the world suggests that inflation is a possibility.
	The national debt is a serious problem.
	That's money that we owe other countries.
	It's money that we are going to have to raise through bonds or through taxes that could create inflation on the other end.
	If your entire life savings is tied to the U.S.
	dollar, you have to ask yourself, what is your plan from hyperinflation?
	If the stilts fall out from under the economy, with higher wages, there's an increase in minimum wage across the country, too.
	That could lead to price inflation.
	Import prices are going to skyrocket with trade wars.
	Raw material prices are increasing with tariffs, rising housing prices.
	All of this could lead the government to actually start printing more money, which could lead to a certain level of inflation, meaning that your savings are worth less.
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	Okay.
	So meanwhile, let's talk a little bit about the New York Times.
	So, the New York Times, about a year ago, tried to hire a tech reporter.
	This tech reporter, it turned out, was friends with some rather unsavory people on the internet, and people dug up her old tweets, and then the New York Times fired this person.
	The New York Times, however, has not fired a woman named Sarah Zhang.
	Sarah Zhang is their new tech person on the New York Times editorial board, and she has some pretty bad tweets.
	Now, as a person who's been targeted for old tweets, it is my opinion that old tweets should not end your career as a general rule unless they are a revelation to the person who hired you.
	So, for example, if I had a bunch of tweets 10 years old and somebody had hired me and they didn't know about my old tweets, like they hadn't been public fodder, they hadn't done their research or something, and then it came to light, then firing me would not be the end of the world.
	If, however, they knew what they were getting when they hired me, then they should not fire me over calls to boycott.
	They should not fire me just on a principled level over them making a bad decision.
	Like the fault of the New York Times here is the fault of the New York Times.
	It's not Sarah Zhang's fault.
	She tweeted this stuff in the past four years and the New York Times just didn't do its research.
	Or if they did do their research, they obviously didn't care.
	So that's a little bit different from, for example, the Roseanne Barr situation, where ABC fully knew that Roseanne Barr was kind of a crazy person, but she then tweeted something new, and that new thing was something that, it's new information, Disney didn't have it when they decided to hire Roseanne, ABC didn't have it when they decided to hire Roseanne, and so that sort of changes the equation.
	Well, Sarah Jean, all this stuff has been known, and here's some of the stuff that she tweeted, and I'll explain why this matters.
	She tweeted, oh man, it's kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.
	And she also tweeted this.
	She's just a delightful, delightful person.
	And it's not just restricted to that.
	There's some old tweets that are now surfacing about cops where she tweeted stuff like, oh, boy, I sure would fight the cops with my guns.
	I wonder why black people haven't thought of doing that.
	Huh.
	And let me know when a cop gets killed by a rock or a Molotov cocktail or a stray shard of glass from a precious, precious window.
	And says when homeless people can beat cops senseless and suffer an area of repercussion, then let's talk about accountability going both ways.
	So, she's an execrable human, right?
	I mean, she seems like a bad person.
	These are not good tweets.
	But the New York Times knew all this when they hired her.
	So, the New York Times came out and they defended her, which tells you something about the New York Times.
	I think it is good, by the way, that employers are not jumping to firing people based on social media mobbing.
	This lady is a bad lady, but I don't think that it is a good thing as a general rule for employers to start firing people based on the social media mob getting angry.
	We've seen this from the left too many times to think that it's any better when it comes from the right.
	It's just not a good idea to have blowback on Twitter drive whether somebody can hold a job or not as a general rule.
	The New York Times released a statement, and their statement is more telling about the New York Times than anything else.
	Because as I say, a year ago, the New York Times fired somebody for doing exactly what Sarah Zhang did, except that she was perceived to be on the right.
	Sarah Zhang is perceived to be on the left, so she gets to keep her job.
	Here's what the New York Times said.
	said.
	They said, we hired Sarah Zhang because of the exceptional work she has done covering the internet and technology at a range of respected publications.
	Her journalism and the fact that she is a young Asian woman have made her a subject of frequent online harassment.
	For a period of time, she responded to that harassment by imitating the rhetoric of her accusers.
	Okay, this is legitimately the worst excuse I have ever heard for why you would treat racist stuff.
	The That's really... People were tweeting racist stuff at me, so in imitation of them, I decided to tweet racist stuff back at them.
	Yeah, that's good.
	Good excuse.
	Well done, guys.
	And then, the New York Times says, she now sees that this approach only served to feed the vitriol that we too often see on social media.
	She regrets it and the Times does not condone it.
	We had candid conversations with Sarah as part of our thorough vetting process, which included a review of her social media history.
	She understands that this type of rhetoric is not acceptable at The Times, and we are confident she will be an important voice for the editorial board moving forward.
	So, several things can be true here at once.
	One, I don't think The New York Times should fire this lady.
	They broke it.
	They bought it.
	They bought it.
	They knew what she was when they hired her.
	They should bear the consequences.
	If you choose not to subscribe to The New York Times, You have every right to do that, and they should bear the consequences of their own decision-making.
	Two, does the New York Times have a double standard?
	You bet your ass they have a double standard.
	You bet your life they have a double standard.
	There is no question the New York Times has an insane double standard.
	Not only does the New York Times have an insane double standard, Sarah Zhang has an insane double standard, because it turns out Sarah Zhang loves social media mobbing.
	She's been part of it.
	Tim Hunt, you'll recall, is a former honorary professor with the University College London School of Life and Medical Sciences.
	He's a Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine, as well as recipient of the Royal Medal.
	He made a joke one time in a speech about how young women and young men should work in laboratories together because they tend to fall in love.
	How do you know this was a joke?
	Because he was specifically referencing the fact that he married his lab assistant.
	Right?
	He is a scientist in her own right.
	People took this as, well, he's saying women shouldn't be in the laboratory, which is weird since his wife is actually a very highfalutin scientist in her own right.
	He was basically mobbed out of a job.
	He had to resign his job.
	He was punished by all of the academies of which he was a part.
	And here's what Sarah Zhang tweeted at the time.
	So she's really a delight.
	And then, there was Zhang's reaction to the firing of Benny Johnson, who now works over at the Daily Caller.
	A long time ago, Benny was caught up in a sort of plagiarism accusation.
	And Sarah Zhang tweeted out, lots of talented people never make mistakes and they still have trouble finding jobs.
	F Benny Johnson's redemption.
	Well, I mean, I think that we could probably apply that same logic to Sarah Zhang.
	And then she said this about Justine Sackler.
	You remember Justine Sackler?
	The woman PR executive who was on a plane and she was traveling to Africa and she tweeted something about getting AIDS.
	And by the time she landed, her life had basically been destroyed.
	She tweeted this bad joke about AIDS and suddenly she was out of a job.
	No one would hire her.
	She had been made a pariah all across the media.
	I mean, it was really insane.
	People were tweeting, has Justine landed yet?
	And this became a top trending Twitter hashtag because virtue signaling on Twitter is extraordinarily strong.
	Here's what Sarah Zhang tweeted about that.
	What I'm getting at is that what happened to Sacco was not that bad.
	And white America's obsession with her is deeply telling.
	So that wasn't bad either.
	It turns out that when Barry Weiss, a New York Times columnist, was mobbed for having suggested that the right was being mistreated online, Sarah Zhang was very upset about that.
	She says, Is there anything more tedious than media navel gazing over outrage mobs?
	Start paying attention to what's happening outside your Ivy League, New York City-centric circles.
	Look at how the pylons operate in other contexts and get some bleep perspective.
	She did a bad tweet.
	She got engagement for it, and then she didn't want to engage back.
	What exactly was Barry Weiss's bad tweet?
	Her bad tweet was, she said, immigrants get the job done, when she was talking about the daughter of an immigrant who went to the Olympics in ice skating.
	That was her bad tweet.
	And Sarah Jean said she deserved everything she got.
	The discourse is not being harmed because of people questioning a bad ice skating tweet.
	The discourse started getting harmed with, say, the online death threats, etc.
	Once you've seen enough of these, you can also see that people tweeting at Barry Weiss is not a big deal.
	LOL.
	Brendan Eich.
	I mean, it's over and over.
	She's been part of these social media mobs, urging them on, cheering them.
	So there is a fair bit of karmic justice to Sarah Zhang now being social media mobbed.
	Now, do I think, again, for the 11th time in the segment, do I think That employers should start firing people based on social media mobbing?
	I do not.
	I think it's a mistake.
	I think employers should only fire employees if they are feeling actual business blowback from the decisions of those employees made while in the employ of those employers.
	But this is not that.
	So I don't think Sarah Zhang should be fired.
	I think she should sit on the New York Times editorial board and we should continue to characterize the New York Times as a terrible piece of garbage newspaper.
	I think that seems to me the fairest outcome here.
	That she should have to work there after having criticized the New York Times for years, by the way, as being too right-wing.
	She should have to work there and then we can all sit here and laugh at the New York Times for being stupid enough to hire somebody like Sarah Zhang.
	By the way, I think it is worthwhile noting that Sarah Zhang, the real reason she wasn't fired is not because the New York Times has suddenly discovered the evils of social media mobbing.
	That is not why she was not fired.
	Okay?
	She was not fired because the New York Times agrees with her.
	She was not fired because the New York Times agrees with her take on white America.
	They are a bunch of white, upper-crust New York elitists who believe that anyone who is not white in the United States is inherently under the boot of Uncle Sam.
	And therefore, when Sarah Jean tweets racist stuff about white people, it's because white people deserve it.
	How do I know this?
	Because there are people on the left who say this sort of stuff openly.
	So there's an idiot named Zach Beauchamp.
	And I say idiot advisedly.
	I think it may be too kind a word for him.
	He's a columnist over at Vox.com.
	Which is the most icily of the commentariat.
	It's a hive of villainy and scum.
	And I say that having actual friends who work there.
	Little story.
	Okay, little story.
	After Zach Beauchamp wrote an article two weeks ago suggesting that Mark Duplass, this independent director, we talked about it on the show, he had tweeted something nice about me.
	And then after he was social media mobbed, he deleted the nice tweet about me and then issued a public apology for ever having said anything nice about me.
	Zach Beauchamp wrote a piece for Vox.com suggesting that I completely deserved it, and Mark Duplass was exactly right because I'm a horrible, horrible human being.
	So, Mark Duplass should have been social media mobbed, and he should have deleted the tweet, and all the rest of this stuff.
	I got letters from two different Vox writers who would not come out publicly and say so, saying Zach Beauchamp is an idiot, and you are not a bad person because I know you and we talk frequently.
	In any case.
	Zach Beauchamp tweets this out yesterday, right?
	Here's what he tweets out.
	A lot of people on the internet today confusing the expressive way anti-racist and minorities talk about white people, unquote, with actual race-based hatred for some unfathomable reason.
	So he looks at those tweets from tweets that say things like, and I quote, dumbass effing white people marking up the Internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.
	And he says that this is actually the expressive way anti-racists and minorities talk about white people.
	And this should never be confused with actual race based hatred.
	It would be unfathomable for you to actually equate these two things.
	Like when you say dumbass effing white people, how could I not read that as, oh, that's just the expressive way that Asian people talk.
	Which is racist, you idiot.
	Okay, Zach Beauchamp, he's just the worst.
	He's just the worst.
	And then David Yoakim.
	Who is, I guess, a writer for the ex-New York Times writer.
	He tweets out, No, it isn't.
	No, it isn't.
	Racism can be used by the powerful to keep down the powerless, but racism is not about the powerful keeping down the powerless.
	Racism is about race-based hatred.
	That is the actual definition.
	We generally are the powerful, meaning we white people.
	White people isn't a slur.
	Oh, really?
	It's not a slur?
	Why don't you say black people and then make a giant generalization about black people, like they're dumbass effing black people.
	Why don't you say something awful, awful, terrible like that?
	And see how that goes for you, David Joachim.
	And then he says, the f-word for gay people and the n-word are slurs because they subordinate.
	You know, as opposed to saying, dumb ass f-ing white people.
	That's not subordinating white people in any way.
	It says, your moral equivalence is nonsense.
	Reverse racism isn't a thing.
	You're right.
	Reverse racism isn't a thing.
	It's just called racism.
	It's just called racism.
	It's not reverse racism.
	It's just called racism.
	But this is an actual perspective.
	On the left.
	An actual perspective on the left suggests that racism from the powerful is the only thing that matters.
	There is no such thing as racism in any other context.
	Right?
	The left tends to see things in this Marxist universe where power relations are the entirety of what we should be talking about every day.
	Relations between the more powerful groups and the less powerful groups.
	And the less powerful groups are less powerful because those less powerful groups have been put upon by the more powerful groups.
	As I always say, the Marxist view of life is that if you have two people in a room, one person has five bucks, one person has one buck, it must be that the person with five dollars somehow subordinated the person with one dollar.
	That is not true in a free country, but this is how the left sees things.
	So, if white people are racist, then their racism is really just a tool of their power.
	But if black people are racist, or Asian people are racist, or Mexicans are racist, or Jews are racist, then this means that they are just fighting back against the man.
	They're just fighting back against the man and they are using the tools at their disposal to fight back against this power relationship.
	This is how you end up with this foolishness of intersectionality suggesting that certain opinions are worth more than others based on the color of the skin of the person who's making a particular argument.
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	Okay, so final note on this tendency of the left to be okay with racism so long as it's not coming from white people.
	I was talking with a leftist friend who happens to work with an aforementioned publication.
	We were talking about intersectionality and she's saying all intersectionality really is is context.
	It's just trying to suggest that every interaction has a context in which group characteristics play a part.
	And I said, well, I'm not sure, number one, that every interaction does have that context.
	And second of all, if there is a context in which, for example, black people suffer more from racism than white people, if that's true, I think that if we're talking about how much that impacts disparities between group outcome, I think that may account for a small percentage of the disparity between group outcome, maybe 15-20%.
	But intersectional theorists think it's 90%.
	And normal Democrats think that it's 60%.
	And that's why they're constantly railing about societal injustice and not taking into account that people should just not act like jerks.
	And this is true of Sarah Zhang.
	People on the left look at Sarah Zhang and say, she's Asian.
	She must've been put upon.
	She went to Harvard Law School.
	If we're going to talk about group characteristics, the highest earning group in the United States are Asian Americans.
	White Americans earn 76 cents on the dollar for every dollar earned by an Asian household.
	White American households earn less on average than Asian American households.
	But she is one of the put-upon groups.
	Why?
	Because intersectional theory really is a guise for power relations.
	Because the left sees all race-based discussion as a way to Reverse power relationships?
	They use intersectionality as a club in order to beat up people who are not of a minority group.
	And that's why Sarah Zhang still has a job today.
	If she were on the right, she would not have a job.
	If she were white, she would not have a job.
	She is Asian and she is on the left, therefore she has a job today at the New York Times, which tells you a fair bit about how awful the New York Times actually is, which is why I say they should continue to employ her so we can mock them for their awfulness on a routine basis.
	Okay, meanwhile, speaking of awfulness in the media, yesterday, Jim Acosta, was doing his job at the White House, which is basically to show up on camera and show his bouffant to the world.
	And Jim Acosta, as I've said many times in the past, Jim Acosta, CNN's White House correspondent, get you somebody who loves you like Jim Acosta loves Jim Acosta.
	That dude loves him some Jim Acosta.
	I mean, If we could retell the modern myth of narcissists, Jim Acosta would be in the starring role.
	So, Jim Acosta gets into it with Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
	Why?
	Because President Trump has done his routine again where he calls the press the enemy of the people.
	Now, as I have said approximately 1,273,322 times on the show, I don't think the media are the enemy of the people.
	I think this is a silly line from the President.
	I think the media lie a fair bit.
	I think, more importantly, the media Unconsciously bias their stories in leftward directions a fair bit.
	I think that that is, I think you have to double check the media's work on a routine basis and try and extricate, try and separate the opinion from the fact in their news stories.
	I think that's your job as a consumer of news.
	So I am fully aware of media bias.
	I've ripped about media bias many times on the air with CNN, right?
	I'm the guy who went on CNN and during the last Gaza war suggested that if Hamas could have a news outlet, it would look exactly like CNN.
	I'm not shy about saying to various hosts on various networks that their networks are biased.
	I said this, I remember, to Martin Bashir before he lost his job at MSNBC, that MSNBC is a left-wing network, and that they bias their news that way.
	And so, President Trump isn't wrong about that, but when he says enemy of the people, not my favorite term, because it does have certain connotations that are just not correct, okay?
	They're not the enemy of the people, they are just biased sources for a truth they think they are purveying when they purport to be objective.
	In any case, Jim Acosta has now made a pretty solid living off of acting like he is victimized by the American people who don't trust him.
	Now, the reason we don't trust Jim Acosta is not because Trump said enemy of the people.
	This is such a left-wing myth that the right wing, we actually loved the media until President Trump came around.
	Then Trump came around, he said mean stuff about the media.
	And then we were all like, oh man, those guys do suck.
	In like 2001, I think, Bernard Goldberg wrote a book called Bias about bias in the media.
	It was a number one New York Times bestseller because everyone on the right has hated the media for decades.
	Because the media are wildly biased and always have been, certainly as long as I've been alive.
	Going back even further than that, when you had Walter Cronkite, who was a leftist, and Edward Murrow, who was a leftist, as the quote-unquote trusted voices of the American news media.
	So the media has been biased for literally generations in the United States.
	It's not that Trump Made us hate the media.
	It's that we hated the media and then Trump took advantage of the fact that we hated the media.
	That's exactly what happened in election 2016.
	How do I know this?
	Because in election 2012, Newt Gingrich jumped to a presidential lead, specifically by smacking around John Harwood in the middle of a presidential debate.
	He said, you guys are the biased media, you're awful.
	And everyone, yeah, that guy should be president.
	Really, it's not unique to Trump.
	In any case, Jim Acosta now makes a living going around pretending that history started in the last 15 minutes and that now the right hates the media and we don't like Jim Acosta, not because Jim Acosta is bad at his job, which he is, spoiler alert, but also that we really hate the media because Donald Trump is a big old meanie.
	So he goes to the White House and he decides this is going to be his Sam Donaldson moment.
	He's going to sit there and he's going to grill Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, over whether the media are the enemies of the people.
	Now, before I show you the clip, before I play for you the clip, Remember what Sarah Huckabee Sanders' job is.
	Her job is not to express the opinions of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
	That is specifically not her opinion.
	This is why somebody from the White House once asked me, would I be interested in working for the White House press office, which is hilarious.
	And my answer was, of course, no, because I prefer to express my own opinion, not the opinion of the president.
	Her job is to express the president's opinion.
	It is not her job to express her own opinion, or Jim Acosta's opinion, or anybody else's opinion.
	And if she did that, she would not be doing her job.
	Jim Acosta suggests to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I need you, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to tell me that the media are not the enemy of the people.
	But that's not her job.
	And Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I think, clocks him pretty good.
	He has this coming.
	You did not say, in the course of those remarks that you just made, that the press is not the enemy of the people.
	For the sake of this room, the people who are in this room, this democracy, this country, all the people around the world are watching what you're saying, Sarah.
	And the White House, for the United States of America, the President of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the people.
	His own daughter acknowledges that, and all I'm asking you to do, Sarah, is to acknowledge that right now and right here.
	I appreciate your passion.
	I share it.
	I've addressed this question.
	I've addressed my personal feelings.
	I'm here to speak on behalf of the president.
	He's made his comments clear.
	OK, and she's exactly right.
	That is, in fact, her job.
	Her job is not to reflect what Jim Acosta wants to say or what Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants to say.
	Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not an elected official.
	She works at the pleasure of the president of the United States.
	End of story.
	Now, do I like what Trump says?
	No!
	Again, I would bet you money that if you got Sarah Huckabee Sanders on the phone off the record right now, she would tell you the same thing.
	I'll bet you that she doesn't like that line either.
	But, does that matter?
	No, because that's not her job.
	And the whole point, and Acosta knows that's not her job, and his whole point here is to somehow shame Sarah Huckabee Sanders as an individual human being.
	If he wants to go out and yell this question to Trump, go and yell it at Trump.
	You want to grill Sarah Huckabee Sanders over Trump's perspective?
	Do that!
	But to make Sarah Huckabee Sanders the enemy here is pretty absurd.
	And Sarah Huckabee Sanders has another response that is just as good.
	Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she then goes off on CNN.
	I'm going to play that for you in just a second.
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	Okay, so, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is grilled by Jim Acosta, who wants, he wants her to admit right here, right now, the press are not the enemy of the people!
	Sarah, tell me!
	Again.
	Are the press the enemy of the people?
	No.
	Is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders' job to express her own opinion?
	No.
	And then, Sarah Huckabee Sanders basically wheels around with a George Foreman-like punch and knocks Jim Acosta through the wall, mentioning the fact that, you know, while you talk about how the press are the victims of the President of the United States, you guys have been pretty awful to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
	Here's Sarah Huckabee Sanders explaining.
	Repeatedly, repeatedly, the media resorts to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger.
	The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network, said I should be harassed as a life sentence, that I should be choked.
	ICE officials are not welcomed in their place of worship and personal information is shared on the internet.
	When I was hosted by the Correspondents Association, of which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender.
	In fact, as I know, as far as I know, I'm the first press secretary in the history of the United States that's required Secret Service protection.
	The media continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the president and everyone in this administration.
	And certainly we have a role to play, but the media has a role to play for the discourse in this country as well.
	That is 100% true, right?
	What she said there is 197% true, right?
	What she said there is 197% true.
	It is just as pure as Omega-3 Omex Fishwell.
	It is absolutely pure stuff.
	It is 100% pure.
	OK, what she says there, that the media have been complicit in the failures of trust and the battle between the media and President Trump, is exactly right.
	And then, so what does Jim Acosta do with this information?
	Jim Acosta, who loves him some Jim Acosta.
	What does he do with this information where he has been told, you know, you guys might want to stop.
	Creating a situation where I need security by Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
	You might want to create a situation where you treat people fairly and then maybe there won't be so many people who are willing to treat you unfairly.
	Maybe we all ought to go weapons down.
	So what does Jim Acosta do?
	He goes on TV and he preens.
	He goes on CNN and he preens, he says, we should make bumper stickers!
	Because he's a reporter, guys, an objective news reporter.
	This is some serious journalisming you are seeing right here from Jim Acosta.
	He goes on CNN, we should make bumper stickers, we should rally, we should get out there in front of the White House.
	Journalists unite!
	And then Jim Acosta reveals the fact that he is just as bad at inventing chants as he is at journalisming.
	Here he is explaining his bumper stickers.
	I think maybe we should make some bumper stickers, make some buttons.
	Maybe we should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue like these folks who chant CNN sucks and fake news.
	Maybe we should go out, all journalists should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue and chant we're not the enemy of the people.
	That's a bad chant.
	That's a bad chant.
	Also, if you really, that'll definitely work, Jim.
	That will definitely work.
	We don't trust you at all.
	So I think what you should really do, and we don't trust you in large part because of your disparate treatment of Democrats and Republicans.
	So I think what you really should do is you should probably go out in front of the White House where a Republican resides, and then you should chant, you're not the enemy of the people, in opposition to Donald Trump supporters.
	Absolutely, we'll respect you more then.
	You shouldn't do better in terms of your journalisming.
	You shouldn't actually try to be more objective.
	You shouldn't try to worship yourself a little bit less, Jim Acosta.
	Instead, what you should do is you should go out there and chant about how awesome you are.
	That'll probably fix all the things.
	Okay, this is just Jim Acosta catering to his base.
	Now again, President Trump caters to his base too.
	The difference is what their jobs are.
	President Trump is a politician.
	President Trump says a lot of things to cater to his base that I don't agree with and that I find abhorrent in many cases.
	But he is a politician catering to a base.
	Jim Acosta's job is not to cater to his base.
	Jim Acosta's job is to ask questions of administrations that actually have content.
	His job is not to be an activist.
	If he wants to be an activist, there are plenty of places for him to do that.
	If he wants to do opinion journalism, Then he should just say, I'm an opinion journalist.
	I, Ben Shapiro, am an opinion journalist, right?
	I cover the news and I have an opinion.
	And you all know where I stand.
	I'm not hiding the ball.
	The reason people don't trust Jim Acosta is not because he's left wing.
	The reason people don't trust Jim Acosta is because he proclaims he is not left wing while acting exactly like a correspondent for the Daily Kos.
	Okay, and then he continues along these lines.
	He says, I'm just, I'm so tired of this.
	Who cares whether you're tired of this, Jim Acosta?
	Why are you the story?
	Why is Jim Acosta the story?
	I don't understand.
	It doesn't make any sense to me.
	I'm tired of this.
	Honestly, Brooke, I'm tired of this.
	It is not right.
	It is not fair.
	It is not just.
	It is un-American.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Like, get off your Aaron Sorkin West Wing script now, Jim.
	And why don't you actually try to do your job?
	It's un-American.
	I'm so tired of this.
	Yeah, I'm sure you have it rough, Jim.
	I'm sure things are real rough for you.
	Cumming is a guy who needed 600 police officers to protect him when he wanted to just speak at Berkeley.
	I'm sure it's real rough for you that the president calls you mean names.
	Ooh.
	Again, should the president call you those mean names?
	No.
	But are we going to pretend that this is like the end of the world that the president says this stuff?
	I'm not going to pretend that either, because it just, come on, come on.
	And here's the thing.
	The double standard is just, it's glaring, and that's why people don't trust members of the media.
	So, another example.
	There was a BBC host yesterday who was interviewing Sean Spicer.
	Now, Sean Spicer was not a good White House press secretary.
	Right, Sean Spicer always looked like he was dying a little bit behind his eyes.
	Like, if you could look through into Sean Spicer's soul, every time he had to get up there and talk about crowd size and act all angry, you could see that there was a part of Sean Spicer that wanted to crawl into a hole and just plot.
	Okay, but Sean Spicer, that said, Sean Spicer did the same job that Jake Harney did when he was at the White House, which is to lie for the president.
	Let's be honest about what the White House press secretary does.
	The job of the White House press secretary is to lie for the president of the United States.
	This has been true as long as I have been alive, basically.
	There are very few press secretaries who don't do it.
	I really do think that members of the Bush administration did it less.
	But Jake Harney used to get up there every day and say, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, knowing full well that wasn't true.
	Robert Gibbs used to do the exact same thing.
	I confronted Robert Gibbs about this in 2012 at the DNC, I remember.
	You know, so anyway, Sean Spicer goes on BBC and the BBC correspondent says, It only applies to Sean Spicer because it's brand new.
	It is now news to members of the BBC, apparently, that White House press secretaries fib on behalf of the presidents whom they serve.
	It only applies to Sean Spicer because it's brand new.
	The world started turning yesterday.
	You joked about it when you presented the Emmy Awards, but it wasn't a joke.
	It was the start of the most corrosive culture.
	You played with the truth.
	You led us down a dangerous path.
	You have corrupted discourse for the entire world by going along with these lies.
	Solid journalism in there.
	Instead of just asking a question like, Sean Spicer, did you mean it when you said that the president had the largest inaugural crowd?
	There are a thousand ways to pin people to the wall.
	I do it for a living.
	It's not difficult.
	There are a thousand ways you could pin him to the wall on dishonesty, but saying that he corrupted the entire discourse is so free of all context in the American political system that it's just absurd.
	This is absurd!
	You're right.
	It wasn't Bill Clinton stooping interns in the Oval Office and lying about it to the public that corrupted the political discourse.
	It wasn't that.
	It wasn't Joe Biden going out there and saying that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people back in chains.
	That didn't corrupt the political discourse in any way.
	It wasn't Barack Obama lying repeatedly about both immigration and healthcare.
	That didn't corrupt the discourse in any way at all.
	For that matter, it wasn't JFK shtupping 18-year-old interns in the White House.
	That didn't corrupt America in any way.
	It didn't corrupt America in any way when Watergate happened.
	American politics was clean up to the point when Trump took office.
	Did you know this?
	Breaking news!
	American politics was awesome, clean, and pure as the driven snow until Donald Trump took office, at which point evil people like Sean Spicer came in and sullied up the place.
	They just got mud all over the curtains.
	You're wondering why we don't trust the media?
	This is why we don't trust the media.
	OK, now, with that said, in a second, I want to talk about, you know, President Trump's impact on the party, because I don't think it's been entirely good on these things.
	I think that we can be honest and still destroy the media.
	I don't think you have to be dishonest to destroy the media.
	And I also don't think that you have to say things that are over the top in order to destroy the media.
	At least the media's dishonesty.
	I don't think that our goal should be to quote unquote destroy the media as much as it should be to club them back into covering things objectively or at least announcing their own political allegiances.
	We'll get into that in just one second.
	But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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	Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the impact that President Trump has had on the parties.
	So I've talked about why does the media get all of this deeply, deeply wrong.
	Let's now talk about the fact that the president's rhetoric undercuts a lot of the good things that other Republicans are trying to do.
	I want to be honest about what I think the president is doing.
	I think that the president's actions, in many cases this administration's actions, are extraordinarily good.
	Judges, regulation, foreign policy.
	I agree with a lot of what the president has done.
	I do.
	But the president's rhetoric with regard to these things undercuts a lot of what Republicans are trying to do.
	Because we have a really good record to run on as conservatives.
	The economy is great.
	There was a new wage report out today that is terrific for the president.
	Why that isn't the top of the news cycle?
	Well, because every day is a new news cycle driven by the president's Twitter account or personal animus.
	So the latest example of this is that the RNC, the Republican National Committee, is now warning that candidates should stay away from the Koch brothers.
	She delivered her message via a memo.
	She has some groups who claim to support conservatives forego their commitment when they decide their business interests are more important than those of the country or the party.
	This is unacceptable.
	And then she says she's upset because the Kochs have developed their own data program rivaling that of the RNCs.
	She says, from the beginning, the RNC had concerns about any outside entity building a data operation to compete with ours because we knew they could potentially weaponize that data against Republicans if their business interests conflicted with electing Republicans.
	Sadly, our concerns were recently proven true.
	That is not the case.
	This is a slander against the Kochs.
	And that is driven specifically because Trump doesn't like the Koch brothers.
	He's mad at them because they are pro-legal immigration, particularly they're kind of open borders libertarian on a lot of these issues.
	And so Trump is very angry at them for that.
	And so he's slandering the Kochs.
	The Kochs are worth $80 billion.
	$80 billion with a B. Do you really think that the reason that they aren't opposing Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota is because they have to protect their business interests?
	Or maybe it's because they've been lifelong libertarians who have held these positions for legitimately decades.
	And they've funded a wide variety of projects, libertarian projects, ranging from the Cato Institute to other foundations on the right and backed a variety of candidates.
	And this sort of RNC sudden animus against the Koch brothers is really dishonest.
	And the implication that they are doing this for corrupt, sleazy business reasons is quite absurd.
	And that's just a reflection of the fact that the president is angry at the Koch brothers.
	The Republican Party should not become a tool of the president's id.
	When the president doesn't like something, that doesn't mean that it's bad.
	Sometimes it just means that the president is wrong.
	That happens.
	That happens from time to time.
	Another example of this is Ivanka yesterday.
	Ivanka Trump, who very often is sort of the moderate face of the administration, she was asked about the president's enemy of the people talk, and here's what Ivanka Trump had to say.
	Sorry?
	Do you think the media is the enemy of the people?
	No, I do not.
	That's not a view that's shared in your family.
	Are you looking for me to elaborate?
	No, I don't.
	I have some sensitivity around why people have concerns and gripe, especially when they're Okay, so that is an actually mature approach to the subject of the press.
	And President Trump immediately responded by attempting to basically take that comment from Ivanka Trump and turn it into, yeah, she actually thinks that the press is the enemy of the people.
	So here's what Trump tweeted out.
	I tweet out, they asked my daughter Ivanka whether or not the media is the enemy of the people.
	She correctly said no.
	It is the fake news, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people.
	Okay.
	All right.
	So, you know, is this is this good stuff?
	Is this good for the future of conservatism?
	No, this is not good for the future of conservatism.
	We should all be angry when the media bias their case.
	We should all be angry when they are not objective.
	But the president's kind of blunderbuss language when it comes to the media is not useful.
	And the fact that he is trying to cudgel Ivanka Trump into now, she really does believe that the fake news are the enemy of the people.
	See, in order to understand why this tweet is so funny, you have to understand that Trump thinks that virtually all media that are against him are fake news.
	So Ivanka Trump says, if you ask Ivanka Trump, do you think the fake news is fake news?
	She'd say, no, I think that there's news that is biased.
	I think that, like, I've met with Ivanka Trump.
	I know Ivanka Trump.
	I do not think that Ivanka Trump is somebody who is sitting around going fake news all day.
	And she's been targeted, by the way, much more unfairly than President Trump.
	You want to talk about people who have been absolutely badgered by the media for no reason whatsoever?
	Ivanka Trump is at the top of that list, right?
	Ivanka Trump got blasted by the media for having the gall to take an Instagram photo with her own children in the middle of the immigration debate.
	And then it became, she's out of touch.
	She's cruel.
	How dare she be with her kids when other parents are separated from their kids?
	Ivanka, by the way, opposed that separation policy.
	So it's...
	You know, she has more reason, at least every reason that President Trump has, to be angry with the media.
	When President Trump, he does differ from Ivanka on this topic, but the idea that we're supposed to follow Trump down every rabbit hole, I just, I find it unconvincing.
	Unconvincing at best.
	Specifically because it's distracting from the mission, which is to get things done.
	Right?
	Trump says he wants to get things done.
	Okay, fine, so get things done.
	Now, Rudy Giuliani was asked about 2018, and here was his take on what 2018 election is going to be about.
	He's framing this midterm election in do-or-die terms for the Trump White House.
	But this election is going to be about impeachment or no impeachment.
	OK, so if you really think that that's going to get people out to the polls, if you think that 2018 should be a referendum on whether to impeach President Trump or not, you're missing the fact that what it really should be is a referendum on President Trump's record.
	It should be a referendum on the fact that the economy is awesome.
	It should be a referendum on the fact that Iran has now been contained in a more superior way than it was when Obama was letting them out of the box to destroy the Middle East.
	It should be a referendum on President Trump's regulatory policy.
	It should be a referendum on all of the areas where the Trump administration has done well and the areas where they've done poorly.
	Instead, by focusing in on Trump and making Trump the center of the political universe, what you have done is turned Republican politics into a black hole of suck in which anything Trump does that is bad allows the media to ramp things up to 11, and it's not going to be good for Republicans come the election of 2018.
	We should always be arguing principles, issues, and the stuff that works.
	And yes, that includes fighting the cultural battles that matter.
	But it doesn't include the president's personal animus for the Koch brothers or his sudden enjoyment of the phrase enemy of the people.
	Okay, in just a second.
	Well, let's do some mailbag.
	You know, let's do some mailbag.
	So it's a Friday, you sent in your letters, and now we get to answer them.
	Well, I mean, usually I go to my yacht, and then I smoke as many expensive cigars as I can, lighting $100 bills on fire, and then I cut a music video with Jay-Z.
	That's usually how I stay grounded after work.
	In reality, I have two kids under five.
	They run around, and they bother people, and they're wonderful, and I have a wife, and I have things I need to do at home, and I have a religious obligation that I fulfill as much as I can every day.
	And so, I don't find it particularly hard to stay grounded, because life grounds you if you are willing to let it.
	But you have to be willing to let it ground you.
	Jacob says, With regard to your stance on pre-existing conditions, how are people like me, having had a disability since my mom was in a car accident and five months pregnant with me, afford necessary medical equipment?
	Thanks, Jake.
	Well, my take is that this is where private charity really should play a significant role.
	I mean, if you were in my Jewish community, when in my community, I really believe in churches and synagogues and community support systems.
	If there are people in my community who have a problem, typically they go to the rabbi of the community.
	The rabbi then makes an appeal to the people of the shul, and then everybody sort of pitches in to help out.
	The American people are extraordinarily generous, but suggesting that insurance companies should not be insurance companies is silly.
	It's not an insurance company if they are covering something that has already happened.
	An insurance policy is taken out.
	This is just definitional.
	An insurance policy is taken out against something that could happen in the future but has not yet happened.
	You can't burn down your house and then buy a fire insurance policy.
	That's not the way it works because then you're paying in five bucks for a five million dollar payout.
	You can't do that.
	You bankrupt the insurance company.
	That's not insurance.
	That said, the best way health insurance should actually run seriously is that people should be purchasing health insurance on their own.
	We should end the employer-based health insurance system.
	Your mom should have been able to Not have to have her health insurance linked to her company.
	She should have been paying for her health insurance as she went along.
	You should be part of a group health insurance program that is formed with your religious community.
	There are group co-ops that are exactly like this.
	And that's the way that we should fix this system.
	Not with suggesting insurance companies ought to not be insurance companies.
	So, I love ragtime music.
	I think ragtime music is a lot of fun.
	And it is sort of a crossover between jazz, it's very early jazz basically, because it's all syncopated rhythm, and classical music.
	It's terrific.
	I love ragtime, which is one of the reasons I love the movie The Sting, because the entire score is Scott Joplin, which actually doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, because it takes place in the 1930s, and ragtime is really from the 1910s and 1920s.
	But it works in context.
	If I wore Disney?
	Okay, so here's what they will do.
	What they will do is they will launch a whole series of movies with Rey and Finn and Poe and all the characters you've come to know and be lukewarm about.
	But what should they do?
	What they really should do is they should pretend none of this ever happened.
	They should pretend the prequels didn't happen.
	They should pretend the sequels didn't happen.
	They should recast Han, they should recast Luke, they should recast Leia, and they should pick up right where Return of the Jedi left off.
	That's what they actually should do, because those are the characters that you like, and they've already shown that they can recast Han.
	Like, Alden Ehrenreich did, I thought, a creditable job as Han Solo in the latest Solo movie, which I actually enjoyed.
	I think that what they should have done is just picked up afterward.
	They shouldn't do prequels for characters that they... The problem with Solo, the reason it didn't do well, is because, spoiler alert, In Force Awakens, they kill Han Solo in the worst, stupidest possible way, thereby destroying my childhood and making him a divorced loser dad murdered by his son.
	Okay, it's a terrible, terrible way for Han Solo to go.
	Then they decide, you know what?
	Let's make a prequel about that guy.
	Well, why would I want to watch a prequel about a guy whose end I already know?
	That's ridiculous and silly.
	It doesn't make any sense.
	What they should do is they should just get the only good, really, the only good movies in the Star Wars canon are Rogue One, which has very little to do with anything outside of the original trilogy and makes very slight reference to some of the prequels.
	So keep Rogue One, keep the original three movies.
	If you want to keep Solo, fine, I guess.
	Dump everything else, pretend Force Awakens never happened, certainly pretend Last Jedi never happened, and take Kathleen Kennedy's resume and burn it on a funeral pyre.
	Okay, Chelsea says, Dear Benjamin, What does a typical day look like for you religiously as an Orthodox Jew?
	What rituals, traditions do you have to do?
	How strict is your diet?
	Also, with your day so full with work and adhering to the tenets of your religion, how do you find time to control the weather?
	Is there an app on your phone?
	Or is there like an antenna thing under the funny hat?
	Thanks for all you do to teach actual conservative values.
	Well, As far as controlling the weather goes, it really doesn't take a whole hell of a lot of effort.
	I mean, you are talking to a dude who literally sat here and destroyed half the MCU.
	Okay, I didn't do anything.
	I sat here and half the MCU was gone.
	Okay, so controlling the weather is really not a problem for me.
	It's really not that big a deal.
	What's my schedule?
	I get up in the morning, I pray.
	In the afternoon, I pray.
	In the evening, I pray.
	Jews pray three times a day.
	I wish I had more of an opportunity to pray with what you call a minion, which is a group of ten people, which you're supposed to do.
	You're picking the right day to do this.
	We have a rabbi visiting the studio, so I'm going to act a lot more religious than I actually am in my daily life.
	But I keep full kosher, which means I'll only eat at kosher restaurants, or I'll only eat food that is made according to particular standards.
	I can give you the whole spiel on what kashrut is and why it exists and what the restrictions are.
	And I keep Sabbath, which means that from Friday night to Saturday night to one hour past sunset on Saturday night, I don't use any electric devices.
	So I'm not on my phone.
	I'm not tweeting.
	I'm not using my computer.
	Somebody asked earlier, how do I keep grounded?
	One of the ways you keep grounded is you turn off your phone, you turn off your computer and you have Shabbat, right?
	So Sabbath really does keep you grounded in a pretty significant way.
	Joe says, hey, Ben.
	My best friend was hit by a drunk driver in 2015 and has suffered serious injuries that almost ended his life.
	He will forever have physical limitations.
	The person who hit him was on bar cameras drinking excessive amounts of alcohol and blew a .17 an hour after the incident occurred.
	My question is, what are your views on dram shop rules, laws that make bars liable for over-serving?
	Should bars be held responsible for over-serving people who are obviously intoxicated?
	Love the show and thanks.
	So I do have a problem with dram shop rules.
	I think the idea of holding a bar responsible for a patron voluntarily intoxicating themselves beyond the legal limit I think it sets a dangerous precedent.
	It seems to me that that verges on making gun shops liable for somebody coming in, buying a gun, and then shooting somebody.
	I'm not a big fan of dram shop rules.
	The argument against, just to present the counter argument, is that once somebody is intoxicated, they no longer have the power to make independent judgments.
	And so you are basically preying on them by selling them alcohol.
	But in just the same way that our law suggests that you are responsible for first degree murder if you get in the car drunk and hit somebody, you are responsible for getting drunk if you decide to get drunk.
	So I'm not a big fan of holding the bartender liable for any of that.
	I'm a bigger fan of holding the responsible individual, holding responsible the individual who's actually participating in the behavior.
	Yeah, any Californian who has a business or who operates in the state has thought about moving.
	There are a couple reasons why I stay.
	I mean, obviously the weather, which I control.
	Double the sanity.
	Yeah, any Californian who has a business or who operates in the state has thought about moving.
	There are a couple of reasons why I stay.
	I mean, obviously, the weather, which I control.
	Second of all, as an Orthodox Jew, I have to be in a place that has a significant number of kosher restaurants and, more importantly, Jewish schools for my kids.
	And so that limits the number of places I can live.
	I would love to be able to go and buy a huge estate in Montana or something and create my own country.
	That would be great.
	But there are no kosher shops in Montana, I'd have to learn how to slaughter cattle, and that's really not on my agenda.
	So, that means that they're really only—the truth is, the Orthodox Jewish community is centralized in a few places around the United States.
	It's in New York, it's in Dallas, it's in Chicago, it's in L.A.
	L.A.
	is the second biggest Jewish population in the United States, after New York, and so it limits the sort of places I can live, and L.A.
	is better than New York.
	I mean, come on.
	Come on.
	Come on.
	I mean, LA is just way better than New York in every possible way.
	First of all, it's not filled with New Yorkers.
	So there's that.
	Okay, let's see.
	Drew says, Dear Ben, Although I am not a big fan of his, Rousseau said something to the effect that in order for people to properly vote in a democracy, they must be properly educated.
	Therefore, it would be the responsibility of the government to educate the population.
	Even Thomas Jefferson said something to this effect.
	My question is, now that the government has taken on the responsibility of education, wouldn't it be proper for the people to take a test in order to vote?
	Despite the negative historical implications that poll tests have in this country, I feel this would be a good solution to politicians preying on the ignorant.
	I'm torn on this question.
	Obviously, I wish that the American public were more educated, but I think that you'd have to determine what exactly is the standard for those polls, right?
	I mean, would it have to be knowledge of current events?
	I'm not sure why it should have to be knowledge of current events.
	What if you spend your days studying Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero?
	It seems to me you know enough about politics at that point to vote, and you just never read the newspapers.
	Hmm, I don't really see why I shouldn't be able to vote.
	How do you test for that sort of stuff?
	Is it a literacy test?
	Well, you know your own interests without a literacy test.
	So, well, I think the idea is correct, that we should have a more popularly educated group of people voting.
	I'm not sure how you decide what elements go into a poll test that make you eligible to vote in the first place that don't bias the voting population.
	I think it would be difficult to figure that out.
	Well, really, abolishing the IRS is just a byproduct of abolishing the income tax.
	I think the income tax is an awful, awful institution.
	The 16th Amendment should be repealed as soon as humanly possible.
	It's garbage.
	And we should go back to Sales taxes and state taxes.
	And the nice thing about a sales tax, you don't need the IRS to enforce it.
	The nice thing about a sales tax is people just send in the money as a percentage of the sales they rack up.
	And then you don't need the IRS auditing people.
	You still need some agency doing it.
	Maybe you keep the IRS and you call it the IRS, but you cut it down to about five guys, right?
	As opposed to they now have to dig through every receipt that you took a deduction on.
	And now they have to go through and they have to determine what your income was.
	And are you lying about it?
	Like, it's just, it's a mess.
	Okay.
	Sorry.
	Final question here.
	Thomas says, Hello, Mr. Shapiro.
	My daughter recently turned seven and has expressed an interest in learning to play violin.
	Knowing that you are a masterful violinist, do you have any advice for beginners and for parents with very little experience in music?
	Well, if you're talking about how your kids should learn violin, the Suzuki method really is good for learning at the very beginning.
	I studied Suzuki method for probably, let's see, from the time I was five till the time I was maybe eleven.
	So maybe six or seven years.
	And it is a great way to learn to play the violin.
	And then you find more advanced teachers.
	As your kid gets older, you do have to make your kids practice.
	And this is one of the questions that you see with parents.
	My kid doesn't want to practice, and I don't want to make my kid practice.
	Okay, then your kid won't be good.
	Really, I mean, that's the answer, right?
	I practiced at the beginning, you know, maybe 10, 15 minutes a day.
	It got to the point where when I was really good, I was practicing, you know, maybe three hours a day or more when I was really first rate.
	You know, my daughter is learning to play now.
	She's four and a half, and it's difficult to get her to sit still long enough to practice, but you make her do it, right?
	I mean, and what I say to her when she doesn't want to practice, OK, well, then we're not going to pay for your lessons, right?
	If you don't want to practice, then we're not going to actually expend money to go take you to a lesson.
	you have to, if you want to have your lessons, if you want to learn, then you have to sit here and you have to learn.
	And she's learning to play, right?
	She's already doing this at four and a half.
	So there is an enforcement mechanism.
	You can't let your kid do it.
	We have this whole idea, well, if the kid's not enjoying it, the kid shouldn't do it.
	Then your kid will suck at everything.
	Your kid doesn't enjoy school.
	Just note to mom and dad, your kid doesn't enjoy school, you make them go anyway.
	Because if you think it's important for your kid to learn a musical instrument and be good at it, do it that way.
	Also, I'm not a fan of the, my kid plays 11 instruments, then your kid's terrible at all of them in all likelihood, right?
	In reality, your kid's really only gonna be good at one instrument, maybe two, if your kid is extraordinarily talented.
	Don't do this, oh, but he plays just a little bit of trumpet.
	No, he doesn't.
	He blasts a horrible sound out of a trumpet, and then he goes and makes a horrible sound on the violin.
	He doesn't play trumpet or violin.
	OK, let's do some things I like and then some things that I hate, and then we'll get out of here for the weekend.
	OK, so things I like.
	Speaking of classical musicians and classical training, I took my four and a half year old daughter to the Hollywood Bowl the other night.
	It is a blast.
	If you've never been to the Hollywood Bowl, one of the reasons to live in L.A.
	is to go to the Hollywood Bowl, because it is just it's this beautiful outdoor venue.
	It was like 75 degrees that night with with a breeze.
	And you're watching great musicians play great music.
	In the middle of, basically, a wooded area of Los Angeles.
	It's just fantastic.
	So, my daughter... I was really proud of her.
	She sat through an hour and a half concert of Grieg.
	So she sat through the Pyrrhgian Suite, and she also sat through the Grieg Piano Concerto.
	So, good for her.
	I mean, she's... My daughter's awesome.
	She's really bright and awesome.
	I like her.
	In any case, I don't like you, but I like her.
	In any case, she's, so she, she sat through this, the pianist is a guy named George Lee, and he is just tremendous.
	Okay, so he played the Greek piano concerto.
	Very good performance.
	And then he played an encore.
	And the encore that he played was a riff on Bizet's Carmen by, that was written by Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great pianists of the 20th century.
	And here is a recording of him doing this.
	He's just terrific.
	If you want to, you can check out his recordings.
	I think we won a silver at the International Tchaikovsky Competition.
	He's incredible.
	My dad's a professional pianist.
	So my dad was sitting next to me.
	I was sitting here.
	My wife was sitting here.
	My daughter was sitting here.
	My dad was sitting on the other side.
	And my dad was just, his jaw hit the floor when he saw this guy play.
	He's only 23, I think.
	So here he is playing some Bizet.
	We'll be right back.
	Those thurs he's playing on top are really difficult.
	music So people always ask me why I'm an elitist about music.
	Because I like skill.
	It's the same reason I'm an elitist about sports.
	When I watch basketball, I want to watch the NBA.
	When I watch baseball, I want to watch the MLB.
	I don't want to watch college baseball.
	I don't want to watch college basketball.
	I want to watch it for the best.
	This is why when people say, you know, you're very hard on rap.
	Right.
	If you were able to pick up a microphone one day and be good at something, it didn't require a lot of skill.
	Really, seriously, if you have to, this guy trained, I promise you, he was practicing eight hours a day from the time this kid was probably eight years old, okay?
	That's why he's really good, okay?
	And you have to admire people who actually spend time perfecting a skill.
	This holds true in politics also.
	I get a lot of questions from people.
	How do I get into politics?
	The answer is you read and you read and you read, and then you write and then you write and then you write, and then you do this for lots of years, and then you eventually get good at things, right?
	This is actually how you get good at things.
	You spend an awful lot of time prepping things.
	If there's anything you do, Whether it's popular or whether it's not popular.
	Where it was, oh yeah, I picked up a guitar one day and in three months I was good enough that I could cut CDs and now I'm selling a million records.
	Okay, that means that you're popular.
	It doesn't mean that you've done anything that I think is extraordinarily worthy of praise.
	This is a general rule.
	As a general rule, I think that you ought to have to put in an enormous amount of time to demonstrate this kind of skill.
	I'm not going to pretend that I think that this guy and Taylor Swift are on the same level.
	They ain't.
	Sorry, Sonya.
	They're not, okay?
	Like, Taylor Swift plays a few chords on guitar, and then she writes wordy lyrics that are somewhat charming sometimes.
	That's as much as you're going to get out of me.
	And then...
	And if you're going to compare that or you can compare rap or somebody cannot even rhyme, OK?
	Half the rap I've listened to is people doing near rhymes, which is the easiest garbage in the world.
	Like my daughter can do it.
	She's four and a half.
	That's not to say that those people are not good at what they do.
	It's to say that what they do does not require a ton of skill.
	There are lots of things in life where you can be good at them without a ton of work.
	Playing piano is not one of them.
	Playing violin is not one of them.
	Playing this kind of stuff is not one of them.
	And if you're going to ask me who I admire more, George Lee, who will sell maybe 1-100 the CDs that any of these other artists I've mentioned ever will.
	Do I admire him more or do I admire Taylor Swift more?
	There is no question.
	There's just no question.
	Perfect a skill.
	Get good at it.
	It requires dedication.
	And frankly, stuff that comes hard is better for you as a general rule, as a human being, than stuff that comes really easily.
	Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
	Okay, so I've never heard of this QAnon stuff.
	So I've just been informed of this in the last week.
	The reason I was informed of it is because somebody tweeted something at me on a topic I didn't really know, and they had a blue checkmark.
	And so like an idiot, I sort of retweeted it.
	And then somebody emailed me and they're like, do you believe QAnon?
	I'm like, I don't even know what the hell QAnon is.
	And then I looked up, I was like, ooh, I shouldn't have retweeted that.
	So I un-retweeted it.
	And QAnon, I guess, is this conspiracy theory about the deep state and the workings of a military government.
	And it's all this weird garbage, this weird garbage conspiracy theory.
	I'm not going to pretend to understand it because I haven't spent more than five minutes looking at it because it makes no sense at all.
	It basically suggests that there's a conspiracy led by President Trump where he leads the executive branch in these conspiratorial designs, which makes no sense since he's actually the head of the executive branch.
	He doesn't need a military conspiracy inside the executive.
	He's the head of it.
	And in any case, Chris Cuomo, who is a block of wood.
	Chris Cuomo.
	On CNN, he is looking for a way to tie President Trump to QAnon, to say that President Trump is a conspiracy theorist.
	Now, why you have to stretch to get here is beyond me.
	President Trump has in the past tweeted about how vaccines are a scam, which is silly.
	He's tweeted in the past about how Barack Obama, who made a big deal out of this, was born in Kenya.
	If you want to show that President Trump is fond of conspiracy theories, it's actually not hard at all.
	But instead, Chris Cuomo, in his attempt to peg President Trump with the QAnon nonsense, goes even further and creates his own weird conspiracy theory.
	So watch, because this is hysterically funny.
	Q Anon.
	Q Anonymous.
	Internet conspiracy collective.
	You see them at Trump rallies.
	They have their Seth Rich signs.
	We are Q. That's them.
	Q is the 17th letter in the alphabet.
	Not that that helps make any sense of its significance to them.
	And they see Trump tweeting something like this.
	17 angry Democrats.
	They take value in the number 17.
	A potential sign.
	I hope he didn't use that number for them.
	He hasn't always used the number 17.
	I don't see that as being intentional, but who knows these days.
	Who knows these days?
	Journalism-ing!
	Excellent journalism-ing, Block of Wood Chris Cuomo.
	Excellent, excellent job.
	I see why we trust you.
	It's okay.
	This is a quote.
	From an outlet you may have heard of called CNN.
	Okay?
	February 23rd, 2018.
	Special Counsel Robert Mueller assembled a team of at least 17 lawyers for his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
	Wow.
	I can't believe that CNN is appealing to the QAnon group like that.
	I can't believe that they're actually just shouting out 17 to get those QAnon people all revved up.
	CNN, are they part of the conspiracy too?
	Hmm?
	Hmm?
	This is so stupid!
	Everything is stupid.
	That's got to be our next t-shirt at the Shapiro store.
	Everything is stupid.
	Okay, other things that I hate.
	So, Don Jr.
	did a premiere for Dinesh D'Souza's new film.
	Dinesh has a new film out.
	quote, that it'll sell a million copies because everyone agrees with that proposition.
	Everything is stupid.
	Okay.
	Other things that I hate.
	So Don Jr. did a premiere for Dinesh D'Souza's new film.
	Dinesh has a new film out.
	I can fairly say that I think that at least the marketing campaign for the new film is not my cup of tea, comparing President Trump to President Lincoln.
	That's The trailer for the new film basically suggests that President Lincoln was shot by horrible Democrats who are attempting to reestablish slavery, and now President Trump faces a similar challenge.
	No.
	No.
	I mean, sorry.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	600,000 Americans died while Lincoln was president because they were killing each other.
	Hey, that, that, nope.
	Nope.
	Sorry.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	I mean, and I'm the first to say, I think the media have targeted President Trump.
	I think that the Democratic Party has become incredibly radical.
	I disagree with a lot of the things they say.
	No.
	OK, any poster that mashes up Trump's face with Lincoln's face?
	Automatic no.
	OK, but Donald Trump Jr.
	was at the premiere and he proceeded to... So one of the things Dinesh just talked about...
	is sort of a premise that he took from Jonah Goldberg's liberal fascism about how the Nazis were actually left-wing in a lot of ways.
	Now, to understand the Nazis, what you have to understand is that European politics is not the same as American politics.
	There is no such thing as a European conservative party.
	Classical liberalism, which is the motivating factor behind American conservatism, the idea of small government, God-guaranteed rights that are guaranteed and protected by a limited government that is established only to protect those rights, that is an American idea.
	It is not a European idea.
	Right, John Locke talked about it, but it was really adopted by the American founders and adopted nowhere else.
	When you talk about European right-wing parties, what you're talking about are parties that still embrace nationalized healthcare, that still embrace full-on social safety nets, that really still embrace all sorts of lefty programs in a variety of ways, but just happen to be more nationalist on issues like immigration and culture.
	They're more culturally assimilationist as opposed to multicultural.
	That's sort of the great distinguishing factor.
	And on occasion, they might be in favor of slightly more austerity measures, but there's no such thing as a right-wing party in Europe the same way that conservatives are right-wing in the United States.
	It just doesn't exist in Europe in anywhere near the same way.
	So when you look at the Nazi Party, the Nazi Party was right-wing as compared with the Communist Party in Germany.
	So when the left says the Nazis were right-wing, they are correct in the sense that they were the right-wing of European politics, but the Nazis bear no resemblance to the American conservative movement.
	As in none, okay?
	There's no crossover whatsoever.
	So, Jonah pointed this out, and he pointed out that the Nazis were called national socialists, believed in big government, nationalized healthcare, corporate control from the top of industry, right?
	That all these things are left-wing propositions, which is true.
	Dinesh took that further, and he basically said, well, the Nazis are the Democrats, right?
	The Nazis and the Democratic Party share a lot of common thoughts.
	Now, the problem that I have with this is the way that we treat Nazi in public discourse, because the reality is the reason that everybody hates the Nazis is because of World War II and the Holocaust.
	Up until World War II and the Holocaust, the reality is that the vast majority of the West was kind of okay with the Nazis, which demonstrates how much of the West is sick.
	If you look at the Nazis' actual agenda, there are a lot of people today, if you just remove the word Nazi at the top, who would look at the agenda that they talk about, you know, nationalized health care, more spending on veterans, more of the public education, more restrictions on industry, tariffs, what they called autarky, the idea we should produce all product in-house inside Germany.
	There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle who would probably agree with some of those propositions.
	Because it was a political party that also happened to be motivated by a deep-rooted evil, and it was a fascist tyranny that suggested a one-party state was the best.
	To try and link that to today's Democratic Party, I think we need to be careful about the Nazi comparisons, unless you are just... Like, what people do is they say, Democratic Party platform, like the Nazi platform, Nazis went and killed 6 million Jews.
	Okay, that's intellectually dishonest.
	What you could say is just, this is a bad agenda.
	This agenda is bad, it's failed everywhere, it's tried, it's immoral.
	Lots of parties have embraced it, from right to left, and it's not good in Europe.
	Instead, Donald Trump Jr.
	basically goes to the bumper sticker version of this, which is that the Democratic Party platform is the Nazi platform.
	When you look at the actual history of how these things evolved, and when you actually look at that platform versus the platform of the modern left, you say, wait a minute, those two are really heavily aligned, and frankly, contrary to the right.
	You see the Nazi platform in the early 1930s, and what was actually put out there, and you look at it compared to the DNC platform of today, and you're saying, man, those things are awfully similar.
	Okay, he's not totally wrong.
	There are elements of the Democratic Party platform that are very similar to the elements of the Nazi Party platform.
	But the reason we hate the Nazis is not really because of that platform.
	The reason we hate the Nazis is because of the Holocaust and World War II.
	So it's intellectually dishonest to sort of make that switch.
	And I wanted to point that out because there's no reason for the intellectual dishonesty.
	You can just make arguments about how the policy is bad without hitting it with the swastika.
	The policy happens to be bad.
	Nationalized healthcare has been tried in a bunch of different places.
	In a variety of different ways.
	It is bad because it is bad in the places in which it is bad.
	It's not bad because you link the swastika to it.
	I don't appreciate that particular linkage.
	Okay.
	So we'll be back here on Monday.
	And we'll have much more for you then.
	So have a great weekend.
	Rest up because we're going to be back at this on Monday and I expect you to be in tip-top form.
	I'll see you then.
	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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