All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 27, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
48:49
Goodbye To A Hero | Ep. 611
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Senator John McCain dies, the media rewrites history, and a mass shooting takes place in Jacksonville.
We'll talk all about it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
A somber weekend with the death of Senator John McCain, dead at the age of 18.
He died on Saturday.
I found out about it right after Sabbath.
I have a lot of thoughts.
Also, there's a lot of fallout in the media sphere, in the political sphere.
We'll get to all of that first.
Let's talk about your gun rights.
The reality is that law-abiding citizens ought to have guns in order to protect themselves from criminals.
And from folks who would want to violate their rights, this is why you ought to have a gun too.
And this is your last chance, because if you'd like to hit the range tomorrow with a brand new gun, the USCCA wants to give you a free gun right now.
They are giving away a different gun every single day.
It ends Friday, so you are almost out of time.
Just go to DefendYourFamilyNow.com to get entered right now.
You could get up to 17 chances to win a new gun every day.
It could be 17 Kimbers, 17 Glocks, maybe even that new Sig Sauer, but they are all gone on Friday.
All you have to do is go to defendyourfamilynow.com to reveal the gun you could take home today.
It's totally free.
Remember, not a lot of time.
The gun of the day always disappears at midnight, and it all ends Friday again.
So hurry, this is your absolute last chance to take home one of these guns.
As a law-abiding citizen, you should know how to use a gun, and you should know how to protect yourself, and you should have the weaponry to do so.
Go to defendyourfamilynow.com So the big story over the weekend, obviously, was the death of Senator John McCain.
Senator McCain served for, I believe, 35 years in the Senate.
SECA does amazing educational work.
Also, you can go enter to win that free gun.
It all ends on Friday, defendyourfamilynow.com.
So the big story over the weekend, obviously, was the death of Senator John McCain.
Senator McCain served for, I believe, 35 years in the Senate.
He became famous not because of that, but because he did five years in a North Vietnamese prison.
And the man truly was an American hero, despite the fact that there are many who would say otherwise, for no reason other than petty spite.
The fact is that anyone who serves in uniform and then does five years in a North Vietnamese prison and then gives up their opportunity to come home in order to maintain A solidarity with the troops who are already there.
That is an American hero.
John McCain did two years in solitary confinement under the North Vietnamese, under the Viet Cong.
When he came out, he had essentially been physically crippled.
His hair was completely white.
Here is a clip of John McCain talking about his torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese.
Historians have said that no American prisoner arrived at the Hanoi Hilton in worse condition than McCain.
Broke my shoulder and hurt my knee again.
But look, I don't blame them.
I don't blame them.
We're in a war.
I didn't like it, but at the same time, When you're in a war and you're captured by the enemy, you can't expect, you know, to have tea.
And when he crashed landed, the North Vietnamese denied him medical aid and they stabbed him with a bayonet as well.
Then they proceeded to torture him for years and years and years for information.
And then they tried to leverage him.
They tried to use him as a propaganda tool.
They wanted to return him to the United States because his father was an admiral and thereby create the narrative that the United States gave preferential treatment to the children of the privileged.
McCain turned that down and instead stayed under the gentle mercies of one of the worst regimes in history, the Viet Cong.
That is American heroism.
He then came back and he entered the Senate, I believe it would have been 1981.
And he was there for 36 years.
He died over the weekend.
Now, does this mean that everything that John McCain did was amazing politically?
No, I disagreed with John McCain routinely.
Most recently when John McCain gave the thumbs down to what they called skinny repeal, the repeal of large parts of the Obamacare package, including the individual mandate.
And he said he did that because he didn't approve of the way the Senate was running.
He was a guy who was constantly talking about the rules of the Senate, even though the Democrats were constantly breaking those rules.
But John McCain overall understood that America was an exceptional place and he put his life on the line.
In order to prove that America was an exceptional place, he certainly understood the threat that was posed to America by outside actors.
He understood the threat that was posed to America by places like Russia.
There's a reason that Russia today basically ran a bunch of smears against him or ignored him after his death.
None of that is particularly a shock.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders actually said that John McCain was an American hero.
She was caught up with by TMZ as she left Reagan National Airport.
She said McCain's death was a great loss for our country.
And then she was asked if she personally planned to attend the funeral.
And she said, absolutely.
Apparently, Vice President Pence will attend the funeral.
Donald Trump will not attend the funeral because he has a longstanding spat with John McCain.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush are both expected to speak at the funeral.
And I want to talk a little bit in a second About the sort of reason why there's so many people on the Trumpian right who are very angry at John McCain.
There are a lot of people who are trashing his memory the day of his death, and I don't think that that is appropriate in any way, shape, or form.
President Trump did tweet after Senator McCain's death.
My deepest sympathies and respect go out to the family of Senator John McCain.
Our hearts and prayers are with you.
But obviously, President Trump was not a fan of Senator McCain.
And that goes all the way back to early in the campaign when he suggested that Senator McCain was not a war hero, which was an abominable statement.
I mean, by any standard for Donald Trump to say a guy who avoided the Vietnam draft and then bragged about how his own personal Vietnam had been avoiding STDs during the 1970s while sleeping with various and sundry women.
For him to say that John McCain was not a war hero because he hadn't been caught was an egregious statement, obviously, and led to a tremendous rift between McCain and Trump from the very beginning.
According to the Washington Post, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and other White House aides advocated for an official statement That gave the decorated Vietnam War POW plaudits for his military and Senate service and called him a hero, according to current and former White House aides, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations.
The original statement was drafted before McCain died Saturday.
Sanders and others edited a final version this weekend that was ready for the president, the aides said, but Trump told aides he wanted to post a brief tweet instead and the statement praising McCain's life was not released.
So despite the fact that Trump had released official statements on the death of John Glenn, former senator, He refused to do so for John McCain, and Trump has no plans, apparently, to attend McCain's funeral.
This is generating all sorts of media headlines.
It's stupid politics by the president.
It is.
It's just, from a political perspective, it is dumb politics by the president because he is reopening a rift in the aftermath of a guy's death that is completely unnecessary.
Showing a little bit of grace would probably be a much better move here.
And this was exacerbated this morning by the fact that President Trump ordered the flags at the White House To be rehung at the top of the staff.
So the normal rule, so by federal statute, the rule is...
That when a senator dies, that the flag is lowered for about a day.
But the unofficial rule, and this is the one that we've kept to, is that when a sitting senator dies, what you do is you leave the flag at half-staff until the senator is actually buried.
If you look at the pictures of the White House, you can see that the flag is back up to top of the staff.
And I think the most troubling picture, obviously, was there is a picture of the White House flag at the top of the staff.
And there's another picture that showed behind that.
You can see the Washington Memorial, the Washington Monument, rather.
And you can see all the flags are at half staff.
So while the White House is back up to top of the staff, the Washington Monument, they're still down at half staff, which makes the president look really petty.
Whether or not you like John McCain, whether you like Donald Trump better than John McCain, it is irrelevant.
This is not good politics.
It makes the president look petty.
It makes him look silly.
And there's no reason for him to do any of that.
Now, the president's honesty is one of the attributes that people like about him.
It would have looked dishonest if the president had called McCain a war hero, had called him a war hero after not calling him a hero and after ripping him up and down.
But to issue some sort of gracious statement and take the temporary hit, I think, would have been well worthwhile.
I want to talk about McCain's record in just a second and why there's a perception on parts of the right that this sort of kind of slap at McCain is a decent thing, that it's not a huge deal.
But let's flash back to a couple of things about John McCain that I think are relevant.
First of all, let's talk about his record.
So, there's been a lot of talk today about the things that John McCain did right and the things that John McCain did wrong.
I would say that John McCain was right on about 65% of issues and he was wrong on about 35% of issues.
Those 35% loomed very large, right?
Campaign finance reform was a case where I was in deep disagreement with John McCain.
I think that his plans for campaign finance reform We're actually quite harmful to the American public debate.
I think, frankly, they were unconstitutional.
But John McCain pushed those through anyway.
He was, as I say, instrumental in upholding parts of Obamacare just in the last year alone.
His tenure was not unmarred by some controversy.
Obviously, his Senate tenure began in 87, rather.
I said 81 earlier.
It was January 1987, and he had some problems with scandal.
He was involved with the so-called Keating Five.
Charles Keating was a banker that McCain had met while working at Hensley and Company, and Keating's associates at the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association had given money to McCain, as well as five other senators.
Keating supported them in the hopes of preventing the government seizures of his savings and loan.
McCain participated in meetings.
There was never any finding of serious corruption there.
But McCain would later go on to sponsor campaign finance reform.
Obviously, McCain-Feingold became a real thorn in the side of a lot of politicians.
And as I say, I think a violation of First Amendment principles.
McCain was very instrumental in the kind of war movement in the aftermath of 9-11.
I think that was right.
I think McCain's statements with regard to the surge in Iraq were eminently correct.
I think he was more correct on foreign policy than he was on domestic policy.
But McCain did win the New Hampshire primaries in January 8, 2008.
He ran a campaign against Barack Obama that I thought was quite lackluster.
But the things about McCain that made McCain a class act in certain ways.
I can't trust Obama.
I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, um, he's an Arab.
from the 2008 campaign, McCain was at a town hall event and a woman gets up and she calls Obama a Muslim and McCain basically says, no, no, no, no, we're not doing that.
I can't trust Obama.
I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, he's an Arab.
He is not.
No, no, no.
No ma'am.
No ma'am.
He's a decent family man, citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about.
He's not.
Thank you.
And that was sort of who McCain was.
McCain had a baseline of good sense to him when it came at least to relationships with other people in politics.
But it's exactly that that led a lot of people to kind of dismiss him on the right, because the reality is in 2008 he did run a lackluster campaign.
He ran a campaign where he refused to say truths about Barack Obama, including about Barack Obama's associations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers.
It was a lackluster campaign.
He shouldn't have lost that campaign.
He did lose that campaign because I think that his sense of honor in politics overwhelmed His necessity for victory in politics.
And you can say some good things about that.
You can also say some bad things about that.
But it led to the feeling that the Republican Party wasn't fighting hard enough.
So what we really need is a counter puncher.
And so people who favor Trump over McCain in that battle are largely relying on the fact that McCain was seen as sort of milquetoast in the way that he went after other politicians.
Whereas Donald Trump is seen as a guy who'll go no holds barred.
Now I want to talk about the media reaction to John McCain.
In just a second, because in some ways I think that it is quite revealing about who the media are when it comes to Republicans generally.
But first, let's talk about your personal comfort.
So, there are a lot of ways in life that you can feel rich without having to be rich, and one of those ways is zeal.com.
You go to Zeal, it's their iPhone, Android app, it's Zeal, Z-E-E-L, and you can select from top local licensed pre-screened massage therapists.
You can choose your favorite technique, gender preference, time and location for your massage, Zeal then sends one of their 10,000 licensed massage therapists with a massage table, music, and supplies to give you that five-star massage.
Scheduling, booking, payment.
It is fast and easy.
Even the tip is included.
Seven days a week, 365 days a year.
A Zeal massage therapist can be at your door in as little as an hour.
So it's supremely convenient.
I've used it for myself, for my wife, for my in-laws, for my parents, for my sister.
It really is fantastic.
There's a reason Zeal has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Vogue, and on Good Morning America.
Bring the spa to you.
Try Zeal today.
Today.
Like, they're on demand.
So you can do it, like, right now.
To help you get started, our listeners can get $25 off their first massage with promo code Ben.
That's Zeal, spelled Z-E-E-L dot com.
Promo code Ben.
Right now, go to Zeal.com or on Zeal's iPhone or Android app.
Get a special offer when you try Zeal today.
Enter promo code Ben to get $25 off your first in-home massage.
Zeal is a fantastic service.
You should try them out.
It's Zeal.com.
And use that promo code Ben to get $25 off your first in-home massage.
So, while the media are fulminating over the fact that President Trump is disrespectful to John McCain, which is true, the media are suddenly experiencing a strange new respect for John McCain.
The media suddenly love John McCain.
And I'd like to remind you that in 2008, while John McCain was running an honorable campaign against Barack Obama, the media were calling him a racist, they were calling him a sexist, they were suggesting that he was a crazed old loon who was going to land the United States in the middle of interminable war.
Right?
That was their campaign against John McCain.
I remember.
I was there.
I helped raise money for the McCain campaign.
John McCain, here is a, this kind of encapsulates it.
Lester Spence was an assistant professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University.
He said this about Senator John McCain's campaign rhetoric.
Senator John McCain's recent attacks on Barack Obama, accusing him of being a terrorist, Which McCain never did.
Combined with GOP columnists and bloggers arguing that Obama supports painting the White House black and racial reparations represents an embrace of the problematic southerner strategy the GOP has historically used to increase white racial resentment, said Spence, who is African-American.
But as can be seen in the most recent presidential debate, he's employing the strategy selectively, only among the GOP faithful.
That was the take of the media at the time.
There are a lot of people in the media who are suggesting that John McCain was just as bad as they suggest Donald Trump is today.
The media routinely say, whoever is the Republican who is running for office now, every other Republican before has been decent.
You wait.
After Donald Trump is out of office, whether it's in four years or whether it's in eight years, The next person who they nominate, the next person Republicans pick will be seen as worse than Donald Trump.
They're already saying it, right?
They already said about Mike Pence that if Donald Trump were to be somehow deposed from office and Mike Pence were to take his slot, be careful what you wish for because Mike Pence is more dangerous and even more scary than Donald Trump.
It is because the left slandered folks like John McCain, who was a moderate on politics.
John McCain was a moderate Republican at best.
They slandered him.
They slandered Mitt Romney, another moderate on politics and moderate Republican at best.
They slandered both of them as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
And the Republican base responded by saying both of those guys were nice guys who refused to run a bare knuckles campaign against the Democrat.
So let's nominate the not nice guy who's happy to go bare knuckles.
To underestimate the effect that Democratic attacks on John McCain and Mitt Romney had on the 2016 primaries is to ignore reality.
There were a lot of Republicans who resonated to the fact that Donald Trump was willing to take a hammer to anyone, specifically because they said, well, we nominated a couple of genteel folks, and we had a genteel president in George W. Bush, and you guys hammered the living daylights out of those folks, so why wouldn't we nominate somebody like Donald Trump?
Now, the cost of that is that you end up with somebody like Donald Trump as president in terms of character, who will also slander John McCain.
But none of that is to, I think, degrade the fact that the media's attacks on Republicans like McCain led to the rise of folks like Donald Trump.
We're gonna talk in a second about what exactly the media said upon John McCain's death, because suddenly it was a different tune.
So first of all, I have to point this out.
This was the best gaffe of the weekend.
It was truly amazing.
NBC News broke into Saturday Night Live in order to announce John McCain's death.
And let's just say that their programmer is not all that bright because it went quite poorly.
Here's what it sounded like.
And again this evening, the breaking news, NBC News confirming the death of Senator John McCain.
Our live coverage continues on MSNBC.
If you can't see this, they then went back to Saturday Night Live, Dolphin Love Story, in which two fat men with dolphin heads are walking around making dolphin songs, sounds, and then, and then proceeding to make out with each other.
Yeah, so from John McCain's death to this, well done media.
Best gaff of the weekend, just astonishing.
I mean, that, so, yep.
Well done, NBC.
But, when you look at the media's response to all this, take for example, Jake Tapper.
So I like Jake, I'm friendly with Jake.
And I think that Jake tries his best to keep his bias out of the politics.
What he says here is not completely untrue, but it is also indicative of one of the reasons why John McCain lost and one of the reasons why Donald Trump won.
Here's Jake Tapper explaining that a lot of the reverence you're seeing for McCain today is because of anger at President Trump and hatred of President Trump.
And Amanda, for a younger generation of conservatives, what does McCain mean?
And I can't help but think that part of the reason why there's such reverence for him today is because of who's in the White House right now, because they are polar opposites.
Okay, so that idea that Tapper is spelling out, that's correct, but it's also relevant to mention that when John McCain was running for the White House, there was a lot of talk about John McCain as a nutjob who's going to land us in war with Iran because he was a crazy person with his finger on the trigger.
And then as soon as Trump is in the White House, it's like, oh, well, you know, that John McCain guy, that guy was great.
Man, I miss that John McCain guy.
Of course you miss that John McCain guy because the guy was never president.
You miss that John McCain guy because that John McCain guy lost to your guy, Barack Obama.
The media loved Barack Obama and so they were happy with John McCain who lost in the same way that suddenly they're romantic about Mitt Romney.
There is even some romance about George W. Bush who's no longer in office.
Now, is it true that Donald Trump is a difference in kind from John McCain, from George W. Bush, from Mitt Romney?
Of course.
Of course that's true.
Of course he's a difference in kind, right?
He's the kind of person who refuses to keep the flag lowered to half staff at the White House out of personal pique at a dead senator.
Yes, he is a difference in kind from those other Republicans.
And it's not out of bounds to point out that he is a difference in kind.
It is important, however, to recall the media malfeasance that surrounded John McCain.
Every time he became a threat to the left, suddenly they turned on him.
And it's something to recall about the way that the press treat any Republican.
They will find their favorite Republican, treat them well until the point when they turn, at which point, as soon as they figure out that a Republican is actually a Republican, that Republican becomes a bad guy again.
And you see this with every major Republican of the modern era.
Right now, they like Ben Sasse.
Were Ben Sasse, the senator from Nebraska, to turn out to be a Republican presidential nominee, he would once again become a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe.
That is the way the left works.
It's what drove people into the arms of President Trump in the first place.
The media's malfeasance is what allowed President Trump to become President of the United States, which is why he campaigns against them on a regular basis.
And the media don't even recognize this.
Chuck Todd was defending the media over the weekend, and he said that, you know, all this mistrust in media, all of it is, it's based not in fact, it's just based on lies and propaganda.
I think one of the best things going in Donald Trump's favor, we know this, is the mainstream media.
I hate to say it, but the conservative echo chamber created that environment.
It's not, it's not, no no no, I mean, it has been a tactic and a tool of the Roger Ailes created echo chamber.
Let's not pretend it's not anything other than that.
I'm just saying it was a creation.
That's such nonsense.
I'm sorry.
That's such nonsense that the belief in left media bias is a creation of the echo chamber.
It's whistling past the graveyard.
It is just not true.
What percentage of people in the NBC newsroom actually voted for Donald Trump?
I would say it verges on zero.
It verges on zero.
The country split half and half and the percentage verged on zero.
And then you trot out folks like Roland Martin.
Roland Martin's on CNN all the time.
And he says, what people really want is integrity like Obama.
He's on MSNBC here.
He says that, well, people really want us integrity like Obama.
Then you wonder why people on the right think that the media is totally full of crap.
The media have been promoting... Here's Roland Martin, then I'll talk about this.
What is happening here are you're seeing Americans who are saying integrity matters.
Okay.
At some point, it can't be, well, that's just, that's just Trump being Trump.
No.
It's not.
Okay.
So Roland Martin saying integrity matters.
They want integrity like Obama's.
One of the memes that's been going around lately is the only scandal Obama had was his tan suit that he wore at the White House.
And members of the mainstream media have been pushing this.
John Harwood said this over the weekend.
If you actually believe that, then it's no wonder you also believe that people think that the media is biased for no reason.
People think the media is biased for a very good reason and McCain's death is the latest example as they swivel from McCain was a bad guy to McCain was a good guy based on how much damage he can do to the Republican Party and based on who is in the White House currently.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about President Trump's poll numbers and then a massive scandal for the Catholic Church.
There's a lot coming up and a mass shooting in Jacksonville.
First, let's talk about your stamps.
Okay, the reality is that you can go down to the post office.
The post office has all sorts of great services, but You probably don't want to actually spend the time getting in the car and going down to the post office.
That's why you ought to be using Stamps.com.
With Stamps.com, you can access all the amazing services of the post office right from your desk, 24-7, when it is convenient for you.
Buy and print official U.S.
postage for any letter, any package, using your own computer and printer.
The mail carrier picks it up.
You just click, print.
Mail.
You're done.
Couldn't be easier.
Stamps.com is fantastic.
We use it here at the Daily Wire offices.
They will actually send you, right now when you use promo code Shapiro, 55 bucks of free postage and digital scale on a four-week trial.
So we have the digital scale here at the offices.
We use the digital scale to weigh the mail.
We know the exact postage.
We print the postage directly onto the envelopes or onto a sticker that you can affix to the envelopes.
It is super convenient.
It saves us time.
It saves us money because time is money in our business.
So stamps.com, go check it out right now.
Use promo code Shapiro for 55 bucks free postage, a digital scale, and a four-week trial.
Go to stamps.com.
Before you do anything else, click on the radio mic at the top of the homepage and type in Shapiro.
That's stamps.com.
Enter promo code Shapiro.
Again, stamps.com, promo code Shapiro.
Okay, so...
With all of this said about John McCain and President Trump, President Trump had a very bad week last week, and the media were hoping that this was sort of the end of little Trump, that this was going to be the end of Donald Trump's administration.
Well, it turns out there's a poll out, and shock of shocks, the poll numbers haven't moved at all.
The poll numbers are exactly stable.
So according to NBC and the Wall Street Journal, after a week that saw President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman convicted on eight counts of fraud, and his former lawyer plead guilty to felony campaign finance charges, the president's job approval rating remains virtually unchanged, new polling from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows.
But the stability in Trump's approval rating also comes as more than half of voters say he has not been honest and truthful regarding the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, and fewer than 3 in 10 voters are convinced that Trump himself is not implicated in the wrongdoing of six of his associates who have now either been convicted of crimes or have pled guilty.
Trump's approval rating is 44% approve, 52% disapprove.
That is basically the same as it was a week ago when it was 46% approve, 51% disapprove.
The president's approval ratings are extraordinarily stable.
I have been saying this now for months.
The president of the United States is the beneficiary of what I call the strong market sufficiency theory.
Everything is priced in.
There's a theory about the stock market that you can't beat the stock market because all available information is immediately priced into the price of a stock.
Well, when it comes to Donald Trump, everything is priced in except for an economic collapse.
Basically, except for an economic collapse or nuclear war, the President of the United States' approval ratings will remain absolutely stable.
And part of the reason for that is because we are so ensconced in our own corners.
We are now cemented in our own political corners.
And one of the reasons we are so cemented in our political corners is indeed the bias of the media.
The feeling that no matter what Trump does, the media are out to get him.
It wouldn't matter if he were innocent or whether he were guilty.
They would treat him exactly the same way.
They went after John McCain.
They went after Mitt Romney.
Them going after Donald Trump.
It was the boy who cried wolf one too many times.
You can't do it that many times and then get away with it interminably.
And the thing is, even when the wolf shows up, the moral of the story of the boy who cried wolf is that even when the wolf shows up, nobody believes him.
Maybe Trump is the wolf.
Maybe not.
Nobody's gonna know.
Because the media already shot their wad when it came to John McCain and Mitt Romney.
They already said all they had to say about Republicans for years, about George W. Bush.
I've been here the whole time, so have you.
And this is nothing new.
They say the same thing about Donald Trump, except louder.
Now, does that mean that Trump should justify all of that with bad behavior?
Of course not.
Of course not.
It'd be great if Trump didn't justify all that with bad behavior.
You know, people treating you badly is not an excuse for bad behavior.
That said, to fail to recognize the impact of a polarized media environment on President Trump's stable approval ratings is absolutely short-sighted.
Okay, meanwhile, over the weekend, the other big news is that there was this terrible shooting at the Madden.
I guess it was Madden Tournament in Jacksonville, Florida.
This is a gamer tournament, so Basically, people get together and they play Madden for money.
Madden football.
And the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office identified the alleged shooter as a white male who had died at the scene.
He was 24 years old, from Baltimore.
So he was coming, obviously, from a gun-free zone, because Baltimore, as we know, doesn't have any gun control laws.
Except for how it has tons of gun control laws.
He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside Chicago Pizza after going on a shooting rampage that left two dead and 11 other people injured.
It was a gun-free zone with not enough security.
This is the typical story, unfortunately, of a lot of these sorts of mass shootings.
When you have a public event, a popular event, popular or public event, you have to have people there with guns.
When my sister's wedding happened, I paid personally for security with guns to make sure that nobody could actually get into my sister's wedding, and that was a private event.
This was a major public event that was a gun-free zone where they didn't have enough security, and this guy got in with a gun.
He was a disappointed gamer.
So he had gone in the first round, he had lost, and then he was so upset with his life that he went out and decided to murder a bunch of people, which is just evil and sick.
He used at least one handgun in his attack, so a ban on assault rifles would apparently do nothing.
He had previously appeared in a photo with a Buffalo Bills player after winning another competition.
There's been no motive announced for the killings.
There are reports that he snapped after losing an event.
He stayed at a local hotel the night before the shooting.
They've impounded his car.
The investigation is still ongoing.
"EA Sports issued a statement saying, "We are aware of an incident "at a sanctioned Madden Championship Series competition "in Jacksonville.
"We are working with authorities to gather facts "at this stage.
"This is a horrible incident.
"Our deepest sympathies go out to all involved." I wanna point out the hypocrisy of folks in the media who are immediately jumping to gun control today.
It's hilarious because literally five days ago, they were suggesting that it was impossible You should not politicize the killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa.
You should certainly not say that that has anything to do with illegal immigration.
That would be politicization of the issue.
And I discussed at length on Friday what's true about that and what's not true about that.
The fact that we know more about Mollie Tibbetts' killing than we know about the average mass shooting in the first few days.
And that's why you can say with a certain amount of certainty that illegal immigration had something to do with the Molly Tibbetts killing, where in this case, we don't know where he got the gun.
We barely know what kind of gun the guy used.
We don't know about his criminal history.
We don't know about his psychological history.
There are a lot of other issues that conflate and confound.
The media immediately jumped to gun control because it was deeply necessary for them to push their agenda.
This just shows the hypocrisy of so many in the media who are willing to overlook their ban on politicization of major events.
So long as it pushes their particular agenda.
The police have ID'd this guy.
It does raise some questions about the lack of purpose in American society.
There are a lot of folks today talking about relationship between gaming and all of this.
That, of course, is spurious.
This was, first of all, not a violent video game.
So you can't even make that connection.
It was a football video game.
But the idea that you are a professional video game player at 24 years old, and that basically your job consists of sitting in a room alone and playing video games, I can't say I think that's great for society that more and more people are doing that.
And that's not a rip on people who play video games.
We have tons of people at the office who play video games.
Tons of people who play Madden.
But it seems to me that part of a well-rounded life should be getting out a little bit more.
And it appears that this guy was not getting out a little bit more.
As I've said about mass shootings before, we do have a problem of masculinity in our society.
Not that all masculinity is toxic, but the opposite.
If you do not task young men with going out... This guy's 24.
I was married by the time I was 24.
I had...
A job, by the time I was 24 years old.
I graduated from law school by the time I was 24.
The fact that 24 years old in American society now is considered a kid, that the level of responsibility that attaches to people in their mid-twenties is basically zero, that you're expected to live at home, mooching off your parents, not for reasons that you have family solidarity, but just because you don't want to pay your bills, and that you do this all the way until you're basically 30, and then you start looking to get married and have a family.
The prolonged adolescence of young men is not good for American society for a variety of reasons.
Now, is that leading to an uptick in the number of mass shootings like this?
It seems like there is some basic connection.
I don't think that it is the main factor.
I think that there are a bunch of factors that are conflated here, but to refuse to acknowledge that young men are not being treated with the level of responsibility necessary from the time they are teenagers to mature into fully blown adult human beings who are capable of handling their lives is a mistake.
Also, it'll be interesting to see what this guy's psychological history was and how well it was taken care of.
Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about what I think is actually the In some ways, the worst story of the day.
But first, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com.
So for $9.99 a month, you can get a subscription to Daily Wire.
That means you get the rest of this show.
It means that you get the rest of the Andrew Klavan show, the rest of the Michael Knowles show, if that's something that you really want to subject yourself to.
You can go check that out right now for $9.99 a month, or for $99 a year, get this, the very finest in beverage vessels.
The leftist here is hot or cold tumbler.
Go check it out right now.
Also, check out our Sunday special by subscribing at YouTube or iTunes.
We had a great one with Clay Travis last week.
Who are we having on Sunday?
I'm not sure.
We have a couple of possibilities, I think, for Sunday.
We'll announce it a little bit later this week.
In any case, go check it out.
Subscribe so you can be part of our Sunday special.
And we have all sorts of great goodies when you subscribe to the website.
Behind-the-scenes stuff, and discounts, and all sorts of fun stuff.
So go check it out right now.
We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
And this is the worst story of the day.
It really is a terrible story and it speaks to the liberalization of the Catholic Church and a serious problem with institutional protection.
So a few weeks ago we talked about, probably two weeks ago, we talked about the scandal that broke out in the state of Pennsylvania with regard to the archdiocese in Pennsylvania covering up over 30 years, a thousand cases of child molestation in the church.
And we talked about the problems that exist within every institution, the tendency to cover for the problems of an institution in order to quote-unquote protect the institution.
And this exists not only in the Catholic Church, it exists in various religious communities around the country and around the world.
It exists in governments, certainly.
It exists in public schools.
There's always, the human instinct is to feel solidarity.
With a particular structure you find to be important.
And then whenever that structure is threatened, particularly if it's threatened routinely, you tend to circle the wagons and defend anything that's happening in-house.
And this is how you end up with the quiet ascent to true evil that happens so often around the planet.
You wonder how Nazi Germany happened.
Basically, there's a population that for bad reasons and wrongly felt threatened by the outside world.
Decided to circulate, basically circle the wagons around the Nazi regime, and then the Nazi regime decided to kill all of the enemies of the people, including the Jews.
And people went along with that because the in-group was more important than the out-group, and the out-group was threatening them.
In-group, out-group politics is deeply important when it comes to understanding how institutions get perverted from the inside.
Well now, there's stories that basically the institutional perversion of the Catholic Church has reached up to the top levels of the Catholic Church.
This is from the NC Register, the National Catholic Register.
In an extraordinary 11-page written testament, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States has accused several senior prelates of complicity in covering up Archbishop Theodore McCarrick's allegations of sexual abuse, and has claimed that Pope Francis knew about sanctions imposed on then-Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI, but chose to repeal them.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, 77, who served as apostolic nuncio in Washington, D.C.
from 2011 to 2016, said that in the late 2000s, Benedict had imposed on Cardinal McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis, and that Vigano personally told Pope Francis about those sanctions in 2013.
So McCarrick has been accused of sexual abuse of young seminarians.
He's also been accused of engaging in homosexual acts with a bunch of people who are under his auspices, which is a violation, obviously, of church code and church conduct.
And he was not turned over to the proper authorities.
There are no allegations that the church knew about him molesting underage boys.
But if such allegations had existed and the church didn't turn him over to the secular authorities, it's a serious problem.
The truth is that the question of church justice, just historically speaking, stretches back a millennia.
It stretches back all the way back to when Henry II trying to say that we should actually try priests in secular courts in Great Britain, in England, in the 12th and 13th centuries.
So this sort of battle between secular and church has been going on for a very long time.
But one of the premises of the idea that the church should handle its own business is that the church will actually handle its own business.
The church did not handle its own business.
According to Archbishop Vigano, he said in his written statement, simultaneously released to the Register and other media, that Pope Francis continued to cover for McCarrick.
And not only did he not take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him, but also made McCarrick his trusted counselor.
Vigano's story has now been backed by a couple of other sources.
He said the former Archbishop of Washington advised the Pope to appoint a number of bishops in the United States, including Cardinals Bla... I think it's pronounced Blaise Cupich of Chicago and Joseph Tobin of Newark.
Archbishop Vigano who said his conscience dictates the truth be known as the corruption has reached the very top of the church's hierarchy ended his testimony by calling on Pope Francis and all those implicated in the cover-up of Archbishop McCarrick's abuse to resign.
The accusation basically suggests that McCarrick has abused Legitimately, dozens of people.
The media has reported written reports of victims of abuse spanning decades, including a teenage boy, three young priests or seminarians, and a man now in his 60s who alleges that McCarrick abused him from the age of 11.
The Pope later accepted McCarrick's resignation from the College of Cardinals, but Vigano wrote that Benedict much earlier had imposed sanctions on McCarrick.
Similar to those handed down by Cardinal Perelin, the Cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living.
He was forbidden to celebrate Mass in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.
He said the sanctions were applied as far back as 2009-2010.
Benedict's measure came years after Archbishop Pagano's predecessor at the nunciature, Basically, the accusation here is that all of these memos were ignored by the top levels of the College of Cardinals and the papacy.
Lugano claims he wrote several memos to a series of cardinals who repeatedly refused to do anything about this.
They basically gave in to what he essentially calls a homosexual clique in the Catholic Church.
Vigano says that he personally repeated the sanction to McCarrick, and the cardinal, muttering in a barely comprehensible way, admitted he had perhaps made the mistake of sleeping in the same bed with some seminarians at his beach house.
But he said this as if it had no importance, Vigano says in his testimony.
Apparently, Pope Francis knew about all of this.
He said it was clear that from the time of Pope Francis' election, McCarrick, now free from all constraints, had felt free to travel continuously to give lectures and interviews, He said McCarrick, who backed Pope Francis, became the kingmaker for appointments in the Curia and the United States and the most listened to advisor in the Vatican for relations with the Obama administration.
He says that appointments of other cardinals were orchestrated by McCarrick.
It is a massive, massive scandal.
And Catholics are There are a lot of traditional Catholics who are looking at this and wondering if Pope Francis can actually survive this.
Whether Pope Francis should step down for having helped cover all of this up because Pope Francis has been extraordinarily soft on LGBT issues.
It's something the media have taken note of for a very long time and there's a feeling among traditional Catholics that perhaps his softness on those issues led him to basically look the other way with regard to this Archbishop McCarrick who is actually engaged in violations of Catholic code with other seminarians alongside allegations of him molesting underage kids.
Really, really troubling stuff.
But again, any institution that refuses to cleanse itself is going to pay the price for all of this.
Pope Francis tweeted out something insane about this.
He tweeted out something like, he prays for the victims.
He prays to Mary for the victims.
And it's like, dude, you're the Pope.
Now it's time for you to actually do something about it, right?
It seems like you could be in a position to help God out here.
I mean, I'm not, I'm not a Catholic, but it seems like if you're the Pope, you might be in a position to actually, you know, help cleanse the Catholic church of this stuff, as opposed to just tweeting out vague references to prayer.
I'm not usually a person who says that prayer is not an answer, but when it comes to you having the power to do something about this at the head of a church to cleanse your own church of this stuff, you're gonna need to do more than pray about this.
This one ain't on God.
This one's on the church.
And this is true for Jewish communities and Catholic communities and Protestant communities and Muslim communities.
It is true for every community.
A community that fails to cleanse itself of evil is a community that becomes complicit in that evil.
Okay, meanwhile, A lot of controversy today breaking out over Tiger Woods.
What did Tiger Woods do that was so awful, that was so terrible?
So apparently he was asked about, after his final round of the Northern Trust, about his relationship with President Trump.
And here's what he said.
He said, well, I've known Donald for a number of years.
He said, we've played golf together.
We've had dinner together.
I've known him pre-presidency and obviously during his presidency.
And then he was asked about being threatened by Trump and his policy.
And Wood said, well, he's the president of the United States.
You have to respect the office.
No matter who's in the office, you may like, dislike personality or the politics, but we must all respect the office.
And then asked if he had any more to say about the state and discourse of race relations, Wood said, no.
I just finished 72 holes.
I'm hungry.
This, of course, led to a massive controversy.
Why isn't Tiger Woods, such a powerful voice, speaking up on issues of race relations?
Tiger Woods is the reason people are still watching sports.
People had stopped watching golf because Tiger Woods became irrelevant.
Tiger Woods is relevant again, and people are watching.
The last thing Tiger Woods should be doing is talking about politics in sports.
You want to destroy the last common area we have left in common?
Destroy the sporting world by polarizing it around issues of politics.
Suggest that every celebrity has the necessity to talk about every political issue under the sun.
There's kind of a running joke on Twitter these days about Taylor Swift, because Taylor Swift has basically stayed out of politics as well.
And so anytime there's some sort of issue, people will start joking, Taylor Swift's silence on this issue is deafening.
Because the joke is that the media expects all these public figures who have nothing to do, they're not famous for politics, to start sounding off about politics because celebrity dominates our politics.
It's really bad.
President Trump tweeted out about this, he's 17, he tweeted out, the fake news media.
We're tired to get Tiger Woods to say something he didn't want to say.
Tiger wouldn't play the game.
He's very smart.
More importantly, he's playing great golf again.
So President Trump is right about this.
It's not particularly smart of him to draw attention to it, because now Tiger Woods is going to be badgered beyond belief by the media even more than he was before.
And now it looks as though Tiger is tacitly supporting the president, which will force him to come out and say something against the president.
You can see how this is exactly going to play out, right?
You can see how this is going to work.
Trump says something.
Tiger's now forced into a corner to say he doesn't like a lot of Trump's policies.
Trump turns on Tiger.
It turns into a Trump versus Tiger fight.
Which maybe is what Trump wants out of all of this.
Maybe it's not what he wants.
Maybe he doesn't care and he just tweets stuff out.
But the bottom line is, did Tiger do the right thing?
Yes, Tiger did the right thing.
On our Sunday special this week, we had on Clay Travis, Clay Travis, sports commentator, and he has a new book coming out called Republicans Buy Sneakers Too, which is a line from Michael Jordan, because during the 1990s, Michael Jordan didn't get political, and a lot of the people in the media wanted him to get political.
He said, listen, Republicans buy sneakers also.
Why would I alienate half of the population?
There's no reason for me to do that.
Tiger Woods made the right move here.
It is none of Tiger Woods' purview to talk politics.
He's not an expert on the issue.
But we have this weird tendency in American life now to think that everybody is an expert on everything, and the more prominent you are in any field, the more you're an expert on something.
So you'll see people who have become very rich in the hedge fund area, and suddenly we think they're experts on politics.
I mean, this is why Trump is president, right?
Trump is not an expert on politics.
Trump actually doesn't know all that much about politics.
He has some gut-level instincts, many of which are good, some of which are not good.
But people think he's an expert because he's very rich.
We all now abide by the line from Fiddler on the Roof.
There's a line in If I Were a Rich Man where Tevye is singing.
Tevye the peddler is singing.
And he's talking about what it's like to be rich.
And he says, the most important men in town will come to call on me.
They'll come and they'll ask me questions.
And they'll ask questions that would cross a rabbi's eyes.
And it doesn't matter if I answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know.
And that's exactly right.
I mean, this is the way that our politics works now.
Tiger Woods is very good at golf.
So we think he should say something about politics because he must know.
He must know about the intricacies of race relations because Tiger Woods hits a golf ball for a living.
Now LeBron James must know everything there is to know about politics and have important things to say on politics because he's very famous and because he plays basketball.
And this is not saying that he should shut up and dribble.
He can say whatever he wants.
It's our fault that we take celebrities seriously.
It's not their fault.
If celebrities want to talk, that's their issue.
But if you want to alienate half the population, if you want to drive people up a wall, if you want ESPN to continue declining in the ratings, please keep asking Tiger Woods what he thinks of President Trump.
Let's do that.
Let's do a lot of that.
You want to destroy what's left of our common culture, all you have to do is keep pushing this idea that our celebrities should be spokespeople for the policies that you particularly like.
It's ugly stuff, and it makes for a worse country.
Which is why ESPN is declining in the ratings, it's why people are watching less and less of sports, and it's why the media's focus on the politicization of every angle of sports is actually making Star secondary.
I'm a baseball fan.
You know how many baseball fans want to see more of Mike Trout on TV?
The answer is virtually every baseball fan.
We can't even see Mike Trout on TV anymore because we're busy battling out kneeling for the National Anthem, an issue that has really very little bearing on anybody's life.
When the continuation of this polarization is only going to make our politics worse.
I think things are likely to get worse before they get better in American life, and that's not a good thing.
That's a very dangerous thing.
Okay, it's time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, let's get to some things that I like.
So over the weekend, Neil Simon died.
So it wasn't just John McCain.
Neil Simon died at the age of 91.
Obviously one of the kind of great American playwrights.
And his most famous play was The Odd Couple, which was made into a movie with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
It's a hysterically funny movie.
Particularly the first half of the movie is really, really funny.
Here's a little bit of the trailer for The Odd Couple.
Starring Jack Lemmon.
A hypochondriac.
A fuss budget.
Neater than neat.
Cleaner than clean.
No wonder his wife kicked him out.
Stop that, will you?
What are you doing?
I'm trying to clear up my ears.
Did it open up?
I think I strained my throat.
Walter Matthau.
Another guy whose wife left him.
And his pad looks like she left it a long time ago.
Who wants food?
What do you got?
I got brown sandwiches and green sandwiches.
Which one do you want?
What's the green?
See, the very new cheese or very old meat?
I'll take the brown.
It's a really funny movie, and it's worth watching.
Maybe we'll do a Neil Simon this week, like a bunch of Neil Simon stuff, because there's a bunch of great Neil Simon plays that he did that are really funny and really good.
And so we'll check some of that out this week.
The Odd Couple is his best.
You should definitely check.
Walter Matthau is just fantastic in the part.
Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau have great chemistry, which is why they were still doing grumpy old men all the way up till the time when they were, in fact, grumpy old men.
Okay, other things that...
Let's just do a thing that I hate right here.
So...
Things that I hate...
The Daily Mirror is now pushing man bras.
I am not kidding you.
Man bras.
Okay?
And here is what they are saying.
They're saying lacy bras for men are now a thing.
And you can also buy matching knickers.
Okay?
K-N-I-C-K-E-R-S.
Okay?
It's a British word.
I did not just say a racial slur.
I just want to make that absolutely clear because I would never say a racial slur like that, but I want to make absolutely clear so Media Matters doesn't suggest that I would ever say a racial slur because I just pronounced a word for undergarments in British, okay?
Because that's the way that this industry works now.
So here is what the Daily Mirror says.
Ladies, if you've ever looked at your man's underwear and thought it was a bit dull, then you're not alone.
I don't know a single lady who has ever looked at men's underwear and thought it was a bit dull.
They say, there's so much choice when it comes to women's underwear.
From thongs to Brazilian and Bridget Jones style pants.
Not to mention strapless, multi-way and water bras.
Most men have only boxers or briefs to choose from.
You know why?
Because women don't operate with regard to sex the same way that men do.
They don't.
Okay, women aren't like...
Men will check out pretty much any woman that is moving because that is evolutionarily beneficial for men to check out women.
Women don't think about sex in exactly the same way, which is why men find the unclothed female body a lot more attractive than women find the unclothed male body as a general rule.
This is not to say that women aren't into sex, but it is to say that to compare men's view of sex to women's view of sex is obviously ridiculous.
And it's one of the reasons why prostitution is an industry that almost entirely caters to males, and why pornography is an industry that almost entirely caters to males.
In any case, we're now going to try to pretend that women are exactly the same about sex as men are, and that women are into men dressing like ladies, which is real weird.
So the Daily Mirror says, this is all about to change.
As one lingerie company has created a unique line of bras and undergarments, I'm going to change the word, especially for men.
No!
No!
Okay, quick survey of the women in the room.
bras matching underwear and for the male who wants to wear something a little more sexy under his clothes if that's not enough men can get their own silk nighties baby dolls and body suits no no it says according to the website it's not just the men getting a kick out of the soft luxurious underwear the women love it too okay quick survey of the women in the room is this something that you're into jess you need to stop vomiting back there Why are you vomiting?
Okay, into the trash can, please.
No, women are not into this.
I love that people actually posted reviews of this and were not embarrassed.
There's a review posted for the turquoise Annabelle bra said, Then let me suggest that your girlfriend may in fact be into other types of things as well.
Like if you're dressing a man as a lady, maybe she's just into the ladies.
Because this is not a thing.
It's not even close to a thing.
One man reviewing the Tiffany sleepwear set commented, The material feels so soft and sensuous to the touch and feels so comfortable, you could sleep in it all night if it wasn't so sexy.
Okay.
I got nothing.
I got nothing.
Daily Mail, thank you for that.
I'm glad that you've made the world a significantly worse place today.
And it was already an unbelievably crappy place after the news of the weekend.
The equation of men and women with regard to sex is one of the dumber things on the agenda of feminists and radical leftists.
This idea that women treat men's bodies the same way that men treat women's bodies is essentially insane.
It's essentially insane.
It's just crazy.
Because men and women's brains do not treat sex the same way.
And to pretend that what women really want out of men is for men to be more feminine is totally nuts.
It's totally crazy.
There's not a straight woman alive who wants men to be more feminine, just as there is no straight man alive who's interested in women being really, really masculine.
What I really want my wife to be is more like a man.
Okay, that's not a thing.
So the separation of sexes is one of the great things about life and the attempt to destroy that with stupidities like this.
The truth is that the Daily Mail is just looking for clickbait and they got it.
I had to give it attention because it's so insane.
Okay, we need to stop showing these pictures because it's just too horrifying.
It's just too terrible all the way around.
Is the audio working again or is it still out of commission?
It's still out.
Okay, fine.
So we'll have to break here today.
We'll save some of our goodies for tomorrow, but we will be back 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 Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection