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Aug. 31, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:13
Canadian On The Moon | Ep. 615
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A new blockbuster movie revises history, the Weinstein scandal makes headlines again, and both parties endorse populism.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh man, hear it here first.
Before President Trump tweets about it, we'll get into the new movie biopic about Neil Armstrong and the controversy springing there from.
But first, let's talk about the economy.
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Okay, we begin today with a scandal that's not really a scandal, but is at least worth talking about because it does say something about the left's perspective and Hollywood's perspective on America.
It is, as they say, one of the reasons President Trump is president.
This particular scandal comes courtesy of Damien Chazelle.
Now, this makes me sad, because Damien Chazelle is one of the best directors working today.
He did Whiplash, and then he did La La Land, and his new movie looks great.
It's a biopic titled First Man about Neil Armstrong, who was the first man to walk on the moon.
And it stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong.
But there's one problem.
The movie apparently omits the American flag.
Why is that a big deal, you say?
Because the most crucial moment, the picture that everyone cares about from the actual moon landing, is Neil Armstrong raising the American flag on the moon.
This is sort of like doing a movie about the Battle of Iwo Jima and not having the guys raise an American flag.
Instead, they just decide to raise an empty flagpole with, like, an emoji sticker on it or something.
It makes no sense at all.
It's an iconic moment in American history.
But Ryan Gosling, who is Canadian, says that he thinks that Neil Armstrong saw himself more as a world citizen than as an American hero, which makes no sense at all.
He says, "I think this was widely regarded in the end "as a human achievement, "and that's how we chose to view it." Well, not by Americans it wasn't.
Not by Americans.
It turns out that when America was putting a man on the moon, China, which is the real reason why they're not putting the American flag in this film, is because they're afraid that it'll piss off the Chinese censors, and they want to make sure that the Chinese market goes to see the film, so they've removed the American flag.
It's the same reason that long ago, when they made Superman Returns, they omitted truth, justice, and the American way.
They turned it into truth, justice, and all that other stuff.
That Hollywood is really, really afraid of ticking off foreign audiences with all of the America?
There's only one problem with that logic, which is that nobody in foreign countries actually cares whether American films promote America, because it turns out America's a pretty fricking amazing place.
Like, we put a man on the moon.
That's one of the pieces of proof, actually.
So Ryan Gosling, Canadian, says, I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts.
And time and time again, he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible.
Those 400,000 people would have been Americans, by the way, who worked for the American government.
He was reminding everyone that he was just the tip of the iceberg.
And that's not just to be humble.
That's also true.
So I don't think Neil viewed himself as an American hero.
From my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite.
And we wanted the film to reflect Neil.
Alternatively, Hollywood is just catering to foreign audiences.
And so they are going to omit the American flag in a blatant attempt to grab Chinese money.
But let's be clear.
Putting a man on the moon was an American mission.
It was not a world mission, it was an American mission.
JFK, who announced the original mission to put a man on the moon, when he did this, when he talked about why we would put a man on the moon, he explicitly linked it to America's special role in the world as a provider of freedom.
Remember, this is the middle of the Cold War, and there was a lot of talk in those days, like right about this time, about the Russians putting a man into space on the Sputnik satellite.
And JFK decided, OK, we're going to fight back against that by actually going far beyond that.
We'll put a man on the moon.
Putting an American flag on the moon was the point of the endeavor.
It wasn't ancillary to the endeavor.
It was actually the point of the endeavor.
Here's JFK talking about the original moon mission.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.
Okay, and then he explicitly links the mission to, guess what?
The American flag.
Here's what he had to say about the American flag in announcing this mission.
He's talking about this at Rice University.
It's a very famous speech, obviously.
For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon, and to the planets beyond.
And we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom.
And peace!
So it turns out that the American flag was sort of the point, right?
That we didn't want the Russians to be up there on the moon using it as a base.
We didn't want the Chinese up there.
By the way, at the time that we were actually throwing ticker-take parades for Neil Armstrong, the Chinese were busy stringing up people who were dissenting from government policy.
So the fact that we are now catering to a Chinese government that remains a fascistic dictatorship, the fact that we are catering to that government in order to downplay the role of America, it has a lot to say with the nature of free markets.
Free markets are not by nature Moral when it comes to who they take into account.
Markets are moral only in the sense that they recognize that our property is the fruit of our labor.
That's what makes markets moral.
But there's nothing that says a free market is moral when it comes to which audience you are catering to.
And if Hollywood feels it can cater to a Chinese market by getting rid of American messaging, it will do so despite the immorality of that basic idea.
But there's something deeper happening here, and that is that Hollywood and the American left are deeply embarrassed by the idea that America is a nation that is a force for good in the world.
There's a hardcore of the left that believes that America historically, it's the Howard Zinn left, believes that America is historically a force for evil in the world.
If you go listen to the radicals over at like Chapo Trap House or something, another podcast on the left, What you will see is that they're constantly talking about historically how America has been a force for tyranny and fascism around the world.
And maybe it would have been better if America had just backed off the world stage and allowed the Soviets and the communists to dominate Africa, dominate South America.
It's all about America backing tyranny.
It's the Noam Chomsky view of history.
And that is being indicated here.
Every good thing America did is actually a world achievement.
And every bad thing America did is America's burden alone.
So slavery was America's alone, but putting a man on the moon, that was a world achievement.
In reality, it's sort of the reverse.
Slavery was universal in human history.
America fought a bloody war to get rid of slavery.
That does not mean that folks who engaged in slavery and back slavery in the United States are off the moral hook.
Far from it.
But, what is uniquely American is not slavery.
That was a universal world institution that was also enacted in the United States and was evil.
But what is uniquely American is what we did after slavery and the foundations of the country and the Constitution.
There are certain things that are unique about America.
The left reverses all of these historical truths.
Everything that is bad about America, in reality, the vast majority of things that have been bad about America were not unique to America.
They were rather universal.
And most of the things that are good about America tend to be pretty unique to America and not universal, which is why America's rise is coincident with the greatest reduction in world poverty in the history of mankind.
Why America's rise in terms of economic power is coincident with the dramatic decrease in child death.
In health problems, even in pollution in the last 20 years, America's been reducing its own pollution by leaps and bounds.
The fact is, America is a uniquely wonderful place.
And because Hollywood doesn't choose to recognize that, they will remove any indicator that anything good that was ever done under American auspices was done under the auspices of that American flag.
They will champion people kneeling for the American flag with regard to isolated instances of police misconduct, but they won't put the American flag on the moon.
It's more representative of the American flag when there's a bad cop than it is of the American flag when we legitimately expend billions of dollars to put a human being on the moon and put the American flag up there.
That's insanity, but unfortunately, that's a pretty prevalent view among a lot of folks on the radical left, and I would say even on the mainstream left.
Now, meanwhile, I think it's important to point out some news regarding some of the beloved candidates of the Democratic Party on the left.
One of the candidates who is rising fast in the polls is Beto O'Rourke.
He's running against Ted Cruz for the Senate in Texas, and the polls have him pretty close.
I mean, in spitting distance, some polls have him within the margin of error.
Democrats are, of course, extraordinarily excited about this.
If they could turn Texas blue, then they'd never lose another election.
I mean, basically, once Texas goes blue, the country goes blue.
Texas is certainly a bellwether state.
And what you saw in the last election, it was actually very interesting, is that while President Trump turned Ohio red, and he turned Florida red, and Wisconsin red, and while he turned Michigan red, Texas was trending more blue.
He actually won Texas by fewer points, I believe, than Mitt Romney won Texas in 2012, if I'm not mistaken.
In any case, Beto O'Rourke was expected to be far behind Ted Cruz in the Texas race.
Turnout is going to be very high on the Democratic side.
And I think Cruz's camp is worried about O'Rourke in a way that is pretty shocking, given the fact that Texas is a deep red state.
It is not a blue state.
And the proof is in the pudding.
Republicans dominate the state legislature.
They dominate the governor's office.
They have for years.
Beto O'Rourke, though, is being held up as the new face of the Democratic Party.
Should Beto O'Rourke win the Senate seat in Texas, there's very little doubt that he would be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination in 2020 from the Democratic side of the aisle.
He is a pretty good speaker.
They're trying to paint him as a sort of Obama-like figure, that he came out of nowhere, and therefore he is somebody who ought to be with a formidable resume.
But apparently his campaign has now run into a bit of a speed bump.
The speed bump being that he was involved in a DUI 20 years ago and actually apparently tried to flee the scene of the crime.
This is according to the Houston Chronicle.
U.S.
Representative Beto O'Rourke has long owned up to his drunken driving arrest 20 years ago, describing it in a Houston Chronicle op-ed piece earlier this week as a serious mistake for which there is no excuse.
Although the arrest has been public knowledge, police reports of the September 1998 incident, when the Democratic Senate candidate had just turned 26, shows more serious threat to public safety than has previously been reported.
State and local police reports obtained by the Chronicle and Express News show O'Rourke was driving drunk at what a witness called a high rate of speed in a 75 mile per hour zone on Interstate 10 about a mile from the New Mexico border.
He lost control and hit a truck, sending his car careening across the center median into oncoming lanes.
The witness, who stopped at the scene, later told police that O'Rourke had tried to drive away from the scene.
So he's involved in a DUI.
Allegedly, a DUI hit and run after crossing into oncoming traffic.
O'Rourke blew a 0.136 and 0.134 on police breathalyzers, which means that basically that he was made of alcohol at that point.
That is not a mild drunk driving arrest.
That is, you have been drinking incessantly for hours, and then you get in a car and rush into oncoming traffic and then try to flee the scene.
This is well above the legal limit.
The legal limit in Texas is .08.
So he's driving almost twice the legal limit.
He was arrested at the scene, charged with DUI, completed a court-approved diversion program, and had the charges dismissed.
Now listen, as somebody who's had their license suspended for speeding, I've never driven drunk.
I have had my license suspended.
I would say that there is a major difference between A speeding ticket or even a DUI where you're pulled over and you blow above the legal limit.
And you rushing into oncoming traffic, hitting other cars and then trying to flee.
That's a significant amount worse.
So Beto O'Rourke's candidacy could be in trouble.
We'll talk about that.
Plus another Democratic candidate who could be in trouble for even more insane reasons in just one second.
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OK, so Beto O'Rourke could be in trouble in his Texas race to the great consternation of Democrats.
That's not even the craziest Democrat story of the day.
The craziest Democrat story of the day comes courtesy of state Senate candidate Julia Salazar.
So, Julia Salazar is running for the State Senate in New York, and she is, according to City and State New York, she has attracted significant, often fawning media coverage, an army of enthusiastic volunteers, endorsements from politicians and activist organizations, and now withering scrutiny.
A series of articles have dug into her childhood religion and activist history, exposing facts that either contradict or provide relevant context to some of her biographical claims.
Based on interviews with her mother and brother, and Salazar herself, City and State has discovered additional, previously unreported instances of Salazar falsely presenting her background and others that are, while not technically untrue, misleading.
But the deeper one digs into the competing narratives of Salazar's upbringings, the less it appears to be a simple matter of truth or lies or he said she said.
Salazar has told a few outright falsehoods.
She claimed her family immigrated from Colombia, when in reality, she, her brother, and mother were born and raised in the United States.
And her father first came to the United States as a teenager and was naturalized before Salazar was ever born.
And she also claimed that she had Jewish background.
She has no Jewish background.
At all.
But she's anti-Israel.
She wanted to claim that she was Jewish, that she could get away with the anti-Israel nonsense.
She also claimed that she grew up working class in an economically stressed family.
It turns out that is not true.
According to her brother, my family immigrated to the U.S.
from Colombia.
So she said, my family immigrated to the U.S.
from Colombia when I was a baby.
My mom ended up raising my brother and me as a single mom without a college degree and from a working class background.
That's what she told Jacobin Magazine, the socialist magazine.
Her brother says he remembers them being financially comfortable, living in a big house along a river in Jupiter, Florida.
Each of the siblings had their own rooms.
The six-figure income their father, Luis Hernan Salazar, earned as a pilot meant the family could afford to set aside college saving funds of about $6,000 for each child.
He says, we were very much middle class.
We had a house in Jupiter along the river.
It was in a beautiful neighborhood.
I feel very strongly about my family, and I want to tell the truth.
So all of this is basically a lie.
So that's pretty awesome.
She also claimed that she didn't have permanent residence in the United States.
That is not true.
Everyone in her family was a U.S.
citizen because her father became a U.S.
citizen sometime around 1984.
So all sorts of good stuff from Julia Salazar.
And, uh, she is, uh, she's kind of a crazy person, it sounds like.
But the Democrats are defending her because, obviously, she fulfills certain intersectional boxes.
And that's, of course, why they're defending Beto O'Rourke as well, because those intersectional boxes matter a lot more than being qualified to actually be a legislator in the United States.
The Democrats are much more interested in this sort of intersectional racial politics than they are in anything else.
And this is a broader trend in American politics right now.
It's very weird what's happening in American politics.
On the left, you have people jumping into a sort of left-wing populism that is wrapped around identity politics.
So populism, to describe what populism is in sort of policy context, It's difficult, because populism is more a tactic than it is natural policy.
Populism is when people say, I speak for the people.
That's populism.
When people say, I speak for a policy, that's usually not populism.
But if you had to sort of peg down the populist attitude toward policy, it's usually distrust of major institutions.
That's how Jamie Kerchick puts it, and I think this is right.
distrust of major institutions, so sort of conspiracy theorizing about the power of institutions in life, belief that your identity group is paramount, and distrust of the markets.
Those would be sort of the three big things.
You distrust the free market because you think the free market is rigged, you distrust the institutions like the government, and you believe that your identity group is paramount.
Well, what's weird is that both left and right have now embraced a lot of these particular principles.
On the right, this manifests as anti-immigrant attitude, a belief that we have to maintain a quote unquote white majority, There are parts of the right that have actually argued this, that the real problem with immigration is not people immigrating from cultures that may not be well assimilated in the United States, but it's actually the people themselves coming from countries that we don't like.
That's a bad attitude, and that's sort of right-wing populism with regard to immigration.
On the left, it's actually manifested as the out-group is white Americans, in many cases, and the in-group is minority citizens who have been put under the thumb.
Anti-institutions, on the right you see this as the deep state, right?
Everything that the government does is conspiratorial and an attempt to get you.
And while I am on board with a lot of suspicion of government interventionism in the economy, I have real doubts that the government is a malevolent force in American life.
I think it's much more to do with radical incompetence and stupidity, because most people are radically incompetent and stupid, than it has to do with conspiracy theories inside the government.
And on the right, the anti-free market attitude, which we'll talk about in a second, has taken the form of big corporations are backing the leftist agenda.
So we'll talk about all those three from the right.
On the left, these three attitudes manifest in a different way.
So the in-group loyalty is loyalty to this idea of a majority-minority country, that that's very important.
We have to push that and we have to say that the future of America is non-white.
You see this in an article in the New York Times today.
The anti-free markets attitude is evident on the left in virtually every respect.
And then you have the distrust of institutions, which is America is systemically racist, America is institutionally biased, and all the rest.
And so there's this meeting of the minds when it comes to distrust of institutions, distrust of the markets, and belief that the in-group is paramount.
So let's talk about, I think that the populism of the right has in large part been driven by the populism of the left.
I think that a lot of the populism of the right is a reactionary response to the populism of the left, particularly on issues racial.
So I mentioned Julia Salazar, I mentioned also Beto O'Rourke.
Obviously, a lot of the enthusiasm for Andrew Gillum in Florida has to do with the fact that he's black, not just the fact that he is a democratic socialist.
By the way, I mentioned, quick correction, yesterday I suggested he was gay because it's just a mistake.
He's not gay, he has a wife.
In any case, the intersectional politics of the left is very evident and the proof today comes courtesy of the New York Times.
There are two separate pieces in the New York Times talking about the threat of whiteness in America.
And why it would be good if there was a white minority in America.
This is the identity politics populism of the left that has led them to embrace a bunch of radical candidates on their own side.
There's a piece by Thomas Edsel talking about demography in the United States and the fact that there are a lot of people, he's very against this, there are a lot of people who are Hispanic who now identify as white.
Now normally we would think, okay, maybe that's a fine thing, like how you self-identify racially Maybe that's an indicator that you feel comfortable in the United States.
If there's this line that's being put out by the press that America is a whites-only country and that whites are comfortable in America, and then you started self-identifying as white, maybe that isn't you being a race traitor.
Maybe that's you basically saying, I don't care about my race anymore.
I'm just going to identify as what the media would identify me as because I'm successful.
The reality is I think that our focus on race in the country is extraordinarily over the top in the most tolerant and diverse country in human history.
But this article by Edsel in the New York Times suggests that it's really bad that people are self-identifying as white instead.
We should cudgel them back into particular racial groups so that we can have this majority-minority America and then identify voters by their particular strain of race.
This is something Edsel is pushing over at the New York Times.
That's not the only column.
There's a piece in the New York Times today that's even worse, which I'm going to get to in just a second.
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Okay, so the left's populism on race takes the form of identity politics.
There's a piece by a person named Pankaj Mishra.
He's a contributing opinion writer focused on ideas and politics of the New York Times.
The title is, The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult.
And the basic idea is that everything she disagrees with is whiteness.
Everything she doesn't like is whiteness.
Because white men are bad.
And whiteness is bad.
And what would be better is if we were ruled by an intersectional coalition of people who have been victimized in the past by American whiteness.
So this is what this idiot writes, Pankaj Mishra, who is representative of a serious strain of thought in the left-wing community.
White men, an obscure Australian academic named Charles Henry Pearson predicted in his 1893 book, National Life and Character, a forecast would be elbowed and hustled and perhaps even thrust aside by people they had long regarded as their inferiors, black and yellow races.
China in particular would be a major threat.
Pearson, prone to terrors of racial extinction while living in a settler colony in an Asian neighborhood, thought it was imperative to defend the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilization.
His prescriptions for racial self-defense thunderously echoed around the white Anglosphere, a community of men with shared historical ties to Britain.
Theodore Roosevelt, who held a complacent 19th century faith buttressed by racist pseudoscience that non-white peoples were hopelessly inferior, reported to Pearson the great effect of his book among all our men here in Washington.
In the years that followed, politicians and pundits in Britain and its settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and the United States would jointly forge an identity geopolitics of the higher races.
Today, it has written.
So you're saying what is 1893 have to do with like 2018?
It's one hundred and twenty one, one hundred and twenty five years later.
What is that?
Why?
Well, let let Pankaj Mishra explain today.
This ideology has reached its final and most desperate phase with existential fears about endangered white power feverishly circulating once again between the core and the periphery of the greatest modern empire.
The fundamentalist question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive, President Trump said last year in a speech hailed by the British journalist Douglas Murray, the Canadian columnist Mark Stein, and the American editor Rich Lowry.
More recently, Mr. Trump tweeted falsely about large-scale killing of white farmers in South Africa, a preoccupation deepened by Rupert Murdoch's media of white supremacists around the world.
So, in other words, because Trump said that the West may be losing its will to survive, that is an indicator of white supremacy.
But the West is a unique thing in human history, and it is not because of race.
It is actually because of not caring about race.
The West was shaped by a couple of cultural forces.
Judeo-Christian values and Greek reason, none of them are exclusive to race.
I mean, Augustine was from North Africa.
The idea that everybody who was a part of Western civilization was of one race.
There were legitimate racial battles between Italians and between the Irish and the British.
It's only now that we consider whiteness a thing.
And that is largely, yes, due to racism of whites, but now it's being re kind of vivified by this idea of the left that whiteness is the prevailing culturally dominant hierarchy and we have to get rid of it.
And so in this article, this is the part that's amazing.
This this author basically connects whiteness to every conservative idea.
So if you're a conservative, this means that you are an advocate of whiteness, which means that we need an identity politics of the left.
We need a populist identity politics of the left to fight the white overstructure.
Here's what Mishra writes.
Mr. Trump appears to some of these powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the higher races.
The Muslim-baiting British conservative politician Boris Johnson says that he is increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.
Mr. Murray, the British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is reminding the West of what is great about ourselves.
The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson claims that his loathing of identity politics would have driven him to vote for Trump.
So, in other words, all of these guys are apparently white supremacists because Trump is a white supremacist and Trump was reading Teddy Roosevelt.
I find all of this highly doubtful, but it's this identity politics of the left that has driven the left into a populist area with regard to race.
Now, they're obviously in a populist area with regard to opposition to free markets.
Bernie Sanders represents that side of the party.
And then finally, you have the Democrats embracing this distrust of institutions, the idea that all of our institutions are riddled with corruption and evil, and therefore must be torn down from the inside.
This has been matched on the right by the rise of a sort of comparative populism.
This looks a lot more like European politics, by the way.
Far-right politics in Europe look a lot like what's happening on the populist right here in the United States, which is big government but distrust of big corporations.
Anger at immigrants and a belief that free markets are corrupt, inherently.
And we're starting to see that on the right, and it's disquieting.
I don't like it on the left.
It's really ugly on the left, and I think the reactionary right is doing some of the same stuff.
As an example, President Trump yesterday was giving a speech in which he was talking about the quote-unquote, old corrupt globalist ruling class.
Now remember, President Trump is the President of the United States.
He is the head of a government that has Republicans in charge of the House and the Senate.
The executive branch is incredibly powerful.
The Supreme Court is largely stacked with Republican appointees.
And yet here he is, railing against the idea of this old corrupt globalist ruling class, which is the populist language of distrust of institutions and free markets.
This sort of populism...
is anti-classical liberalism.
It is.
When he says globalist ruling class, I'm not sure what he means.
He's very unclear about this terminology, but it perpetuates this myth that people are losing their jobs because there's a cabal of people in power on the coast who are attempting to remove jobs from people in the middle of the country and send them to China, which is not actually accurate.
Free trade policy is not responsible for the vast majority of job loss in the United States.
Free trade policy is really involved with the vast majority of growth in the United States.
Technological progress The so-called resistance is mad because their ideas have been rejected by the American people.
ever been for the last 30 years.
And here's President Trump going off on the old globalist ruling class, which sounds a lot like Bernie Sanders, frankly. - The so-called resistance is mad because their ideas have been rejected by the American people.
They're the old and corrupt globalist ruling class that squandered trillions of dollars on foreign adventures. - I mean, that foreign adventures language, that's like Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders stuff, right?
The idea that we've squandered money on foreign— We are still involved, by the way, in a war in Afghanistan.
The president of the United States has spent an enormous amount of money on the military, as he should.
But this populism of the right, which is rising to meet a populism of the left, is not good.
The best indicator of this last night was Tucker Carlson, who's very into a lot of this populist rhetoric.
Now, I think Tucker's a really talented host.
I think Tucker has a lot of intelligent things to say.
But here he was yesterday, Legitimately repeating Bernie Sanders' talking points to go after Amazon.
Now, going after Amazon has become a preoccupation since President Trump decided particular corporations are worth targeting.
Amazon is a fine American corporation that provides literally hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, keeps other businesses in business because you can sell your product via Amazon.
I've never understood the attacks on Amazon.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
Bernie Sanders' attacks on Amazon have been that Amazon doesn't pay its workers enough.
But the reality is that Amazon pays the workers what they are willing to accept because no one is being forced into a job.
The chief reason that Amazon, like a lot of major corporations in the United States, doesn't pay very much to its workers is because, number one, they don't have to.
Right?
Supply meets demand in the labor market as well.
And second, because the government provides an enormous amount of aid in the form of food stamps and welfare programs to supplement the income that people are earning from corporations like Amazon.
If you actually want Amazon's pay rates to go up, all you have to do is remove a lot of these government subsidies, and then Amazon will start paying higher wages because no one can accept a job that is not a quote-unquote living wage.
You hear this phrase a lot from the left.
A living wage.
Amazon's not paying a living wage.
Well, by definition, Amazon is paying a living wage or you would be dead, right?
Any wage that you choose to accept is by definition a living wage because if you were dead, you couldn't accept it.
Or if it were going to kill you, you couldn't accept it.
What you mean is that it's a wage you don't like, but the worker likes it enough to take it.
So here's Tucker Carlson, nonetheless, using the same populist rhetoric as Bernie Sanders.
Again, not trusting free markets because it's more important to distrust institutions and therefore call for a sort of bizarre centralized government control.
It's certainly enough to pay his employees well, but he doesn't.
A huge number of Amazon workers are so poorly paid, they qualify for federal welfare benefits.
According to data from the non-profit group New Food Economy, nearly one in three Amazon employees in Arizona, for example, was on food stamps last year.
Jeff Bezos isn't paying his workers enough to eat, so you made up the difference with your tax dollars.
Next time you see Jeff Bezos, make certain that he says thank you.
Okay, it's actually the opposite.
Jeff Bezos is not paying those people because they are on, and paying them less because they are on welfare.
The welfare exists, and therefore he is paying them less.
That's just the way markets work.
Again, if there's a subsidy, more people are going to be on that subsidy, and you are subsidizing the business on the other end.
The reason that I bring all of this up, really, is because I think that we're moving toward a darker time in American politics, where certain basic principles of classical liberalism are going by the wayside.
There are inherent contradictions in the populist ideology and philosophy.
These inherent contradictions are pretty simple.
Let's say that you're an in-group.
You trust the members of that in-group.
That's an institutional in-group.
But you don't trust institutions.
So why is it that you trust your in-group, but you don't trust institutions?
That doesn't make any sense.
You don't trust free markets, but you also don't trust the institutions that are there to restrict the free markets.
So who do you trust?
Which is why populism basically ends up being a lot of anti-sloganeering and fulmination about problems without any real solutions.
But I guess that angry fulmination has become the culmination of our politics.
And then, the most irritating part is that we have politicians who engage in this sort of crap on a regular basis and then gloss over it the minute that it rears its ugly head.
In a second, I'm going to talk about that.
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As I say, one of the elements of deep irritation is that populism, because it is seductive, populism, The basic picture of populism is, it's not your fault.
That is the basic picture of populism.
You got a problem in your life?
Well, blame it on the failure of markets, or blame it on the failure of institutions, or blame it on the out-group that is targeting your in-group.
Never blame it on yourself.
Never say, maybe the problem in my life is I live in a free country with a free market, with institutions that are largely trustworthy, and I'm just effing up my life.
Populism says, it's not you, it's everybody else.
And so you see that on the right and on the left, and it makes politics nastier, because now you have two in groups that see the out group as an enemy.
And that means that the battles are going to become worse and worse.
I was talking with my mom about this last night with regard to the Catholic Church, because she was suggesting, she was saying, I don't understand how it is that there are so many people in various institutions that are willing to go along with, for example, the abuse of children, Just to protect their institution.
And I was explaining to her that human psychology is such that we like to belong to groups and these groups make us feel protected.
This is the in-group mentality that is so endemic to populism.
But it's also endemic to the human condition.
If you're part of a group, you are safer.
If your group is threatened, you're going to rise to the defense of the group.
And it does not matter whether the group is threatened for good reason or for bad reason.
So, if you read a child sex abuse scandal as an attack on your group, rather than on as a good-hearted attempt to cleanse the group of something bad, You are likely to respond by defending your group, even if it means defending the bad thing.
And you're now seeing this inside both political parties as well.
You're seeing Democrats respond to legitimate criticisms of their policies, ideas, and politicians as you're attacking my identity and my identity group.
Therefore, you're evil and I will fight you and I will try to shut you down.
I will censor you and I will use every method at my disposal to silence you.
And then you see on the right, every time President Trump, for example, does something that's actually morally bereft, People on the right say, well, you're actually attacking my in-group.
It's not that you're attacking Trump.
I understand your real motive is to destroy my in-group.
And the problem is that in both cases, that's sort of half right.
The right does want to destroy the left's in-group, and the left does want to destroy the right's in-group.
The only way to get past this is to get past the in-groups themselves and to say, listen, I'm not interested in destroying your in-group.
I don't like your ideology, but that's not a group, right?
The groups that we're talking about that are really dangerous are these identity politics in-groups, the identity politics of whiteness or of blackness or of Hispanicness.
Those are the in-groups that I'm not threatening any of that stuff.
I see you as an individual, and your rip on President Trump for schtupping a porn star and then paying her off $130,000, that is not necessarily an attempt to destroy whiteness.
But I think that the radicals in each group have an advantage.
Once people are engaged in a certain tribal loyalty to their in-group, radicals are able to take advantage of that, because the more radical you are, the more you're threatened by the out-group, which means that your in-group comes to your defense.
You say that again slower.
The more that you are radical, the more outgroups have reason to attack you.
But those attacks, the very presence of the attacks, drives the in-group to greater solidarity.
So it's easy for radicals to take footholds in in-groups that feel threatened.
That's a very, very dangerous thing.
You're seeing it happen with populism across the country.
What's truly irritating is some of the people who have been pushing exactly this sort of populism, exactly this sort of in-group, out-group division.
Those people now claiming that they had nothing to do with it.
So, for example, Joe Biden was speaking at John McCain's eulogy yesterday.
And former Vice President Biden, who obviously wants to run in 2020, says that he saw John McCain as a unifying figure.
And he thinks that we need to get past the attacks on each other's motives.
What he says here is correct and good and anti-populist.
There's only one problem.
It was always appropriate to challenge another senator's judgment.
But never appropriate to challenge their motive.
When you challenge their motive, it's impossible to get to go.
But all we do today...
You can stop it there.
Weird, because I seem to recall Joe Biden saying this about Mitt Romney's motives going back to the 2012 campaign.
A campaign, by the way, that I think broke the country.
I think 2012 is really the moment that the country, I think, fragmented maybe beyond recognition.
Here was Joe Biden driving this leftist populism of identity politics that has driven the reaction and led to a populist rise on all sides.
Look at their budget and what they're proposing.
Romney wants to let the, he said in the first hundred days, he's gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules.
Unchain Wall Street.
They're going to put y'all back in chains.
He was speaking at a historically black church.
At a historically black church.
He was saying that Mitt Romney was going to put y'all back in chains.
But don't worry, he wasn't questioning anybody's motives.
Joe Biden also likened the Tea Party to terrorists.
Back during that campaign in 2000, in 2011, actually, he said that.
And even going all the way back to 2008, when he was running against John McCain, right?
He was on the VP side, running with Barack Obama against John McCain.
He said that it was unpatriotic not to back his tax program.
We want to take money and put it back in the pocket of middle-class people.
Anybody making over $250,000 is going to pay more.
You got us.
Time to be patriotic, Kate.
Time to jump in.
Time to be part of the deal.
If you don't back his program, you're not a patriot.
All these people who are engaging in this exact sort of populist political rhetoric, now they turn around and say they don't like it when Trump does it.
They were the creators of it.
So let's be clear where all of this came from, and let's also be clear that standing for a certain moral standard when it comes to classical liberalism and politics is actually an important thing.
There are central principles in American politics, and those principles do include seeing ourselves, seeing America as the big in-group, and unified by principle, and seeing free markets as a good thing, and seeing our institutions as bedrocks of American honesty.
We're spoiled in this country.
We really are when it comes to the honesty of our institutions.
We like to talk about the corruption of American institutions.
Yes, there are certain institutions that have corruption embedded in them.
There are certain individuals who are corrupt.
But try another country and see how corrupted it is where you're actually paying off police officers to get your business done.
I mean, the idea that one of America's great virtues is the fact that our institutions are historically non-corrupt, actually.
Okay, so let's get into some mailbag.
Let's get into some mailbag.
So here we go.
Steven asks, "Does your wife brag "at her work about her husband, the lawyer?" Because obviously I brag a lot about my wife, the doctor.
No, actually my wife tends to keep what I do on the DL, on the down low, because there's a lot of blowback in every institution in California if people know that you're a conservative.
There have been a few cases where patients have gone in and seen my wife and known who she was, and she always finds that hilarious and flattering.
But, like, a lot of her co-workers don't know what I do for a living, which is pretty hilarious.
I'm not sure why you wouldn't add the duties to the Air Force.
I'm not enough of a military expert to know the answer to that question.
But I do like the idea that we ought to have some sort of military understanding of space, because that is a space that we are going to have to protect.
Obviously, there are foreign nations that are attempting to militarize space.
Melissa says, My relationship for four years just ended.
The main reason given was that my now ex didn't want to marry me or possibly ever get married if it meant that there would be times of struggle in the relationship.
He comes from a broken home with a sort of Elizabeth Taylor story on one side.
My parents have been married for 34 years, so I've watched them work through all the tough times and come out stronger.
As someone who has what appears to be a strong marriage, what is your advice to a millennial looking to find a future spouse willing to build a life together, including overcoming adversities?
All the best, Melissa." Well, honestly, this is an entry-level question that you need to be asking the person you're dating.
You shouldn't find out four years into the relationship that the person doesn't want difficulties in the relationship and doesn't want marriage.
You should be dating for marriage.
In my view, this is the only purpose to date.
I really, I do not understand the idea of dating to live together.
I don't understand the idea of dating for sex.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
The entire purpose of dating for marriage, of dating should be that you want to create a long lasting relationship within which to build a family.
And that means asking tough questions on like the first date.
And by the way, as soon as you date with direction in mind, your dating life is going to change because you're actually going to be able to dismiss people who are a waste of your time.
You're not going to be wasting time with losers who latch on to you for four years and then decide they don't want to get married.
And ladies, you're not going to draw a man in by living with him.
That's not how this works.
The old saw, no one buys the cow if they can get the milk for free.
There's a large grain of truth to that.
You know what kind of women men want to marry?
The kind of women who make it clear that they want to be married.
If men can get away with not marrying women, then they will do it.
Because that's how men are.
If you want to get married, make clear to the dude you're not doing anything until you get married, and he will marry you.
Really.
There's an entry level... There's... In any relationship, whether it is business or whether it is personal, in order for somebody to fully commit to a business relationship, they have to have skin in the game.
The only way to get skin in the game when it comes to actual marriage is to say, you are not going to get anything out of me, basically.
And I mean, in terms of sex, particularly.
Until marriage actually happens.
I think that virginity until marriage is not just a good idea for your own protection.
I think, and for your spiritual good, I think it's actually a pretty good negotiating tactic is the reality.
So, do what you want.
It's free country.
But, if you want my advice on how to actually snag the kind of person worth marrying, make clear to the person that that's what you're looking for.
Because it draws a different kind of person.
Every job has a job description.
The job description of husband is not the same as the job description of guy I want to live with for four years and then get dumped by.
Well, again, I think the number of people who truly believe that religion dictates socialism is very low.
Well, again, I think the number of people who truly believe that religion dictates socialism is very low.
I think there are a lot of socialists who like to use religion as a guise, but the sort of progressive social justice religious folks, very often these are the same people who suggest that the Bible is fine with abortions.
So I have a very tough time believing the sincerity of those particular motives.
And I say I don't like questioning people's motives, but when the motive clearly does not line up with the purported motive, I have a tough time understanding where exactly the gap takes place.
That said, You know, it does say in the New Testament that he who does not work nor shall he eat.
The New Testament focus on sharing in common among us, which is one that the left likes to use a lot, is specifically talking about the disciples who are being treated more as a family.
There is something worth noting when it comes to religious talk about the quote-unquote sharing among people.
Religious communities were designed to build out family to larger levels.
That's basically the idea.
You're a socialist.
I'm a communist in my own family, right?
From each according to his ability to each according to her need when it comes to my daughter, right?
That's the way it works inside families.
That's not the way that works in society at large and trying to apply the rules of religious redistributionism in a communal context to a broader society that Compels redistributionism is actually a form of theocracy so all these all these SJWs who are quoting the Bible Ask them whether they're for theocracy because it's kind of weird Bobby says hey, Ben.
My son was finally born My question is considering you like classical do you also like opera if so what were your top five operas be?
Can't wait to see you in Pittsburgh this November.
Thanks, so I do really enjoy opera Bizet's Carmen The Magic Flute by Mozart.
Those would be the top two.
I'm trying to think, what else?
La Boheme.
Let's see, there's so much good opera.
I actually have to think about this one.
There's some Verde, there's some Puccini that's really, really good stuff.
I do like Fidelio, which is an underrated opera by Beethoven.
But basically, everything by Mozart is just Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni, obviously.
That's a huge, how could I forget Don Giovanni?
My favorite, actually, of all of them.
Shea says, all husbands and wife fight from time to time.
How do your fights go with your wife?
And have you ever told her facts don't care about your feelings?
So I did actually, I have ripped off a meme that somebody made about me in fights with my wife.
Whenever my wife, my wife does what all...
All women do, which is she gets dressed and she puts on makeup and she looks very pretty.
And then she says, do you like this outfit?
And I say, yes, I think you look beautiful.
And she says, well, I don't feel beautiful.
And then I say, facts don't care about your feelings.
Right.
So that is so I have actually used that line before.
But as far as fights with my wife, we don't typically tend to fight.
I mean, really, we don't fight a lot when we do disagree.
I think that I've tried to develop over the years the capacity to understand where my own upset is coming from.
Is it coming from her being unreasonable?
Or is it coming from me?
Being unreasonable or glomming on too hard to my own emotional state because sometimes you're just stuck in an emotional state and now you're going to lash out about it.
Very often fights come because you bottle stuff up for a long time.
But there are a few key things, I think, in fights.
Number one, never say always or never.
When you say always or never, it's always inaccurate.
That's the one time you can use always.
So when you say to your spouse, you always do X.
It's a recipe for failure, because your spouse doesn't always do X. Your spouse sometimes does X, and it drives you nuts.
Right?
Your spouse does something sometimes that drives you nuts, but it's important to recognize that the sometimes is not always.
Also, I would say that most of the major fights that you're going to have, most of the major character flaws you're gonna have, get them settled while you're young, because by the time you hit 65, you're set in your ways, and it's very difficult to change.
You see this with people who are above the age of 60, and I think that it's important to try and iron all that stuff out as fast as possible.
That said, do I fight with my wife sometimes?
Yeah, my wife and I had a bit of a tiff on Sunday.
It was actually really, really funny.
It ended up being really funny.
So basically, here's the story, and she's going to be so pissed I'm going to tell this on air.
So here's the story.
So my wife was really, really tired.
She'd been tired because she'd been working the previous night.
And we had to go to this bat mitzvah that, you know, I didn't know people, but she knew the people.
And so we had to go to this bat mitzvah on a Sunday night.
And my wife has, my pet peeve with my wife is a really simple and stupid one.
She loses her phone all the time.
Like legitimately, she loses it all the time.
And when she loses her phone, she doesn't say to me, she doesn't look for it for 10 minutes and then say, I've lost my phone.
She immediately says, I've lost my phone, which makes me feel like she's losing it even when she's not because she'll say, I've lost my phone.
Then five seconds later, she'll look down and it's right there.
So in any case, we're about to leave and we have both our kids in the house and my parents are taking care of the kids.
And my wife turns to me and she says, I don't have my phone.
And I say, well, is that a big deal?
Like I've got my phone.
My parents can call me.
It's not really a big deal.
She said, well, I feel more comfortable with my phone.
I said, okay.
Why don't you just go back in the house and get it?
We're sitting right outside the house.
And she says, I'm too tired.
Can you get it?
I said, you know, OK, fine.
We're already late to this party.
OK, OK, fine.
And, you know, I'm not I'm not happy about it.
My son right now is very attached to me.
So if I walk back in the house, we both sneaked out of the house.
He doesn't make a fuss.
If we walk back in the house, my son is going to jump on me like a barnacle on a whale.
Right?
This is what he does.
He's two and a half and he just runs to me and he grabs my leg and will not let go.
And it's very cute, but when you're trying to leave and then he breaks down into a crying fit, it's not quite as cute.
So I say, you know, it would be better if you went inside because he's not going to bother you as much.
He says, no, I'm really tired.
I just, I don't care enough.
I don't care enough.
Let's just go.
I said, well, now you've got me, right?
Because you've just said that you want the phone and you don't want to go.
And now you're telling me that you don't care and let's go.
So fine, I'll go inside.
I'll go look for the phone.
So I go inside.
I have no idea where the damn phone is.
Well, how would I know where the phone is?
I don't know where she's been in the house.
So I'm searching around the house, and sure enough, like a shot, out comes my son, running to me and grabbing my leg and screaming.
So I pick him up.
I'm walking around the house.
I look around for five minutes.
I can't find it.
We're even later to this party.
I walk out to the... I finally kind of...
Push my son off to my dad, and I start to walk out of the house, and I walk back to the car, and then my son comes charging out the front door after me.
And I walk back to the car, I said, sweetheart, I don't know where your phone is.
Can you get up off your butt and go in the house and look for your phone?
You know where your phone is, right?
Like, you know where it is, or at least you have a better idea, because you know where you were in the house.
She says, no, no, I don't need it.
It's not important.
I said, well, now you've made me go in the house, and my son's running after me, and I'm going to have to go back in the house now.
And by this point, I'm ticked.
I said, I'm going to go back in the house, Mm-hmm and I go back in the house.
I look some more can't find the phone, right?
I finally come out I say sweetheart.
You're being really really unreasonable.
This is not reasonable and she says well, I don't care anymore Let's just go so she consents.
I'm extraordinarily pissed because I'm very angry at this point And when I go angry, I tend to go silent rather than yelling.
I'm not a yeller so I go silent and we drive for about three minutes and now the car is on and because we're driving and Then strangely a phone begins to ring In the car.
Through the speakers of the car.
And we've tried calling her phone before.
We got nothing.
It turns out that it's ringing in the car because even when your phone is on silent, it rings through the car speakers, right?
But the car wasn't on when she was sitting in it.
Where was the phone the entire time?
Beneath her butt.
So if she had just gotten up for 10 seconds, she would have seen that the phone was right there.
And we would not have had to do any of this.
It was my dad calling just to tell me that the kids were fine.
And I said, Dad, if I come home in the car by myself, it's because I tossed my wife's body in a lake.
And, you know, don't tell the cops.
We both started laughing because sometimes it was something out of a sitcom.
So that's typically how our fights kind of go.
They usually end with us laughing about most of them.
I will say my wife is an incredibly understanding and giving person.
And so when I have critiques of her, she takes them really well.
And I've tried to do the same.
And it means that our fights become less fights and more discussions about how we can improve in the future, which is the best way to handle things.
And it has to be less accusatory for fights.
It has to be less accusing and a lot more sort of, um, Here's how we can fix the problem.
Fights have to be problem solving oriented.
They have to start off as understanding oriented and then move to problem solving.
They can't start off as problem solving and then move to understanding.
Because if you start off with, I want to solve this problem, the other person doesn't feel understood.
That's a hard one for me.
Okay, let's see.
Gabriel says, So I think that we should know how everyone feels politically, and then we can take it with a grain of salt.
And you can say, listen, I'm a conservative, but I'm trying to cover this story straight.
I do this on the show all the time, actually.
in their coverage.
Perhaps there's a difference between an ideal and practical approach.
So I think that we should know how everyone feels politically and then we can take it with a grain of salt.
And you can say, listen, I'm a conservative, but I'm trying to cover this story straight.
I do this on the show all the time, actually.
I say all the time on the show, I'm a conservative, but I'm going to try and be as objective as possible on this story.
You can take my objectivity with a grain of salt, but at least I'm gonna try and separate my opinion out.
That seems to me the honest way to do things.
Being completely transparent is the best way.
Okay, final one.
Mark says, Hey Ben, I'm addicted to all things Ben Shapiro.
The first thing I do when my feet hit the floor every day is check Daily Wire.
My question is what sites do you check?
What are your first couple of go-to sites when you start your day?
Thanks.
Your biggest fan, Mary.
Please come to Tampa soon.
So, honestly, I'm a Twitter guy.
Obviously, I'm on Twitter all the time.
One of the reasons I tweet so often is because it's also where I get my news.
A lot of my retweets, the reason I retweet so often is to remind myself of stuff that I want to talk about or write about a little bit later in the day.
Twitter is still the central source of news.
So, I think that's something worth noting.
Okay, you know what?
I lied.
One more.
Sorry, guys.
Here it is.
Oh, there's so many good questions today and I'm so mad.
Jacob says, Hey Ben, my name is Jacob.
I'm a 19 year old college student.
I'm also a proud third degree member of the Knights of Columbus and a proud Catholic.
With the recent news of the scandals inside the Vatican, a lot of hate for my church has come to light.
It pains me to hear people talk like this about my faith.
As a very religious person, and since people of the Jewish faith are no strangers to hate, do you have any advice on how to deal with it?
Thank you, Jacob.
Well, I think you have to determine what the cause of the hatred is.
Very often people are using the hatred of a particular incident or thing as an excuse for hatred of the church generally.
You see this with anti-semitism all the time.
It's like, they just, people hate the Jews and they just find some sort of hook to latch on.
So, people hate the Jews because all the Jews are communists.
No, people hate the Jews because all the Jews are capitalist pigs.
No, people hate the Jews because of the state of Israel.
No, people hate the Jews because they're a rootless, nationless people.
The same thing happens with regard to any outgroup.
If you hate the outgroup, you can find an excuse to hate the outgroup.
And trying to identify whether this is an honest critique of the ingroup is a worthwhile endeavor.
Try to determine from where all of this is coming.
Okay, you know what?
I lied again.
It's a good question.
So this is, I promise, this is the actual last one.
And we'll do a very short Things I Like and Things I Hate just to round it up.
Gregory says, Dear Supreme Overlord Shapiro, Recently, I got into a debate with one of my good friends over the definition of racism.
My friend contends that according to people with PhDs who study the issue, true racism is when the race that holds power or privilege in a society uses that power or privilege to suppress other people of other races.
My friend went on to say, because of white privilege, it is only possible for white people to be racist.
Well, I totally agree with you.
Now, does that mean that all racism is inherently equally dangerous?
Of course not.
Racism combined with power is a lot more dangerous than racism combined with non-power.
Well, I totally agree with you.
Now, does that mean that all racism is inherently equally dangerous?
Of course not.
Racism combined with power is a lot more dangerous than racism combined with non-power.
But racism itself is a toxic brew.
And even if you are victimized and you engage in racism, what you are doing is poisoning your kids.
And you never know in a free country, and even in non-free societies, which race is going to end up on top again.
This is the problem with the argument that racism is inherently connected to power.
Well, so if a group, let's take Zimbabwe, for example.
Whites were racist against blacks in Zimbabwe.
Clearly, clearly.
Now, let's say that, and so blacks, many blacks were racist against whites in Zimbabwe.
Was that a good thing?
Was that an okay thing?
Well, maybe the argument would go they didn't have any power, so they couldn't actually be racist.
But then it turns out that black folks took power in Zimbabwe, and then that regime has now reduced white farmers in Zimbabwe to almost a subject state by seizing their land.
Is it only become racism when they gain power, or is it just that racism itself is something toxic, evil, and terrible, and it is made a lot worse in terms of real-world effect by power?
It's not that racial hatred plus power equals racism.
It's that racial hatred equals racism.
Racism plus power equals something a lot more dangerous.
I think that's the easiest way to explain it.
Okay, time for things I like and then things I hate.
So the thing I like today is a book called The Diversity Delusion by Heather MacDonald.
We're going to have Heather MacDonald on the Sunday special at some point in the future.
It's a really, really good book.
It's all about, and the subtitle is how race and gender pandering corrupt the university and undermine our culture.
Our colleges have become a repository of leftist thought.
That leftist thought has led to exactly the sort of identity politics populism we are seeing right now, and exactly the sort of rise of democratic socialism and hatred of Central American principles we've seen.
Heather MacDonald details all of the nuttiness going on at our university level, with which I am intimately familiar.
Go check out The Diversity Delusion by Heather MacDonald, who, full disclosure, I am friends with, and we became friends because I like her writing so much, so go check it out.
Heather MacDonald, The Diversity Delusion.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Stephen A. Smith said something dumb on ESPN because it's a day ending and why and he was talking about Serena Williams and he said about Serena Williams that if she were a man we would call her the greatest ever.
You just say to her, if she were a man, what would we be saying?
We'd be calling her the greatest ever.
There would be no dispute.
We wouldn't even be talking about Michael Jordan.
We wouldn't be talking about Muhammad Ali.
We would be talking about Serena Williams because of the sustained level of greatness.
And I think the only reason we haven't is because she's a woman.
Well, no, the reason that we haven't is because, I mean, I guess so, in that she would lose to the 200th ranked men's player.
So there's that.
We can say she's the greatest woman ever.
If he really believes that it's only sexism that prevents us from calling her the greatest ever, then why don't we just have open brackets at the US Open?
Really, we can just do that, like no sex discrimination at all.
We'll just have men and women compete in the same brackets, and then we'll see if she is indeed the greatest ever, or if she's the greatest woman.
I don't see what's wrong, by the way, with being the greatest woman ever.
Like, what's so bad about this?
Why is that so terrible?
It doesn't...
Why can't we just acknowledge that men are more physically powerful than women on average, and also far more physically powerful at the upper end of the bell curve?
Why is this so difficult?
It's because everything is stupid.
Somebody tweeted out today, there's a big story about income disparity when it comes to tennis.
You know why?
Because far more people care about men's tennis than care about women's tennis.
The ratings are far higher for men's tennis.
The players are far better in men's tennis.
tennis player, Roger Federer, $77.2 million.
Highest paid female tennis player, Serena Williams, $18.1 million.
You know why?
Because far more people care about men's tennis than care about women's tennis.
The ratings are far higher for men's tennis.
The players are far better in men's tennis.
The players are more popular in men's tennis.
I mean, this is like saying, well, you know, the pay in the NBA is just orders of magnitude larger than the WNBA.
We're Right.
Because no one in history has ever wanted to see the WNBA for basketball reasons.
No one.
Right?
People want to see the WNBA for political reasons, or for gender parity reasons, or to show their daughters that girls can play basketball too?
Oh, that's fine.
But if you're looking for a display of physical athleticism and skill, you're not actually going to want to watch the WNBA.
WNBA championship teams could be beat by the leading high school teams, men's high school teams, boys' high school teams in America.
The women's World Cup soccer team?
There's the story that came out when they won the World Cup in, I think, 2000, something like that?
They played, like, a good high school or good college men's soccer team in Australia and lost 6-0 or something.
Again, none of this is to suggest that women can't be great at sports.
They're a hell of a lot better than I am.
I mean, I wouldn't get on the court with Serena Williams.
She'd blow me away, obviously, but...
If we are going to be honest about discrepancies and disparities, we can't attribute them all to discrimination.
Otherwise, we are just being idiots.
OK, we'll be back here next week.
Have yourself a wonderful Labor Day weekend.
Enjoy it.
Come back refreshed on Tuesday.
I'm sure the world will have imploded in some fashion and we'll talk about all of it.
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.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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