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Sept. 12, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:49
Is Rhetoric Dangerous? | Ep. 620
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A violent political attack shocks the nation, Joe Scarborough compares President Trump to 9-11 terrorists, and the Washington Post blames President Trump for a hurricane.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, glad to be back, saving the world once again from the steaming pile that is Michael Knowles, who apparently took over my radio show for a couple of days in my absence.
I just cannot believe that such things happen while I am gone.
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All righty.
So we begin today with a violent attack that if the parties had been reversed would be national news on every major channel in the world.
Instead, it was sort of news inside the conservative ecosystem.
Here is the story.
According to CBS San Francisco, a man was arrested on suspicion of felony assault and other charges after allegedly attempting to stab a Republican congressional candidate with a switchblade over the weekend in Castro Valley, according to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office.
On Sunday, September 9th, at approximately 3.45pm, deputies working at the Castro Valley Fall Festival were alerted to a possible knife attack at one of the vendor booths.
Deputies arrived at the booth and made contact with the victim, Republican candidate Rudy Peters, who is running against incumbent Eric Swalwell for the 15th congressional district seat.
The Castro Valley News first reported on the attack.
According to witnesses, 35-year-old Castro Valley resident Farzad Fazeli, Now, this isn't national news.
It's regional news, and the reason it's regional news is because the guy was cursing about Trump.
the Republican Party and President Donald Trump.
During the incident, Fazelli allegedly pulled out a switchblade knife and attempted to stab Peters.
The knife malfunctioned.
The candidate became involved in a physical struggle with Fazelli, according to the Sheriff's Sergeant Ray Kelly.
The suspect then fled the scene, but was later detained by deputies and found in possession of a switchblade knife.
Now, this isn't national news.
It's regional news.
And the reason it's regional news is because the guy was cursing about Trump.
If this had been an acolyte of President Trump, who is instead attacking a Democrat or a member This would be national news because then we'd have a national conversation about the extent to which rhetoric on the left is generating violence.
And there are some folks on the right who are qualified to speak on this.
For example, Representative Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip.
Steve Scalise, you will recall, was shot nearly to death in a congressional baseball attack.
They were playing baseball, a bunch of Congress people, and an anti-Trump Bernie Sanders supporter walked up and started shooting folks up.
I said at the time, Bernie Sanders is not responsible for the actions of a crazy person who decides to shoot up a bunch of Republican Congress people.
But that story disappeared from the news in about a week, in about a week.
We would still be talking about that story if it were a bunch of Democrats.
Here's Steve Scalise explaining that some people on the left incite violence.
Here's what Scalise had to say.
He said, you've got some people on the left that just want this idea of resist and ignore the fact Trump is president.
They want to interrupt the ability of Congress to do its job.
And of course, you've got death threats and literal attacks on lives.
And frankly, I want to see the left stand up to this.
And of course, Scalise should know, and Scalise is right.
And this is not the only evidence of violence and violent threats coming from folks on the left.
Again, in the media, all you hear is people on the right have grown increasingly violent thanks to President Trump's rhetoric and the escalated rhetoric of recent years.
You never hear this about folks on the left, even as mainstream anchors like Chris Cuomo on CNN defend Antifa, an actual violent domestic terror group.
Here's another story from yesterday.
According to Ryan Saavedra over at Daily Wire, a supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America has reportedly threatened to shoot up a Make America Great Again event at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Law enforcement officials with the Metropolitan Police Department have opened up an investigation in response to the threat, which was posted to Twitter on Tuesday, according to the Daily Mail.
The Twitter account wrote to right-wing pundit Cassandra Fairbanks, I'm coming with a gun and I expect to get numerous bloodstained MAGA hats as trophies.
The account used the DSA logo as its profile photo, added an emoji of a rose to its name, which is common among DSA supporters, and shortly after the threat was posted, the owner of the account changed their Twitter handle as well.
So that's another story of left-wing threats to violence.
Here's another one.
A Republican party office in Laramie, Wyoming caught fire early Thursday morning just days after it opened, the Daily Caller News Foundation learned.
This is a bit of an older story, this one is from September 6th.
The fire appears to have been set intentionally, according to Laramie Police Department spokesman Steve Morgan.
The local police department is cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the ongoing investigation, according to Morgan, adding that authorities have not yet identified a suspect or a motive for the fire.
That's not a major shock.
There have been attacks on Republican party offices for the past several years, actually.
For the last couple of years, there have been attacks on Republican party offices.
And again, the motive of the person who is engaging in the attack seems to be the only thing that the media definitely care about.
If the person is motivated by pro-Trump animus, then that person gets all sorts of press.
If the person is motivated by anti-Trump, anti-right-wing animus, then the person gets no press at all.
If it turns out the person was a racist lunatic, Then it's a major story.
If it turns out the person was a left-wing environmentalist lunatic, then the story gets virtually no coverage.
And the reason for this is because while the left does not, in most cases, in the vast majority of cases, agree with violent rhetoric, the left does agree with pretty extreme rhetoric about the right that they would never tolerate from folks on the right.
And I speak today specifically of a column by Joe Scarborough.
So Joe Scarborough yesterday put out a piece in the Washington Post In which he suggested that President Trump is harming the dream of America more than any foreign adversary ever could.
His contention is that Trump is basically worse for America than 9-11.
That is his contention.
Now, again, is Joe Scarborough responsible for violence against pro-Trump people?
No, he's not.
I have a very simple rule and I've held this rule consistently since long before Trump was president.
I held it with regard to Barack Obama.
If you're not overtly calling for violence, you're not responsible for violence on behalf of people who quote-unquote agree with you.
Because then, it's going to be very easy to malign mainstream political opinions because there are a lot of folks who are crazy who agree with mainstream political commentators.
So instead, what I've said, and I think this is the relevant gauge, is that you're only held responsible for the violence of people who take you up on your offer of violence or on your urging of violence.
Then we can fairly say that rhetoric was involved in violence.
It is true, however, that as we raise the temperature in the country, as we raise the temperature on the rhetoric, there are people who are on the fringe, and those people are more likely to be activated by the extreme feeling that they are getting from the nature of today's politics.
Think of politics like ripples in a pond, and the epicenter of those ripples, the very center of those ripples, when you throw the rock in the pond, that's a political event.
And as the ripples move out, they encompass a larger and larger group of people and a more and more fringe group of people.
So if politics are now reaching a more fringe group of people and making those people more apt to feel extreme, more apt to engage in violence, then that's something we ought to be watching.
It's one of the reasons we ought to be taking the temperature down at least a little bit.
Here's Joe Scarborough, though, encouraging at least this sort of extremism and rhetoric.
Again, this is a guy who it is worthwhile to recall.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and MSNBC spent months pumping President Trump.
Months pumping President Trump.
Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had him on the show.
They sat with him during the primaries.
They kept talking about what a great guy he was.
They enjoyed the ratings boost that they got from hanging out with President Trump.
Now, of course, President Trump is the worst thing since Since New Coke.
Here's Joe Scarborough explaining why the President of the United States is worse than 9-11.
Here's what he said.
He said,
Even after Lee Harvey Oswald's shots rang out from the Texas school book depository, could anyone have foreseen the collapse of such an ordered age soon overtaken by the anarchy of Vietnam, the murders of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
and Bobby Kennedy, the race riot Chicago-Kent State Watergate post-industrial rot, and the cultural chaos set loose across the country by these events?
And could even the most insightful observer have foreseen while staring at the billowing smoke set against New York's brilliant September sky, the avalanche of strategic blunders set in motion by Osama bin Laden's attack on the United States?
Of course not.
But two wars, three presidents and 17 years later, the tragic lessons of that time are still lost on our leaders.
And then he goes on to talk about the United States deploying its various resources and how the and how the various parties dealt with 9-11 banjo.
But then he gets to President Trump.
And here's what he says.
He says, "17 years later, endless wars abroad and reckless policies at home have produced annual deficits approaching $1 trillion." First of all, that's a lie.
The reason that we actually have a $1 trillion deficit every year is because of social programs.
It is not because of war.
The reason that we have a massive, massive deficit is not because of the war.
It is because of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which constitute somewhere on the order of 66% of the federal budget each and every year in mandatory spending.
But Scarborough then continues, President Trump's Republican Party will create more debt in one year than was generated in the first 200 years of America's existence.
And it's always fun to watch as people who didn't care all that much about Barack Obama's debts suddenly care about Donald Trump's debts, and vice versa, by the way.
Republicans don't care about debt anymore.
They used to care about debt an awful lot.
But the part that's really astonishing about this Scarborough column is when he gets to the end.
He says, For those of us still believing that Islamic extremists hate America because of the freedoms we guarantee to people, the gravest threat Trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to America's image.
As the New York Times' Roger Cohen wrote the month after Trump's election, America is an idea.
Strip freedom, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world, and America itself is gutted.
Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team 6 before he accomplished that goal.
Other tyrants who tried to do the same were consigned to the ash heap of history.
The question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this troubled chapter in history, or whether they will continue supporting a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America than any foreign adversary ever could.
So apparently Donald Trump has now done more to damage America than, you know, the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9-11.
And the murder of Americans, by the way, aboard the USS Cole.
This sort of rhetoric is not particularly helpful.
I'll give you another example of this sort of rhetoric in just a second.
Donald Trump apparently responsible for every horrible thing that happens in the universe.
It's amazing.
If the left were to simply restrict their criticism of President Trump to the relevant, if they were simply to say, you know, President Trump, not a supremely competent guy, the people around him may be keeping him on track, but is this somebody who you really want to trust?
Is this somebody who you really trust to make the right decisions for you?
They'd have a lot better shot at winning back power than they will just screaming to the sky about how President Trump controls everything.
And honestly, people on the right who resonate to this and think President Trump does control everything are contributing to a belief that government can solve all of your problems.
When you believe that government is the only thing that matters, that government can solve all of your problems, or it causes all of your problems, you're more likely to fall into a pit of extremism and extreme feeling and rhetoric about the government that makes the condition of the country a lot worse rather than better.
I'm going to talk about the latest example from the Washington Post in just a second.
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ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire Okay, so not only is President Trump worse than 9-11, according to the editorial board at the Washington Post, President Trump is responsible for hurricanes.
He rocks you like a hurricane.
President Trump...
Apparently, through flatulence alone can generate hurricanes.
Here is what the Washington Post says.
This is their editorial board.
But don't worry, they're not generating a feeling of extreme rhetoric with regard to politics in any way, shape, or form.
Politics is the be-all, end-all.
Here's what they say, quote, Yet again, a massive hurricane feeding off unusually warm ocean water has the potential to stall over heavily populated areas, menacing millions of people.
Last year, Hurricane Harvey battered Houston, Now, Hurricane Florence threatens to drench already waterlogged swathes of the East Coast, including the nation's capital.
If the Category 4 hurricane does indeed hit the Carolinas this week, it will be the strongest storm on record to land so far north.
President Trump issued several warnings on his Twitter feed Monday, counseling those in Florence's projected path to prepare and listen to local officials.
That was good advice.
Yet, when it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit.
He's complicit.
Apparently, the hurricane calls up the president, and the president's like, listen, I can't help you out, hurricane, but what I can do is I can keep my mouth shut.
I will be complicit in your sins, hurricane.
He plays—so it used to be the Democrats blamed the Juden for the weather.
We got that from that Democrat crazy person in Washington, D.C.
The Jews were responsible for the weather.
Now President Trump is controlling the weather.
There's this meme on Twitter.
Where you say something like, ah, President Trump, I can't believe he just did flips through notebook.
And then you land on some random thing, right?
So flip through, I can't believe that he's responsible for flips through notebook.
Dog abandonment, right?
This is, this is that, right?
I can't believe President Trump is responsible for flips through notebook.
Hurricane.
Here's what they say.
He plays down humans' role in increasing the risks.
He continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks.
And now it should be straight.
If President Trump signed on to every leftist proposal on global warming today, it would have no impact on hurricanes today.
None.
So that hurricane would still be a coming down the pike.
But they say it is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change, which is their admission they have no way to actually attribute this hurricane to climate change, but that's not going to stop them.
There is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth's systems to produce disasters.
Well, I mean, there's some reasonable doubt about the level to which humans are doing that and the solutions that can be taken with regard to it.
In fact, in one second, I'm going to give you all the evidence.
But the Washington Post continues.
They say, Atmospheric Research, Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, co-wrote a May paper showing that Harvey's cataclysmic wetness came from the unusual hot Gulf of Mexico water that fed the hurricane before it slammed into Texas.
Harvey could not have produced so much rain without human-induced climate change, he and his colleagues concluded.
All of which, by the way, drove the president to say that this hurricane was extremely hard and extremely wet, which was very weird.
Now Florence is feasting on warm Atlantic Ocean water, says the Washington Post.
The ocean is warming up systematically, Mr. Trenberth said, explaining that though natural variation can turn surface temperatures up or down a bit, the ocean's energy content is inexorably rising.
It is the strongest signal of global warming, Mr. Trenberth added.
It's very weird how everything bad that happens is an effect of global warming.
If it's bad snowstorms, it's an effect of global warming.
If it's a bad hurricane, it's an effect of global warming.
Again, I'm not somebody who believes that humans are not contributing to global warming.
I think that humans probably are contributing to global warming by all available evidence.
The question is, what is the climate sensitivity?
How much are humans contributing to global warming?
And what can actually be done about that is maybe the best idea, technological progress, as opposed to cap and trade systems that are actually not going to mitigate the effects of global warming in any serious way.
But the Washington Post, nonetheless, blames the president of the United States.
They say the Trump administration has now attacked all three pillars of President Barack Obama's climate change plan.
Except that when Barack Obama had his plan, the hurricanes were still hitting the United States, so this is quite silly.
Also, it is worth noting that hurricanes, major hurricanes in the United States, are at about their average.
It's funny, the latest line that you were hearing for a while, what you were hearing from the left was, Then the number of hurricanes is increasing.
That's not true.
The number of hurricanes is not increasing.
Now they say the number of hurricanes is not increasing, but the severity of hurricanes is increasing.
So let's look at the stats.
According to this guy, James Taylor, who's president of the Spark of Freedom Foundation over at Forbes.com, he actually went through decade by decade to look at the number of major hurricanes hitting the United States.
So from 2001 to 2010, seven major hurricanes struck the United States, which is the 100-year average.
During the preceding decade, six.
During the decade before that, four.
Before that, four.
And then, from 1961-1970, seven.
Okay, from 1951-1969, from 1941-1950, eleven major hurricanes struck the United States.
During 1931-1940, eight major hurricanes struck the United States.
From 1941 to 1950, 11 major hurricanes struck the United States.
During 1931 to 1940, eight major hurricanes struck the United States.
From 1921 to 1936, from 1911 to 1928.
So the idea that we are now in the midst of some massive upswing in the number of radical hurricanes hitting the United States, the statistics simply do not bear that out.
Now, is that a reason to ignore whatever threats global warming is posing?
No, it isn't.
But to blame President Trump, who's been in office for a year and a half, For a hurricane hitting is just insane.
It's just insane.
And of course, most people are only going to read the headline anyway.
And the impression they're going to get is that President Trump simply doesn't care about hurricanes or President Trump is somehow forwarding hurricanes or the rest of this sort of silliness.
I think it is fair to say that media coverage has gone off the rails.
And it's not just with regard to President Trump.
It's also with regard to sort of normal Republican candidates.
So the latest evidence of this is the Washington Post, again, they're the newspaper of the day, going after Ron DeSantis.
So on Sunday, the Washington Post had two Post reporters put together a story that Ron DeSantis spoke at a conservative conference four times between 2007, 2013, and 2017.
He spoke at the David Horwitz Freedom Center Conference.
And these are usually, they usually take place in Florida.
I know this because this is where I met Ron DeSantis.
I met Ron DeSantis at this event at the David Horwitz Freedom Center in Florida.
According to the Washington Post, this means that Ron DeSantis is no longer fit for office because he spoke four times at conferences organized by a conservative activist who has said that African Americans owe their freedom to white people and that the country's only serious race war is against whites.
Okay, so they're going to pick everything that David has ever said that is wild and they're going to now attribute it to Ron DeSantis.
As opposed to when Bill Clinton stands next to Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin's funeral and no one has to answer a question about us, now Ron DeSantis goes and speaks at what is by any measure a normal conservative conference with a wide variety of speakers.
I mean, we are talking about major politicians in the Republican Party who have shown up there.
It's not all people who agree with David.
I know.
I used to work at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
I was on the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Not everyone who shows up agrees with everything that David Horowitz says.
I didn't agree with everything that David Horowitz said.
But the Washington Post ran this long story suggesting that because DeSantis had spoken at this event, therefore he agrees with everyone at the event, which is just ridiculous.
It's just ridiculous.
That's the way the press are going to treat our politics these days.
And then they're surprised when it feels like there's a violent upsurge in American politics.
Again, they're not responsible for that violent upsurge unless they call for violence.
They are responsible for raising the temperature on American rhetoric to a dangerous point.
Meanwhile, Norm MacDonald is now in trouble because we can't have any nice things.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
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So, the culture wars continue in my absence.
Norm MacDonald, who's doing the only Netflix special that I'm actually interested in these days, he is now being ripped up and down for an interview that he did in The Hollywood Reporter.
He was uninvited from The Tonight Show on NBC, Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show on NBC.
Apparently, you're only allowed to go on NBC if you are either an ardent Democrat or a person who worked for a company that actually covered up for Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuses.
If you're one of those, then I guess you can go on Jimmy Fallon's show.
But if you express sympathy for Louis C.K.
or Roseanne Barr, then you're in serious trouble.
Norm Macdonald is now in serious trouble.
Why?
Because Norm Macdonald happens not to be a radical leftist.
So he's talking to The Hollywood Reporter.
And he was asked about the emboldening of racism.
He said, I live in L.A. where I'm always faced with the lunacy of the left.
I didn't know the same lunacy existed on the right.
So I never really bought into the notion that everybody is racist because there was a black president, you know.
But the Sacha Baron Cohen show has been a frightening eye opener.
I was also in a bubble, but in a different way.
I guess everyone is an effing idiot.
Everyone is an ideologue.
Hopefully the pendulum will slow down in the next four years.
And the Hollywood Reporter person presses and swing back toward liberalism because it's the Hollywood Reporter.
And he says, not necessarily.
He says, I'm happy the Me Too movement has slowed down a little bit.
It used to be 100 women can't be lying, and then it became one woman can't lie, and then it became I believe all women, and then you're like, what?
Like that Chris Hardwick guy, I really thought got the blunt end to the stick there.
And the Hollywood reporter said, what about when someone admits to wrongdoing?
And Norm MacDonald said, quite reasonably, the model used to be admit wrongdoing, show complete contrition, and then we give you a second chance.
Now it's admit wrongdoing and you're finished.
And so the only way to survive is to deny, deny, deny.
That's not healthy that there is no forgiveness.
I do think at some point it will end with a completely innocent person of prominence sticking a gun in his head and ending it.
That's my guess.
I know a couple of people this has happened to.
And they ask who?
And here's where he gets himself into trouble.
He says, well, Louis CK and Roseanne Barr are two people I know.
And Roseanne was so broken up after the show's reboot was canceled, I got Louis to call her, even though Roseanne was very hard on Louis before that.
But she was just so broken and just constantly crying.
There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day.
Of course, people will go, what about the victims?
But you know what?
The victims didn't have to go through that.
And then they asked, you know, what did the two of them talk about?
He said they had a good conversation, and he said she's not a racist, everybody knows that she's not a racist, but she shouldn't have tweeted the stuff that she tweeted.
He got all sorts of flack, particularly about the Louis C.K.
comment, because the implication seems to be that Louis C.K.
was innocent of any wrongdoing, when of course Louis C.K.
was basically inviting female comedians back to his room and then masturbating in front of them.
And then apparently his associates were calling up networks and trying to get them to lose jobs, but there's no actual evidence that Louis C.K.
was engaged in that particular activity.
Louis C.K.
is back, but the left media is not interested in Louis C.K.
repairing his image.
By the way, if you're Jimmy Fallon and you don't want to have Norm MacDonald on for saying this, you will have Bill Clinton on to talk specifically about essentially being accused of rape, and that's totally fine.
You can't ask Norm MacDonald a tough question.
That's the part of this that's so crazy.
Let's say you disagree with Norm MacDonald here.
Let's say you think what he thinks is unreasonable.
Why wouldn't you have him on and just ask him about it?
The reason is because we live in such a ridiculously censorious society that we have to make sure that people like Norm MacDonald are never heard.
He apologized for it and they're still not inviting him on The Tonight Show.
Matt Damon made comments about me too.
He was welcomed back into civil society.
There are no accusations, by the way, that Norm MacDonald has ever participated in any sort of bad activity with regard to women.
And yet he's being put on the outs because he expressed sympathy.
Sympathy for Roseanne Barr or for Louis C.K., people whose careers have been ruined by allegations.
Roseanne Barr's career was ruined because she tweeted out dumb racist crap.
But should she be forgiven?
I think probably.
Louis C.K., should he be forgiven?
He seems to have expressed contrition, like, right from the outset, and then he went away for a while.
I'm not sure what else you want from him.
I mean, you could file a lawsuit.
It seems to me that a lot of this... If you really believe you have a lawsuit against Louis C.K., perhaps you should sue him.
If you really believe you have credible allegations against Louis C.K., perhaps you should sue him.
Perhaps you should take to the court.
Because the court of public opinion is a really nasty place, and destroying people's lives and careers based on accusations that you're not willing to back up in court, you're not even willing to try to back up in court, seems like a difficult business to me.
It's hard for us to set an objective standard if you're not willing to take this stuff to court.
Now, that doesn't mean that I don't believe the allegations about Louis C.K.
I tend to believe the allegations about Louis C.K., particularly since he admitted them.
But it does mean that we have to have some standard.
When Norm Macdonald says there's no standard, I don't think that he's completely wrong.
Of course there's no standard here.
It's obvious there's no standard here.
Okay.
Well, meanwhile, I want to talk a little bit about the holiday that, you know, before I get to the holiday that I just celebrated, I also want to talk about Hillary Clinton.
So this is an amazing thing.
Hillary Clinton And decided that it was necessary to step into the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings while I was away.
So she tweeted out this morning, I want to be sure we're all clear about something that Brett Kavanaugh said in his confirmation hearings last week.
He referred to birth control pills as abortion-inducing drugs.
That set off a lot of alarm bells for me, and it should for you too.
And then she continued by suggesting that Brett Kavanaugh was actually going to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he hates abortion, and that's really why he said all this.
This is a lie.
It is a lie that has been debunked multiple times.
Senator Kamala Harris trotted out this lie over and over and over again.
The Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios.
The reason that Brett Kavanaugh referred to abortifacients as abortion-inducing drugs is because they are abortion-inducing drugs and were expressed as such in the Supreme Court decision that he was citing.
But Hillary Clinton Again, when it comes to the culture wars, the reason that so many folks are with Norm Macdonald and frustrated and with President Trump is because the left refuses to call out its own.
The left refuses to call out Joe Scarborough for saying ridiculous things.
The left refuses to call out Hillary Clinton for saying things that are obvious lies.
The left refuses To call out Michelle Goldberg, who suggests that Brett Kavanaugh is going to usher in the Handmaid's Court?
And then you wonder why the politics are polarized?
It's ridiculous.
Okay, now I do want to get to what I did over the last couple of days.
So I was absent for the last couple of days to celebrate Rosh Hashanah.
Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Jewish year.
So it's the Jewish New Year.
And more importantly than being the Jewish New Year, unlike sort of the secular New Year, where you party it up and then you make resolutions for the next year, the Jewish New Year is all about atoning for sin.
So we are now in the midst of the High Holy Days, which is typically used to express Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
I'm about to explain to you why I'm going to be absent for a bunch of days coming up.
So this is why.
Rosh Hashanah was a two-day holiday that happened Monday, Tuesday.
And then a week from today, I will be out again for Yom Kippur.
That's the Day of Atonement.
That's where you fast all day and you stay in synagogue essentially all day.
And you pray for forgiveness, and then God hopefully inscribes you in the Book of Life.
And then about five days after that, four days after that, I'm out for another couple of days, and that one is for the holiday of the Festival of Booths, is what it's called in English, called Sukkot in Hebrew.
And that is the one where we sit outside in these makeshift booths with poem fronds on top to remind us of when we were sojourning in the desert.
And then we conclude with the last couple of days of Sukkot, which is like a week after that.
There's a last couple of days.
One is concluding day of Sukkot, and the last one is Simchat Torah, which is when we celebrate the completion of the cycle of reading of the Torah.
So Jews every week read a portion of the Torah, and then over the course of 50 weeks, we go through the entire Torah, the five books of Moses, and then we celebrate.
Let me explain why I'm explaining all this to you in just one second.
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Okay, well we are going to discuss A couple of insane articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, rather, with regard to religion, which is why I'm mentioning Rosh Hashanah.
I also want to talk about Serena Williams.
I missed that whole controversy while I was out.
The world continued while I was out.
I just can't believe it.
I thought the world was going to stop spinning and then I would be able to come back and pick up where we left off.
I'd be able to analyze last Friday's Obama speech.
It would have been great fun.
Unfortunately, the world kept spinning, so we'll get to all of the latest news in just one second.
But first, go over to dailywire.com to subscribe.
$9.99 a month gets you a subscription to Daily Wire.
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You get this, the very greatest in beverage vessels.
The left is yours, hot or cold tumbler.
You know why I'm not sipping from it today?
Because Jewish holiday.
It's a fast day.
I'm really thirsty.
But you could be sipping from it today.
All you had to do was go over and get that annual subscription over at dailywire.com.
Go check that out.
Also, when you subscribe over at YouTube or iTunes, then you get to view our Sunday special.
Well, this week's Sunday special features the insane and entertaining Steven Crowder, who stopped by for an hour.
Here's a little bit of what we talked about.
Hi, I'm Steven Crowder, and that's Ben Shapiro, but I don't think you can see him right now.
I am going to be on the Ben Shapiro Sunday Special show.
That's what it's called, right?
The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
There's one guest, and we're going to be talking about some things maybe off the beaten path.
Different side of Ben and myself that maybe you haven't necessarily seen before, and I think he's probably going to try and make me cry because I saw his show prep.
And we will see whether that indeed succeeded.
All you'll have to do is watch this Sunday.
All you have to do is subscribe at YouTube or iTunes.
Go check it out.
it out we are the largest fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation so the reason i mentioned the jewish holidays is not just to prove to you that i didn't just take days off for the hell of it but also because we are living in the midst of a sort of religious schism that's happening in the united states and really all across the world with regard to western There are a lot of folks in the West who believe that religion is what has held back civilization.
People like Steven Pinker, people like Sam Harris, people with whom I'm friendly.
And a lot of these folks think that religion is the great curse.
It's the great blight.
That if it hadn't been for religion, we would have reached some sort of secular paradise long ago.
Now that ignores the fact that once you get rid of religion and the notion of absolute morality, it's pretty easy to slide into the secular, relativistic morality that leads down the path to gulags and concentration camps.
But!
The claim is that religion is basically backward, and that's the reason religion is falling apart now.
That religion is really falling apart.
And what you see is folks on the left who want to maintain some semblance of religion.
What they do is they've started to infuse religion with a bunch of secular humanist nonsense.
Basically, what they want religion to be is a bunch of secular humanist messaging with some bagels on top if you're Jewish, or with a little bit of wafer and wine if you're Catholic, or if you're Protestant, then with a band, I guess.
So here is, there are a couple of pieces specifically about the Jewish holidays in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that are pretty astonishing and telling about why this religious schism exists.
And before I get to these pieces, I want to explain to you why I think religion is important, because this is one of the questions I get most frequently.
I'm an Orthodox Jew, obviously.
I wear a yarmulke.
I take my religion extraordinarily seriously.
And a lot of people say, well, Ben, you know, you're a guy who promotes reason, a guy who promotes facts above feelings.
Why do you care about religion so much?
Why do you think all of these crazy things like God spoke to people from on top of a mountain and all the rest?
Number one, I think that there are real, good, rational explanations for the existence of God.
On our Sunday special, a couple of weeks ago, we had on Ed Fazer, who is a professor of a Pasadena City College, who makes some very good secular explanations for why he believes God exists.
But the reason, in reality, that I believe in my religion is because I believe the Judeo-Christian civilization is the greatest civilization in the history of the world, and it rests on twin foundations.
Those foundations are Jerusalem and Athens, the foundations of Judeo-Christian revelation, the Old Testament, as promulgated to the rest of the world through Christianity as well, and the notion of Greek reason, which provided us the idea that human reason is capable of understanding the cosmos.
Without those two ideas, there is no science, there is no Western civilization, there is no liberalism, there is no Western morality.
Get rid of those two key ideas, Greek reason and Judeo-Christian morality, and what you end up with is a hedonistic, deterministic society that is not interested in investigating the cosmos, not interested in bettering life, because what does life matter anyway?
I think this is one of the reasons that what you're seeing in Europe with the decline of religion is not an upswing in beauty and harmony, but an increase in fracturing, an increase in factionalism, an increase in violence in many cases, the importation of people who are actually having kids, a decrease in the number of children who are being had, economic struggle, the rise of right-wing nationalist groups in a lot of these countries.
A lot of that has to do with the European decision to abandon religion long ago.
Judaism and Christianity, by extension, provided the world with certain basic truths.
Those truths include the idea that human beings are made in God's image, which means that every human being has inherent value.
That is not something that you can find from an atheistic source.
It isn't.
Atheists who say that they believe that, I'm glad they believe that.
I'm not saying atheists can't be moral people.
They can.
I know a lot of atheists who are wonderful, moral people.
But atheism is not a philosophy that can explain why every human being has value any more than it can explain why every ant ought to have value.
The idea that God cares about human beings and that what you do in the world matters.
That's not something atheism can explain because why should what you do in the world matter?
You're a ball of meat wandering around without any sort of free will.
Which brings us to Greek reason.
The Greeks were very focused on the idea that the apotheosis of human achievement was reason.
And rationality and using your brain in order to understand the universe.
Judaism and Christianity, they suggest that, unlike a lot of pagan philosophies, that the world actually has a systemic order to it, created by a rational God.
And when you combine that with the idea that human beings have the capacity to understand their universe, that's how you get the pursuit of science.
In other words, religion has eternal truths to tell.
Truths that are as valuable today as they ever were.
And yet what you are seeing is an abandonment of traditional religion, an abandonment of the synagogues and the churches, and an attempt to backfill those synagogues and churches with a bunch of secular, humanist nonsense that is not going to bring anybody there.
So, here's a piece from the Wall Street Journal today.
It's called, it's by a woman named Shane D. Race, who I actually knew back when I was at Harvard Law.
She is certainly of the left.
She used to be more Orthodox, I believe.
I'm not sure she is anymore.
Anyway, the piece is called, Goat Yoga, Mosh Pits, Glow Sticks, Younger Jews Reinvent Yom Kippur.
Now, it's important to recognize here, Yom Kippur is the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar.
You fast for 25 hours, you are praying for nearly that entire time.
It is extraordinarily spiritual.
But instead, because they can't get Non-affiliated Jews into their conservative reform synagogues, all these people are trying these weird things.
So, here is what the article says.
For 2,000 years, Jews have spent Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in a synagogue, abstaining from food and drink, fervently praying and beseeching God to forgive their sins.
This year, some rabbis, eager to woo younger people to high holiday services, are holding programs in a beer garden, replacing deep reverential bows with goat yoga, and celebrating the end of the season with glow sticks in a mosh pit.
Rabbi Dan Ayn, who started Rosh Hashanah service called Bol Hashanah at the Brooklyn Bowl, a music venue and bowling alley in Williamsburg, New York, says, for the millennial generation, walking into a synagogue can feel like a Civil War reenactment.
He said, Rabbi Avi Shafran, who actually does public affairs for Agudat Yisrael in New York, which is an Orthodox group, he says, it's a solemn time of year to dispense with the solemnity is to do violence to the very essence of the days, which is, of course, true.
Traditionalist to sales, Rabbi Aaron Podek, who held a Yom Kippur program at a Washington, D.C.
beer garden last year.
While no food or beer was served, he said fasting wasn't required of attendees.
He said he felt validated when he packed the beer garden with 140 people and had a waiting list of 70 more.
There was no prayer.
Instead, attendees discussed themes of Yom Kippur, such as mortality, repentance, and the meaning of life.
Rabbi Potick says, I'm 100% convinced that Jews are desperately looking for ways to connect that are outside the synagogue model.
No, what he means is that Jews who are unaffiliated and aren't interested in leading a Jewish lifestyle are looking for something to connect them back to eternal values, and they're not going to find it in beer gardens.
They're not going to find it in beer gardens.
Because I'm going to explain to you some statistics about religion in the United States in a second that demonstrates that this attempt by Jews, Catholics, Protestants to run away from traditional religion is actually killing their religious conviction.
Now, so here are some of these statistics, because, again, the Wall Street Journal is pushing goat yoga, and the New York Times is pushing a piece called Celebrating Rosh Hashanah with Less Oy, More Joy, and a Bit of Gospel.
It's a long feature piece on Rabbi Perry Berkowitz, who, along with his sister, Rabbi Leah Berkowitz, runs East Side Synagogue, an unconventional congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
What exactly do they do?
Well, the services are freewheeling, rollicking affairs that have the feel of a gospel church.
They give evangelical-type sermons.
My favorite part of this is where they explain what exactly they do here.
liturgical music, often in Hebrew.
The songs can range from hymns and spirituals to klezmer and pop, and they often spur congregants to form conga lines down the aisles.
And my favorite part of this is where they explain what exactly they do here.
They talk about how they say oy, He says, here it is.
Rabbi Perry Berkowitz told congregants that someone asked why God permitted rain on Rosh Hashanah.
They said, don't you have a connection upstairs?
The rabbi recounted.
I said, sorry, I'm in sales, not management.
He urged the congregation to wipe away any negative associations from the past year and to start the new year, not with oi, but with joy.
He told them to exhale and let go of all the ois of the past year.
Everyone let out a collective oi, he directed them.
One, two, three, oi.
A spirited oi resounded in the worship space.
Ooh, so great.
He also says, Yes, this is exactly what people are looking for out of religion.
Now, here are some statistics.
Because there are a bunch of people, left and right, a bunch of people left and right, who keep suggesting over and over, the only way for religion to survive is for religion to change with the times.
Religion has to not just apply eternal lessons to new evidence, which I think is a good argument, But to change the religion utterly, get rid of fundamental conceits about the nature of human beings, get rid of fundamental ideas about the nature of morality and God, and instead basically Judaism, Christianity, these should just bow to the secular idolatry that is being promoted by a lot of folks on the secular left.
Synagogues should become places where all you do is talk about Black Lives Matter and homophobia.
It's a DNC meeting center, except it's got a Jewish star at the front or a cross at the front.
There's only one problem with this.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't work at all.
I mean, there are two problems.
One, you're getting rid of fundamental values.
But second, there is no actual draw to this.
Statistics show that these churches are not holding anyone.
They're not holding anyone.
Hey, I can tell you something.
At my synagogue yesterday, which is a small shtiebel.
It's a small synagogue.
It was packed to the gills yesterday, it's packed to the gills every Sabbath, and it is filled with young people.
The average age of Orthodox Jews in the United States, the most observant group of Jews in the United States, is 40.
The average age of Jews across the United States who are not Orthodox is 52.
Orthodox Jews are significantly younger than non-Orthodox Jews.
Orthodox Jews have significantly more kids than non-Orthodox Jews.
They average over four children a family.
Non-Orthodox Jews average less than twos.
They're below replacement rates.
The same thing is true in the evangelical community.
People look at polls and they say, oh well, the level of people going to church in Protestant America is declining.
Mainline Protestantism is declining.
Evangelical Protestantism has gained.
All the people who used to go to mainline Protestant churches are either becoming unaffiliated or they're moving over to evangelical churches.
In the Catholic church, you're seeing the same thing.
All of these Catholic churches that you drive by and they have the rainbow flag waving out front because it's a new diverse Catholic church or whatever.
A lot of those Catholic churches are empty.
The ones that are still full are the ones that still care about what are considered fundamental values.
The reason people care about religion, the reason people are willing to sacrifice for religion, is because they feel there's an eternal value to religion.
And there is an eternal value to religion.
And it is maddening to watch as the media who hate religion, top to bottom, start promoting this idea that religion can simply be saved as long as it parrots the talking points of Hillary Clinton.
That's not what's going to save religion.
The only thing that's going to save religion, and by extension, in my view, Western civilization, is a return to a social fabric that matters.
A return to eternal, fundamental values that bring us together.
It's really interesting.
Robert Putnam, who's a liberal sociologist, over at Harvard University, he wrote a book called Bowling Alone.
And in that book, he basically said that diversity, ethnic diversity doesn't, in fact, change anything in a community except protest marches and TV watching.
That's his line.
All that happens is protest marches increase, TV watching increases.
But if you go to a church where everybody believes essentially the same things about the nature of man, about the necessity to care for your neighbor, Then you see diversity across the aisle, but with a common set of principles.
America is losing a common set of principles.
They're backfilling that with politics.
And you're seeing it happen in synagogues, in churches.
And guess what?
That's going to empty out the churches.
It's going to empty out our politics.
It makes politics paramount.
You want a functional country?
You need more people going to synagogue.
You need more people going to church.
You need more people who take religion and eternal values seriously.
If you don't, the country is going to be in serious, serious trouble.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, I was in a very, uh, I was in a very preachy mood today.
So, let's do some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, I missed apparently The whole Serena Williams meltdown, and I have some thoughts on the Serena Williams meltdown.
So, if you missed it, over the weekend, Serena Williams is playing at the U.S.
Open, the Women's U.S.
Open, obviously, because she's the greatest women's player of all time.
Not the greatest player of all time, the greatest women's player of all time.
And Serena Williams, the reason I say that is because people in ESPN keep saying she should be considered the greatest tennis player of all time, which is absurd, okay?
It's just ridiculous.
It's like saying Lisa Leslie should be considered the greatest basketball player of all time.
What?
Anyway, Serena Williams is playing this woman named, is it Naomi Osaka?
I think it's Naomi Osaka.
Excuse me, who's the up-and-comer.
She's 21 years old from Japan, and Serena was favored in this match.
She's coming off of pregnancy, and things are not going well for her.
Osaka blows her out in the first set, and then they're playing a competitive second set, and Serena Williams starts to lose her cool because she's not playing as well as she wants, and she starts yelling at the chair empire, and here's exactly what it looked like.
I didn't get coaching.
I didn't get coaching.
You need to make an announcement that I didn't get coaching.
I don't cheat.
I didn't get coaching.
How can you say that?
You owe me an apology.
You owe me an apology.
I have never cheated in my life.
I have a daughter and I stand what's right for her and I've never cheated.
You owe me an apology.
You're going to never do that.
When are you going to give me my apology?
You owe me.
Say it!
Say you're sorry!
Well then you're- then don't talk to me!
Don't talk to me!
Okay, then she called the guy a thief, and then he gave her a game penalty.
So basically, he gave her, uh, he gave her a warning, I guess?
And then he gave her a point penalty when she smashed her racket, which is mandatory.
And then when she called him a thief and a cheater, then he gave her a game penalty.
And the left said that she was totally right about this.
She was totally right.
Now, if Maria Sharapova had done this, I highly doubt that you get that sort of response from the press that this is sexism at work.
But Serena Williams is a hero to a lot of people for some good reasons.
That's fine.
But she acted badly here.
OK, she acted badly here.
End of story.
And there are a bunch.
And what I love is people who are non-tennis aficionados.
I'm not a tennis aficionado.
So that means that I will listen to people like the umpire.
In the John McEnroe match, who actually gave a game penalty to John McEnroe.
I'll listen to Martina Navratilova.
It seems like these people know more about tennis than I do, but I like all the people on Twitter who once saw a tennis match, and now they're like, oh, you know, that's just terrible.
That was sexism.
If a man had done that, he would have gotten away with it.
Really?
Because John McEnroe really didn't get away with it.
Right?
This is a piece by Richard Ings, who is the umpire In the McEnroe, in the McEnroe U.S.
Open, he says, his welcome to the job match happened at the 1987 U.S.
Open.
I was the chair umpire for the fourth round stadium court match between John McEnroe and Slobodan Zivanovic, where I issued a warning point penalty and game penalty against McEnroe.
The game penalty for a string of obscenities against me came at 4-5, costing McEnroe the set and making the match one set all.
The memories and scars of my welcome to the job match are fresh.
For even more than 30 years later, Ramos will be going through much of the same emotions.
He says that all of this was exactly right.
He says that Ramos did exactly the right thing.
He says, All players know that destroying a racket on the court is a mandatory code violation.
The game penalty was triggered after Williams, in a lengthy tirade, loudly accused the umpire of being a thief, stealing points from her.
Ramos let the tirade slide, showing great composure, until Williams accused him of cheating.
All players know that publicly attacking the honesty of the umpire is going to result in an immediate code violation.
Ramos made absolutely the correct calls as the chair umpire in each of these three incidents.
Now, if you mention that Serena acted badly, or that when Serena's been losing in the past, sometimes she loses her cool and acts badly, then this makes you some sort of sexist and racist.
But I'm not the one who's making this claim, okay?
To other chair umpires, it's Martina Navratilova.
So Martina Navratilova said this.
Mr. Ramos effectively had no choice but to dock her a point.
This is Martina Navrasilova, probably, if not the greatest women's player of all time, maybe the second greatest women's player of all time after Serena Williams.
She says, Ms.
Williams opted to argue about this.
She insisted she didn't cheat, she wasn't coached, and therefore she shouldn't have been docked.
But she didn't, it doesn't matter whether she knew she was receiving coaching, she was being coached.
Her own coach admitted it after the match.
So at this stage, she'd been giving a warning, one that couldn't be dismissed retroactively and had smashed her racket in an automatic violation.
Mr. Ramos effectively had no choice but to dock her a point.
This is exactly right.
That's one thing.
Tiloa says, If in fact the guys are treated with a different measuring stick for the same transgressions, this needs to be thoroughly examined and must be fixed.
But we cannot measure ourselves by what we think we should also be able to get away with.
This is exactly right.
If you think that the umpire should be harsher on the men, that's one thing.
If you think Serena should be able to get away with things because men have gotten away with it in the past, I'm not sure how you argue that.
In politics, we call that whataboutism.
Jonathan Lastover at the Weekly Standard makes this point.
He says, Serena has a history of lashing out in big matches when she's getting beaten by inferior players.
In 2009, Serena was getting worked by Kim Clysters in the semis at the U.S.
Open when she got called for a footfall.
Again, the call itself was correct.
She exploded in a tirade against the female line judge that included a physical threat.
In the 2011 finals at the U.S.
Open, Serena was getting beat by Sam Stoser when she yelled in the middle of a point.
The chair umpire called interference again correctly, and Serena exploded at her saying, aren't you the one who screwed me over last time?
Are you coming after me?
That is totally not cool.
Don't even look at me.
You're a hater.
You're very unattractive inside.
Again, this doesn't change the fact that Serena Williams is the greatest female player ever, but she basically stole the headline from an up-and-comer, and that is really kind of a terrible thing to do.
The thing that I like about this is that there are some actual tennis experts who are coming out and speaking the truth and not being intimidated by the wave of publicity that has followed all of this.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, John Bolton, who is the current National Security Advisor, He says that the United States is going to withdraw the embassy.
The Palestine Liberation Organization, which is the Palestinian Authority, has an embassy in the United States.
He says that they are going to get rid of it, as well they should.
It's a terrorist organization.
Here's John Bolton.
The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel.
And today, reflecting Congressional concern with Palestinian attempts to prompt an ICC investigation of Israel, the Department of State will announce the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization office here in Washington, D.C.
The United States supports a direct and robust peace process, and we will not allow the ICC or any other organization Well good for John Bolton and good for the Trump administration which has been extraordinarily pro-Israel in every aspect as well they should be.
It's sad that this has become a partisan issue because there is one side here that teaches its children to murder other people and there's one side here that has repeatedly offered territorial compromises in exchange for the other side stopping all the nonsense about teaching their kids to kill people.
So this is really not a hard issue and the Trump administration gets it right.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So this is pretty horrifying.
Apparently, there's a Washington convenience store.
It's near Seattle, in Auburn.
And a guy who was working behind the counter collapsed.
The clerk collapsed.
And the people inside the store, these two teenagers, didn't call for help.
Instead, they decided to take the opportunity to rob the store.
So I'll narrate the video, because you can't really hear the audio.
Basically, you're going to see that there is the clerk who's talking to them.
And then he collapses and he faints or something and the people he's talking to then come back into the store and start robbing the store.
They start taking everything they can from the store instead of calling the cops.
They're walking around.
They don't care this guy just collapsed and maybe dying, maybe had an aneurysm or heart attack.
They're just taking stuff.
One of the messages of the Jewish High Holidays and of religion in general is that people are sinful creatures and that people are capable of good and people are capable of evil.
The notion that has become very popular in American society and across the West is that people are naturally good.
I don't know how you can look at people and possibly think that.
People are not naturally good.
My two-and-a-half-year-old boy is not a naturally good person.
He's a naturally innocent person.
He has the capacity for good, but he's going to have to be civilized.
My four and a half year old girl gets punished a lot when she's bad.
People have to be civilized.
And it takes, it's because, honestly, we live in a civilized civilization.
We live in a civilization where violence is at all time lows or prosperity is at all time highs.
Then we look around, we say, oh, people must be naturally good.
If people were naturally good, why do we have several thousand years of people beating the living crap out of each other and murdering each other by the millions?
And now everything is bad.
Well, because civilization progresses and civilization progresses because of that interplay that I talked about a little bit earlier on the show, that interplay between absolute morality and Judeo-Christian morality and Greek reason, that interplay cast across the ages is what creates a civilization capable of channeling people's selfishness toward best efforts.
And capable of channeling people's destructive tendencies toward creative tendencies.
But the minute you stop teaching children this, you're one generation away from all of it collapsing.
Because a generation that is not educated in morality, a generation that is not educated in decency, will not be decent.
It takes thousands of years to build a civilization worth keeping.
It takes one generation to destroy the whole thing.
All you have to do is not teach your kids.
That's all you have to do.
And in an age when it's seen as nasty and judgmental to teach your kids things, it seems like that is becoming a probability, not just a possibility, unfortunately.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So I have to talk about this terrible, terrible police shooting.
It's not really even effectively a police shooting, but it's being treated as such.
David French has a piece about it.
It's about this guy named Botham Shemjean, who's a young black risk assurance associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers who was shot last week.
Here's what happened.
He was home alone in his apartment in the Southside Flats complex in Dallas when a police officer named Amber Giger entered and shot him dead.
The precise chain of events is somewhat disputed.
The affidavit supporting Geiger's arrest warrant states she believed she was entering her own apartment, which was directly below his, and laid out almost identically.
She placed her key in the lock, the door pushed open, the apartment was dark, she saw a large silhouette across the room.
She believed she was facing a burglar.
She drew her firearm and gave verbal commands, which Jean ignored.
She fired twice, and only then, she says, entered the apartment, called 911, turned on the lights, and realized she'd made a terrible mistake.
But apparently, this doesn't square with other testimony.
One witness reported hearing a woman yelling, let me in, let me in, before the gunshots, and a man's voice saying, oh my god, why did you do that, after the gunshots.
Police sources are indicating that Geiger may actually try to raise the fact that Jean didn't obey her commands as a defense.
That is not a defense.
If I come into your apartment and I start yelling at you, and then I shoot you, I'm a murderer.
End of story.
It doesn't matter whether I'm a cop in my day job.
You don't get to do that.
And this is one of those cases where people should be speaking out across the aisle because the police department apparently took its time about getting to this and the investigation is pretty slow.
There are actual problems.
The problems that actually exist in policing, and I say this as a major supporter of American police officers, There are two major problems in policing.
One is the major problem that exists with regard to guilty cops getting off because people give too broad an area of discretion to those cops.
And the other is a lack of training, not with regard to race, but with regard to proper use of violence in particular circumstances.
And the second one, I think, is more common among young recruits.
Older people know this.
I had a close friend of mine is a police officer, and he was talking to me yesterday about how much of the job involves just Restraint.
Just holding yourself back and not doing things that you want to do.
And that's true.
But when a police officer crosses the line, obviously we need to hold them responsible.
The problem is we're having the wrong conversation.
The conversation we're having is about implicit bias and secret racism and all of this.
The real conversation we ought to be having is about holding people accountable when they actually do something wrong, not about maligning all police officers as incipient racists who want to kill black folks.
Okay.
Well, we will be back here tomorrow with all of the latest.
I hope that you had a couple of decent days off while I was off, but we'll be back tomorrow with all the news.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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