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Oct. 11, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:59
Screaming To Victory | Ep. 636
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Democrats double down on their screechy rhetoric, Google is trying to usher in an era of civility, and the Saudis are in hot water.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Here we are, live from Memphis.
Yesterday, I took my young deputy, Colton, over to Graceland, and we visited with Elvis and communed with the king, so that was kind of fun.
And then we went and spoke at University of Memphis.
So, that was a blast last night.
Terrific crowd.
A thousand people showed up.
People in the overflow room.
It was really just an awesome experience.
We're gonna get to all the news of the day in just one second.
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Okay, so the Democrats are doubling down on their commitment to incivility.
This should not be a shock to anyone.
It really should not.
And I'm kind of surprised, frankly, that so many members of the media are pushing back against the idea that Democrats embrace anger and mob-centric politics.
So Eric Holder, the Attorney General, Excreble Attorney General.
He's the only person who earns an excreble rating from me outside of Michael Mowles, is in fact Eric Holder.
Eric Holder, who's a terrible, terrible Attorney General, he came out and he said that our old strategy in the Democratic Party used to go, when they go low, we go high.
Well now, our strategy is when they go low, we kick them.
Here is Eric Holder saying just that.
It is time for us as Democrats to be as tough as they are, to be as dedicated as they are, to be as committed as they are.
Michelle always says, Michelle Obama, I love her, you know.
She and my wife, like, really tight, which always scares me and Barack.
But Michelle always says that, you know, when they go low, we go up.
No, no.
When they go low, we kick them.
And Eric Holder knows of what he speaks, considering how he used the office of the Attorney General to protect his wingman, Barack Obama.
There are a lot of folks who are very upset at Eric Holder today for saying this.
And yes, it's violent rhetoric.
He then clarified that he didn't mean that literally, obviously.
But this is the sort of rhetoric that Democrats have been using for quite a while.
And it turns out that a lot of Democrats do mean this stuff literally.
So, for example, There's this woman who wrote a piece for the Huffington Post.
Her name is Nina Khanna, and she's very excited because she went and screamed at Mitch McConnell.
Here's some tape of her screaming at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Excuse me, are you assaulting me?
Excuse me, am I being assaulted right now?
Why are you putting your hands on her?
She's walking.
Excuse me.
Senator McConnell is really telling that you shook the hand of a man while a woman is trying to tell you her story.
Senator McConnell, do you always turn your back on women like this?
Especially women of color who are all sexual assault victims.
Is this what your constituents can expect of you?
Is this what they can expect of Republicans?
Do you not believe survivors and believe it doesn't matter?
And my favorite part of that is where she says that all women of color are sexual assault victims, which is pretty amazing.
I mean, not like really all of them.
I mean, some of them, I'm sure, but all of them, it's a pretty amazing statement.
She wrote a piece for the Huffington Post called, I Confronted Mitch McConnell and Interrupted Susan Collins, and I'll do it again.
She says, I am the executive director of Positive Women's Network, because she seems very positive, a national network of women and transgender people living with HIV.
But you may know me as one of those people who followed McConnell through Washington, D.C.' 's National Airport last week, as seen in a tweet that quickly went viral.
I and others like me confronted McConnell and other politicians in airports and offices and elevators earlier this month because they refused to meet with the people whom they allegedly represent.
What happened at the airport that afternoon is only one part of the story.
And she talks about how she's harassed Susan Collins and screamed at Susan Collins during her speech affirming her vote for Kavanaugh.
She says, There are tens of millions of us with a lot of skin in the judicial game.
Women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, people with disabilities and chronic health conditions.
The Supreme Court has the power to interpret, uphold, and enforce laws in ways that ensure our democratic and human rights, or it can entrench privilege and power for the already privileged and powerful.
We, in all our diversity and rage, are the future.
And then she suggests that this is how she wants things to go from now on.
She says, we will keep screaming.
We will continue to confront our elected officials wherever we encounter them.
We will not be dissuaded by the police or fines or jail time.
We are survivors, not just of sexual violence, but of an entire system that was designed to keep us in our place.
So it's going to be a lot of screaming from here all the way to the end.
My favorite part of this continues to be the media gaslighting everybody.
No, no, no, no.
These aren't mobs.
These folks aren't members of mobs.
They're just angry people, you know, like angry people in groups screaming at people and doing stuff, which normally we would call like a mob, but they're not a mob because they're Democrats.
And this is what the media do when it's a When it's a Democratic mob, it's not a mob.
It's a group of angry people.
When it's a Republican group of politically concerned people not even doing anything remotely violent, then it's a mob.
Here is Don Lemon doing his damnedest to ensure that people don't hear the truth about what Democrats are doing in the public square.
The real mob is a mob of white supremacists who killed a woman in Charlottesville.
Killed.
Killed.
People who are voicing their opinion about something that they don't believe in, or that they think is bad for them, is how the government, how the country works.
That's not a mob.
Well, I love that the only standard for a mob is they killed someone now.
There's never been a mob outside of mobs that kill somebody.
And by the way, it's important to note that in Charlottesville, the person who killed somebody did so when he got in his car and drove away from his own mob and then rammed into somebody.
So it wasn't like the mob went crazy, ran over a bunch of gates and then started destroying people.
They did that, but that didn't result in the death.
So even by his own logical standard, it doesn't make sense.
Charlottesville was a mob.
That's the point.
But it's not the only mob.
And yet, folks on CNN are very, very strong in their belief that the only sort of mob that's real is right-wing mobs.
Maxine Waters, also trotting out this talking point.
Maxine Waters, the same woman who said in front of a crowd that people should confront and get in the face of people at gas stations and restaurants and they should harass folks in public places.
Now she says, well, the only real type of mob is a mob that has to do with President Trump.
That's the only real kind of mob.
They're trying to change the description of protest and call it a mob.
Well, this president is the poster boy for what a mob protester looks like.
Okay, so Trump is the definition of a poster boy for a mob, but you're changing the definition of a mob in order to actually label mobs mobs.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Senator Mike Lee, he's a friend of mine and also, I think, a very solid citizen.
He came out and he said, listen, he got doxxed last week, meaning that there was a staffer for a Democrat who revealed his personal information.
He says, that's sort of unsafe.
That seems sort of like a mob tactic, maybe.
It's terrible.
It leaves us feeling very unsafe.
My wife has had to be followed to the park by the local police.
It's not a pleasant thing.
The fact that the Democrats are now suggesting they're not involved in these sorts of mob tactics is really kind of astonishing, especially because there's a long history of Democrats using the mobs as political tools.
See, there is this strategy, it's called, Fred Siegel, who's an author of a great book called The Future Was Once Here, about major American cities destroyed by democratic liberalism.
He calls it riot ideology.
Riot ideology, according to Fred Siegel, is this belief that riots are a reflection of deep underlying social ills that can only be cured by more government.
And what you would see from the Democrats is an attempt to actually forward mob politics, to forward the mob, to feed the braying mob, to make the mob larger, to encourage riots, and then turn around and say, look at this.
This riot is happening because the people are angry.
The only way to cure this is to give the people what they want, aka more government or dollars or something else.
This is a tactic of the Democrats.
It has been an actual tactic of Democrats for generations.
Marion Barry, who ended up being mayor of Washington, D.C., he said regarding the Black Panthers, who are a violent, actual terrorist group, he says, I know for a fact that white people get scared of the Panthers, and they might look at somebody a little bit more moderate and say, well, let's give them money.
And so, there he is, supporting the mob.
New York Mayor John Lindsay, who is a very, very liberal Republican, he said that mass unrest could be the spur to more leftist policies.
He said, quote, You remember when the left fully embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement, despite their crime and violence, despite the fact that they were occupying public places and turning them into pig sties?
Jake Harney, the White House press secretary under Obama, said of Occupy Wall Street, quote, You remember when Barack Obama expressed sympathy for rioters in cities ranging from Baltimore to Ferguson?
He said this about the situation in Ferguson.
He said, Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up, and America isn't everything that it could be.
way need to recognize that we have work to do here and we shouldn't try to paper it over.
Whenever we do that, the anger may momentarily subside, but over time, it builds up and America isn't everything that it could be.
In other words, riots are always an expression of public anger, so long as the public anger moves us in the direction of more government liberalism.
In fact, Barack Obama was not afraid to use the mob as a catalyst for his policy preferences basically throughout his entire career.
Right?
Right after the 2008 financial crisis, President Obama takes office.
He has a big meeting with a bunch of bank CEOs.
And at that meeting, he turns to them and he says, you basically ought to cave to my entire agenda because if you don't, I will let the mob get you.
This is a direct quote from Barack Obama reported by Politico, quote, my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.
That is demagoguery.
Sheer demagoguery.
And of course, when it comes to sort of this casually violent language, President Obama is no exception.
He's used this language too.
It was Jim Messina, his White House Deputy Chief of Staff, who said the Democrats should punch back twice as hard.
It was Barack Obama who said, if they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.
And told people to get in their face.
Is Barack Obama saying that?
So all the talk about Trump is unique in American politics because of the way he talks and that's what's causing all of this?
Just not true.
You have to be historically ignorant to think this.
And it has been a long-standing part of the Democratic agenda to use mobs in order to achieve political purposes.
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So back to this Democratic mob politics routine.
I'm very familiar with this because they've been doing this on college campuses.
They basically incentivize violence on college campuses by saying that if things get too violent, well, then we'll just ban conservatives.
Very convenient.
There's violence over at Berkeley.
And so the administration will say, well, we've got to ban conservative speakers until we can get a hold of the situation.
Which is basically the rioter's veto.
We experienced this at DePaul University last year, when students suggested that they might get riotous and violent over me visiting campus.
And so DePaul simply banned me.
And then they threatened to arrest me if I showed up.
There's tape of me standing in front of a security guy, their head of security there, who's telling me that if I take one step forward, he will arrest me.
I mean, it's truly amazing stuff.
Democrats have engaged in this sort of stuff for a very long time, and it's always rich to hear what they're willing to label a mob.
Folks on the left were perfectly willing to label not only Trump supporters a mob, but go back a few years before that.
I'm old enough to remember the Tea Party, which was, in large part, a bunch of people standing around carrying Don't Tread on Me flags and reading the Declaration of Independence at rallies.
I went to a bunch of Tea Party events.
I spoke at a bunch of Tea Party events.
I was a charter member of the Tea Party.
The left called them mobs.
The left said that the Tea Partiers were mobs.
They said Occupy, which was involved in actual criminal activity, many, many, many, literally dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of arrests across the country of Occupy protesters, that was not a mob.
But the Tea Party was a mob.
The Tea Party was really a mob.
Jimmy Hoffa Jr., I remember, there were some events in 2011, and I remember him introducing President Obama there and suggesting that the Tea Party were, quote, sons of bitches.
And he said, well, let's take these sons of bitches out, right?
Because they were a mob.
For Democrats, any form of Republican speech is demagoguery and being a mob.
Anytime you get more than two Republicans in an area together, it's a mob.
But Democrats who are actually charging the steps of the Supreme Court and bashing on the 13-ton doors and chanting, stop Brett Kavanaugh, those people are not a mob.
People who are running through the Senate heart building trying to buttonhole senators in elevators without security protocol, those people are not a mob.
It's not a mob when folks go to Washington, D.C., find conservatives and then rip up their signs.
That's not a mob.
It's not a mob when you have Occupy Wall Street occupying large swaths of land and defiling and defacing it.
Not a mob.
The only mob is Charlottesville.
It's the only mob we've ever seen.
And we keep hearing this from the media.
It is the only mob.
The only mob is the mob in Charlottesville.
That, of course, is not true.
It's silly.
And more than that, it is obviously politically motivated, and the media are part of this whole routine.
So, the left is making the case that their politics is not the politics of the mob.
Instead, anybody who's angry at the politics of the mob, anybody who's angry at the attempt to get Brett Kavanaugh, for example, the mob justice that was attempted on Brett Kavanaugh, and it was mob justice, right?
There was no due process.
He was just going to have his life ended, essentially, by a bunch of people screaming.
The folks on the left have decided that any resistance to that is just because you are a privileged white person.
Charles Blow, who's aptly named over at the New York Times, he has a column today called White Male Victimization Anxiety.
And here is what he says.
He says, during the swearing in of Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Monday, Donald Trump took it upon himself to apologize to Kavanaugh and his family on behalf of our nation for the terrible pain and suffering you've been forced to endure.
He repeated the tire lines that he and Republicans hope will stick and steer the comatose base to electoral fervor that accusations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh were part of a campaign of political and personal destruction based on lies and deception.
They were.
And what happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency, and due process.
It did.
But here's Charles Blow's perspective.
To me, this was not just a president and party worried about an approaching blue wave and trying to take political advantage of a moment of victory.
It was an outright and increasing amplification of a reactionary white male victimization syndrome that has consumed modern American conservatism.
Vox has called it the unleashing of white male backlash.
This is very bad, by the way.
White males are not allowed to defend their rights.
If they do, this is just evidence that they are privileged.
So, if white males are given due process, then that shows that they are privileged.
And if they are not given due process, and then they get angry, that also shows that they are privileged.
So, just like every other major leftist argument these days, the conclusion is already assumed.
It's just a question of how you get there.
According to Charles Blow, the women accusing the white man of assault weren't the victims.
Instead, the white man was the victim.
Well, to be accurate, the actual accusation is that the women accusing the white man of assault didn't have any corroborative evidence, which means that you were trying to get this guy without any corroborative evidence whatsoever.
In some people's eyes, says Blow, he was the victim of political correctness, Me Too's overreach, a check your white male privilege culture drunk on its own self-righteousness.
All of which is true, because that's what happened.
But that's not really what this is about, according to Charles Blow.
Kavanaugh's belligerent offense and Trump's dismissal of the accusers.
He mocked one at a political rally and called the accusations a hoax.
You'll recall that some folks like me criticized that and said that he shouldn't have mocked Christine Blasey for it because he didn't know the facts either.
But according to Blow, they represent for many men a back-against-the-wall, no-more-space-to-retreat moment of fighting back, of pushing back, of standing proud in their patriarchy and proclaiming that it will not bend.
Now due process is patriarchy.
Now presumption of innocence is patriarchy.
Blow continues, they're saying enough.
They will cede no more ground.
They will share no more power.
They will accommodate no more ascendancy and validation of the oppressed.
Now you might want to add the word allegedly oppressed there because again, none of those allegations have actually been supported by any evidence.
He says that is what they are telling us and they are speaking through Trump.
He says the victim sensibility Trump is articulating is not generationally restricted.
In January, a PRRI MTV poll of 15 to 24 year olds found that 43% of young white men say discrimination against whites is as serious a problem as discrimination against other groups.
29% of young white women agreed with them, and nearly half believe efforts to increase diversity will harm white people.
Because, by nature, the definition of the left's attempts to increase diversity include harming white people.
Meaning, what the left wants from diversity is not ideological diversity or diversity of experience.
What the left says is that we should give slots that belong to qualified white people to unqualified non-white people.
This is an actual point that the left believes in.
I don't even know how the left can argue this particular logic.
It doesn't make any sense.
If you are saying that there's a group of college admittees, of which too many are white, and we need to replace some of those white people with non-white people, how does that not harm white people?
You're gonna have to explain that one.
And as for the notion that discrimination against whites is as serious a problem as discrimination against other groups, there are two ways to read that question.
And I think that there's one accurate way and one inaccurate way.
The inaccurate way is to say that historically and presently, discrimination against black folks is not as bad as discrimination against white folks, with which I disagree.
And then there's the way to read it, which is that as a whole, the left is interested in stomping white dudes.
Because they think that there is a patriarchy that must be punished.
And that patriarchy has to do with the color of your skin, and therefore, if you're white, you don't get due process.
That part's true.
That part's true.
Well, we'll conclude Charles Blow's account in just a second, and we'll show why this is going to generate a backlash.
This is actually bad politics on the part of the Democrats in one second.
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Okay, so concluding Charles Blow's column in the New York Times in which he accuses white males of a sense of victimization, He says that NPR's Domenico Montanaro pointed out in August that since Trump announced he was running for president, he has used the word unfair 69 times in tweets and since becoming president, 40 times.
And then he says, Trump's sense of fairness or unfairness really has driven him, his rise in politics and his priorities for the country.
He has capitalized on grievance, especially that of white Americans chafing at the culture of a demographically changing country and has expressed his view of what is unfair, everything from trade and immigration to the court system.
On this show, I have said that I don't like victimization culture.
I don't like it from white folks.
I don't like it from black folks.
I don't like the idea that you believe that you are a victim in a free society.
With that said, the left has been saying for years on end, the day of the white man is over.
The day of whites in this country is over.
Demographic shifts are going to completely change the way the culture is done.
And white men, it's time for you to sit down and shut up.
That is a form of discrimination.
If you actually want to make an argument in favor of a cultural shift in America, make the argument in favor of the cultural shift, but don't do it predicated on the color of the people that you're talking about.
That's what the left has done, and it's driving an awful lot of backlash.
And I think, to a certain extent, appropriate backlash.
If you say to a group of people, you no longer matter in American life, what do you think they're going to do?
What do you think they're going to do?
So, Charles Blow concludes, Well, maybe President Trump is on a mission to point out that discriminatory politics in any form is bad.
Or if he's not, he should be.
performance anxiety into a weapon that can repel change and any perceived diminution of white male primacy.
Trump is on a campaign to make America's white men feel great again.
Well, maybe President Trump is on a mission to point out that discriminatory politics in any form is bad.
Or if he's not, he should be.
If he's not, he certainly should be.
I mean, that is a really biased take on what's going on in American politics, that Trump wants to bind together toxic masculinity and racial performance anxiety.
The suggestion being that the only people who are angry right now, the only people who are upset with the left, are toxic males who want to rape people, and whites who are underperforming.
Nonsense.
Nonsense.
I am angry at lack of due process.
And I am about as feminist as it is possible to be with regard to what women should be allowed to do in the United States.
They should have every right that men have.
And I've said that one million times on this program.
It'd be very difficult to label me toxically masculine.
And as for racial performance anxiety, this idea that what I'm really upset about is that white people are underperforming.
I don't really have that.
That's not a thing.
I'm not concerned about the color of people who are underperforming.
And I certainly am not one of these folks who is supposedly underperforming generally.
It'd be hard to make that case as well.
I am angry, however, and I'm angry at a left which seeks to divide us based on color.
And then the minute that you say, listen, stop dividing us based on color, the left says, oh, that's because you're a patriarchal discriminatory white man.
That's the logic being used right now.
Now, this will backlash.
This will backlash.
And the backlash is not just going to come from white folks.
The great lie of the left is that political correctness has been embraced by all minorities, and political correctness is only opposed by the white majority.
That's the live left.
Well, there is a new study out from Yasha Monk.
He's a lecturer on government at Harvard University.
And here's what he finds.
He says that Americans across cultural and ethnic lines don't like PC culture.
It annoys them.
They are sick of the left trying to shut down debate by simply shouting that you are of a particular color.
Here's what he writes at The Atlantic.
It's a fascinating article.
On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps.
Call them the woke and the resentful.
Team resentment is manned, pun very much intended, by people who are predominantly old and exclusively white.
Team woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian.
The white allies do their dutiful part.
These teams are roughly equal in number and they disagree most vehemently as well as most routinely about the catch-all known as political correctness.
Reality is nothing like this, says Yasha Monk over at The Atlantic.
As scholar Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Marion Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, Hidden Tribes, A Study of America's Polarized Landscape, most Americans don't fit into either of these camps.
They also share a more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest, including a general aversion to PC culture.
The study was written by More in Common, an organization founded in memory of Joe Cox, who was a British MP murdered in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.
It was based on a nationally represented poll of 8,000 respondents between December 2017 and September 2018.
And here is what they find.
According to the report, 25% of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream.
Some 8% of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical.
By contrast, two-thirds of Americans who don't belong to either extreme constitute an exhausted majority.
That would be most of us.
I'm a traditional devoted conservative, but I think I would also probably be a member of the exhausted majority.
Their members share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.
Most members of the exhausted majority, and then some, dislike political correctness.
Among the general population, a full 80%, 80% believe political correctness is a problem in our country.
Young people don't like political correctness.
74% between 24 and 29.
79% under age 24.
The woke are in a clear minority across all ages.
Race is also a bad proxy.
Whites are less likely than average to believe political correctness is a problem.
Less likely.
82% of Asians think political correctness is a problem.
87% of Hispanics think political correctness is a problem.
88% of American Indians think political correctness is a problem.
I love this.
One 40-year-old American Indian in Oklahoma said this, quote, It seems like every day you wake up, something has changed.
You say Jew or Jewish.
Is it black guy, African American?
You're on your toes because you never know what to say.
So political correctness in that sense is scary.
The only part of the standard narrative that the data partially affirm is that black folks in the United States are more likely to support political correctness.
But three quarters of blacks still oppose political correctness.
So, it turns out the vast majority of Americans in every racial category are annoyed by the woke crowd and their insistence that nobody ever be offended.
So, Charles Blow's take, which is that we are allowed to racially polarize so long as we are targeting one political group, that's not popular.
That's not popular.
83% of respondents who make less than 50 grand dislike political correctness.
Just 70% of those who make more than 100 grand are skeptical about it.
Okay, so that means that the richer you get, the more you like political correctness.
So it's not poor people pushing political correctness.
It's not even minorities pushing political correctness.
It is disproportionately rich white people pushing political correctness.
That's amazing!
Now, there is a political gap here.
Among conservatives, 97% believe political correctness is a problem.
Among traditional liberals, 61% do.
The only ones who really, really, really like the woke culture are progressive activists.
Only 30% see political correctness as a problem.
They are far, far outside of the mainstream.
So, who's in this group according to The Atlantic?
I love this.
Compared with the rest of the polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated, and white.
They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than a hundred grand a year.
They're nearly three times as likely to have a post-grad degree.
And while 12% of the overall sample in the study is African-American, only 3% of progressive activists are.
It's rich white kids.
Rich white kids.
Those are the people who are creating a lot of the problems in our society right now with their talk of divisive polarization and political correctness.
In one second, I'm going to explain what the study means by political correctness, because that's sort of important.
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We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so in just a second, I want to get back into this study plus a big scandal over at Google broken by Breitbart.
We'll talk about that.
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So Americans hate, hate, hate, hate, hate political correctness.
But what do they mean by political correctness?
According to The Atlantic, in extended interviews and focus groups, participants made clear they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves.
They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic or an unthinking word choice could lead to serious social sanctions for them.
So, they're not really sure what it means, but they know that they don't like the feeling of restriction that the woke left has created.
But there's plenty of support for the idea that Americans are not as neatly divided by age or race as is commonly believed.
According to Pew, only 26% of black Americans consider themselves liberal.
Nearly half of Latinos argue that many people nowadays are too sensitive to how Muslims are treated.
Two in five black folks say that immigration nowadays is bad for America.
In other words, this notion that demographics is destiny, which has been pushed by both sides of the political aisle to a certain extent, is just not true.
There is no shrinking white majority that is going to inevitably lead to liberal domination, and there is no inevitably increasing liberal majority that is going to lead to incredible victory over time.
People's minds can be changed, in other words.
We are individuals.
We are not just members of groups.
That's really important to remember in the middle of what is a very, very polarized news cycle.
And this is why the left has some serious problems even going forward.
Now, that doesn't mean that the right can't do things to alienate folks.
The right obviously can do things to alienate folks.
And, I would say, there's a difference between being politically incorrect and being a jerk.
And this is where the right has to be careful.
Not everything that you say that is offensive is just you being politically incorrect.
Sometimes it's you being a jerk.
If you use the N-word, that's not you being politically incorrect, it is you being a jerk.
If you say that men and women are different, that is politically incorrect and you're not being a jerk.
What I would recommend is that if you actually want to side with that middle of America that is tired of the standards that are being purveyed by the left, be polite, be civil, and be politically incorrect.
Say things that are factual, specifically because they are factual and not merely to offend.
Believe me, you don't have to purposely offend the left.
The left will be offended anyway.
None of it matters.
Hey, the left will always be offended.
I just spoke at USC last week and it was fascinating.
There was a young black woman who got up to ask a question and she said, you've been accused of inciting violence.
And I said, well, you've been here the whole time.
Have you heard anything that you think would incite violence?
And she thought about it for a second and she said, no, of course not.
Of course not.
The reason that folks on the left suggest that I incite violence is because they disagree with me.
That is why.
Well, it turns out that most Americans would rather have disagreement than impute violence to somebody who's not involved in violence.
And when the left equates speech and violence, and then says that their own violence is speech, All they're doing is alienating the vast majority of the American people.
The left is now playing a game.
The Democratic Party is playing a game.
The speech of the right, they say, is violence, because right-wingers are bad, and their own violence is speech.
So when the left goes and pounds on the doors of the Supreme Court and acts threatening, that's just a form of speech.
That's just anger, according to CNN.
But if folks on the right say stuff that offends people, that's now a form of violence.
On CNN Headline News, when I say a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and some transgender woman grips me by the back of the neck and threatens me bodily harm, those two things are equivalent.
Me saying a man is a man and a woman is a woman, according to the left, is the equivalent of somebody grabbing me physically on national television and threatening to send me home in an ambulance, which is literally what happened, and also makes no sense because you don't go home in an ambulance.
The left is engaged in this really polarizing game, and most Americans don't buy in.
That's what we found out in the Trump era.
Most Americans don't buy in.
Now, that doesn't mean that Trump's gonna win from here to eternity.
It doesn't mean that Republicans always win.
Republicans are not good at this game.
They are not.
And again, when you mistake political incorrectness for being a jerk, or vice versa, you are making a rather large mistake yourself.
But it is important to note that this notion on the left that the woke majority is just all the black people and all the women and everybody else, it's just not true statistically.
And that's a very, very important thing to keep in mind.
We still have more in common than not.
And you can be fooled by watching our politics or watching social media.
I get fooled too.
But it's not reality.
It's not reality.
Okay, speaking of folks who are not living in reality, there is a leaked report from Google.
It was leaked to Breitbart, and it's just an amazing report.
So Breitbart reports, This goes to exactly what I'm saying.
Folks on the left have decided that if there's speech they don't like, it is equivalent to violence.
Reibart News, argues that due to a variety of factors, including the election of President Trump, the American tradition of free speech on the Internet is no longer viable.
This goes to exactly what I'm saying.
Folks on the left have decided that if their speech they don't like, it is equivalent to violence, and thus it must be shut down.
Despite leaked video footage showing top executives declaring their intention to ensure that the rise of Trump and the populist movement is just a blip in its history, Google has repeatedly denied that the political bias of its employees filters into its product.
But, the 85-page briefing titled The Good Censor, I mean, how Orwellian is that?
They actually have a briefing at Google called The Good Censor.
Great job, guys.
In a second, I'm going to go through this report and explain to you why this is so bad.
Plus, I want to talk a little bit about this horrific situation with the Saudi government allegedly murdering a Saudi dissident at the embassy in Turkey and what the Trump administration should do about it.
So, what's in this Google report?
Well, here's what it says.
First, it says in the report that users are asking if the openness of the internet should be celebrated after all.
And they say that free speech has become a social, economic, and political weapon.
If you are Google, and you say political speech is a weapon, I would suggest you don't understand what free speech is.
They say that the early free speech ideals of the internet were utopian.
They even point out that maybe they shouldn't be considered a platform anymore.
I've said this on the program before.
Platforms, it's like AT&T, right?
You pick up a phone, you can say what you want on the phone line, and AT&T doesn't shut down the conversation based on what you say.
That makes it a platform.
If AT&T were to be like the Daily Wire, then they would actually be a publisher, right?
They could decide what is and is not published.
If that's the case, then they have all sorts of legal liabilities you don't have.
As a platform, Google's essentially admitting they might in fact be a publisher, not a platform.
The briefing from Google identifies several factors that allegedly eroded faith in free speech.
The election of Donald Trump and the alleged Russian involvement is identified as one such factor.
So basically, Democrats browbeated Google into believing that they are responsible through allowing free speech into Donald Trump being president.
And then they talk about the rise of online hate speech.
And then they also talk about spreading conspiracy theories.
But the most important thing appears on pages 66 through 68.
Their briefing argues that Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are caught between two incompatible positions.
First, the unmediated marketplace of ideas.
Right, that would be the free speech tradition of the United States.
And second, the well-ordered spaces for safety and civility, which would be The second tradition is described as the European tradition, which favors dignity over liberty and civility over freedom.
That's scary stuff.
That's very scary stuff.
And that is political correctness come to life.
That is all your social media companies siding with the woke left that most Americans don't like.
Saying we should shut down ideas, we should redirect people's eyeballs, we should move people toward a civility that we want.
And we will define civility.
Civility may not include your viewpoint.
This is dangerous, dangerous stuff and it's one of the reasons why we should all be very wary of these massive social media companies that seem to be targeting specific political points of view.
Now, I do want to talk a little bit about the situation with regard to Jamal Khashoggi.
He is a columnist or was a columnist for the Washington Post.
He's been missing since entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week.
The Turkish police allege that he went into the consulate and that he was then murdered by members of the Saudi consulate.
That basically the Saudis brought in 15 people, a kill squad, to go into the consulate, kill this guy, dismember him, and then bury him.
The Saudi government is still denying foul play.
The Turkish government has provided specifics and evidence.
There's video of Khashoggi entering the consulate, and they've provided the names of 15 Saudi agents that it says flew to Istanbul in pursuit of him.
The Saudis have issued blanket denials.
But this is raising some very serious issues for the United States, because the Trump administration has been very close to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
And that's because Salman has been treated as a reformer.
He's somebody who supposedly wants to move away from some of the fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia.
He's been involved in the creation of an anti-Iranian alliance in the Middle East.
The United States has heavily funded the Saudi government in their fight in Yemen because the Saudis are basically having a proxy war with Iran in Yemen.
And so this has raised questions because Khashoggi was a legal resident of the United States.
This has raised questions about whether the United States ought to punish the Saudis by withdrawing support for their arms.
We should stop selling them weaponry, for example.
The reason that this is a dicey issue is not because we should keep providing them arms on a moral level.
The reason it's a dicey issue is because there is another party at the table, and that is the Iranian government, which is an actual terrorist government.
And the Turkish government is much more warm with the Iranians than they are with the Saudis.
The Turkish government right now is holding a U.S.
pastor in prison, so none of these regimes are great.
But it does provide the Trump administration with a choice.
Choice number one is basically slap the Saudis on the wrist, pretend that nothing bad happened.
Choice number two is to basically downgrade the Saudi relationship with the United States over all of this.
To suggest that the choice doesn't have ramifications or that it's easy is to misread the nature of global politics.
My tendency is to say that if this happened, you have to downgrade the Saudis.
There's just no way around it.
You have to withdraw armed support for the Saudis and they have to be punished because this cannot be allowed to go on by an American ally.
We should also remember that there are geopolitical considerations at play, and backing the Iranians in order to stop the Saudis, or allowing the Iranians to run roughshod through the Middle East because the Saudis did something evil here, would not be a good outcome either.
Sometimes there is no good outcome.
And it's just awful the Saudis put the United States in this position, geopolitically, and also, obviously, a lot more awful that it sounds like they murdered a guy because he was a dissident at their consulate in Istanbul.
It's just, just terrible, just terrible.
Okay, so, as we continue, we'll talk a little bit more about that, and we'll get to some things I like and things I hate.
So, President Trump has sounded off on this.
Yesterday, he came out, he said, listen, we can't let this happen.
This can't be a thing.
This is a bad situation.
We cannot let this happen.
To reporters, to anybody, we can't let this happen.
And we're gonna get to the bottom of it, okay?
Okay, so, obviously, Trump very unhappy about this.
Lindsey Graham, who's been a big Trump ally, he says, there'll be hell to pay if this guy actually was murdered.
I've never been more disturbed than I am right now.
If this did in fact happen, if this man was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, that would cross every line of normality in the international community.
If it did happen, it would be hell to pay.
OK, now let's point out that would anybody be that surprised?
I mean, the Saudi Arabian government has been a dictatorship, a rather evil dictatorship for several generations now.
So I don't think anybody would be supremely surprised if it turns out that this is what happened.
But it will necessitate action on the part of the United States.
And as I say, that action could take one of two forms.
Eli Lake has a good piece over at Bloomberg talking about all of this.
He says, there's a deeper problem with the slap on the wrist.
It lets the Saudis believe the U.S.
needs them more than they need us.
It effectively puts the Saudis in control of the alliance.
And what about the more severe response?
Well, Saudi Arabia would definitely get the message, and other U.S.
allies would understand there are consequences if America recalled its top diplomat and supported a U.N.
resolution.
But that risks undermining Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the alternatives in Saudi Arabia aren't much better.
The U.S.
has an interest in his success.
What's more, less U.S.
military engagement in Yemen could actually lead to more civilian casualties.
So, we will find out what happens here.
My guess, in the end, is that the United States does a mixture.
That the United States punishes the Saudis temporarily and then comes back to them in three months and talks about what they can do to rectify the relationship.
That's the probable outcome.
But suffice it to say that it's deeply disturbing and messed up that the Saudi Arabian government decided to put the United States in this position aside from the innate evil of killing a man who apparently was going to this embassy to get a marriage license.
Just terrible stuff.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So things that I like, I wanna give a shout out to Encounter Books.
Encounter Books is a wonderful publisher.
They do incredible work.
I've been a big fan of the stuff that they do over at Encounter for a very, very long time.
They publish some of my favorite authors, people like Heather MacDonald, published by Encounter Books.
Just too many authors over there to name.
They're having their 20th anniversary gala this weekend.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to go, but if you are in New York, you should think about going.
It really should be a kick.
Yeah, good for them.
Encounter does tremendous, tremendous stuff.
And I believe it's still Roger Kimball over there.
They do just excellent, excellent work.
So if you go check out all of their published works, very intellectual publications.
I really like Encounter.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, shout out to the producer of James Bond, Barbara Broccoli, who's a longtime executive producer, and the daughter of the franchise creator, Albert Broccoli.
She says that James Bond will never be a woman.
Well, Good.
Because, um, what the hell?
Why would James Bond ever be a woman?
Like, it wouldn't make any sense if James Bond were a woman who's attracting guys.
Like, the key to James Bond as a character is that he is a rogue, right?
He's a rogue who attracts women.
Now, the reason that that makes him unique is because women and men do not treat sex the same way.
You know, James Bond is quote-unquote a player, right?
He's a player with a heart, right?
He always finds a woman in one of these films, a beautiful woman, and then she falls for him, and then they sleep together.
At least one woman per film.
Now, you want to know what you call a woman who can get a guy in bed?
A woman.
Right, that's what we call that, right?
Guys are not the same about sex as women.
So if you had a beautiful woman and she's like, ooh, she was able to get that guy in bed, that is not any sort of actual plot line because there's no tension whatsoever in the plot line.
I mentioned this study the other night at...
University at Buffalo one of my favorite social science studies ever from 1989 there is it's I think it's Clark and Hatfield are the guys who did this study and the study was they took an attractive female and they had her go to a bar and proposition a bunch of guys want to come home with me tonight they had an attractive male go into a bar and proposition a bunch of females want to come home with me tonight 75% of dudes proposition by the female said yes Zero women said yes.
Zero.
For people who think that men and women are exactly the same about matter of sexual, that is just asinine.
In fact, turning James Bond into a woman makes no sense at all.
And the way that you can tell this is they tried to do this with Atomic Blonde and it was a box office failure.
There was nothing about Atomic Blonde and Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde where she couldn't have been a dude.
Like, they could have literally had a dude say every one of those lines and do every one of those actions and the movie would have worked in almost exactly the same way.
Nobody actually wants to see A woman play James Bond.
I'm sorry to break it to folks.
If you want to create a new character who's not James Bond and is female and is written uniquely female, go for it.
But men and women are not interchangeable on screen or in real life.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
So now I have to tell you a story.
My producer, Colton, who travels with me when we are on the road, young Colton, we were on the road and we did an event in Detroit.
Great event.
And we're with our security detail also.
It's both tragic that I have to have a security detail in order to go around giving speeches, but it's also fun in the sense that I really like the guys on my security detail.
They're all ex-military and they're a blast and they're really a kick.
So we go to this event in Detroit.
Great event at a church.
And afterward, there are a bunch of off-duty police officers who are there, who are fans.
And one of them says, OK, I know you need to get to the airport.
How about we give you a police escort?
And I said, OK, sure.
Sounds great.
So this female police officer jumps into her car.
And we're cruising down the highway toward the airport to get on our flight.
And she's got her lights on.
And suddenly, behind us, pulls up another cop.
And this other cop pulls us over.
And we were like, okay, so why are you pulling us over?
And the first thing he says is, because you're following a police officer.
And we were like, well, right, because she's guiding us to the airport.
And he says, really?
That's her?
She's guiding you to the airport?
Yes.
She's giving us an escort to the airport.
And he said, well, your brights were on.
Like, no, our brights were not on.
You're just making that up.
And then, because all the guys in my security detail are ex-military, one of them starts to get out of the car to talk to the police officer.
And the police officer is getting real uptight now.
Get back in the car!
Get back in the car!
I'm like, God, I'm gonna get shot on the side of the freeway by a cop with a stick up his butt.
And here's the part that's amazing.
This is the best part.
So the police officer who was guiding us there has now pulled over on the side of the freeway as well.
And so we say to this police officer, why don't you go and ask the person in that car?
And he says, well, I don't know.
That's a police officer.
And we say, well, that's a police car.
And this officer says, well, you know, there are people on our force who go home at night and, you know, they build police cars and they just ride around in them.
Now, number one, that's not a thing.
Number two, if that's happening and you are posing as a police officer, that's a crime.
So if you actually think that that is a person who has built a formal police car and is driving around with their lights on off-duty, shouldn't you go arrest the person doing that, you know, 10 feet in front of us and not bother us?
Eventually, this police officer goes and actually asks the other police officer what's going on.
She says, yes, I'm a police officer.
I'm guiding these people.
And the guy kind of gives us a stern shake of his head and gets into his car and then drives away.
The reason I tell this story is, as you know, on the show, I am very pro-police officer.
I think law enforcement does an amazing job overall in the United States.
I love police officers.
I defend police officers.
I'm one of the biggest defenders of police officers in America.
The reason I tell this story is because one of the narratives you hear a lot is that police action, when it's bad action, is a result of racism.
Something bad happens to a black person, it's automatically the result of racism.
I am here to tell you, there are some police officers who are just doofs.
I don't know what this guy's name was.
I don't know his badge number.
I wish I had it.
Okay, but this police officer was a doof.
He was a doof.
And it is important to recognize that in every profession, there are doofs.
So when something bad happens, instead of immediately leaping to the conclusion that it must be systemic racism because police officers hate black folks, instead, we might want to think about the possibility that the police officer is just a doof.
The kind of doof who would pull you over for following another police officer.
I mean, frankly, if you thought the police officer in front of us was not a police officer and was a civilian impersonating a police officer, you should have given us a medal for making a citizen's arrest against somebody who's impersonating a police officer.
It was just insane.
I mean, it was really funny.
One of the guys was like, well, we were kind of behind the other police car when he pulled up to talk to the second officer.
He's like, should we pull up?
And I was like, no, just sit still, okay?
This guy is super jumpy.
I really don't want the headline tomorrow to read, Shapiro and security team shot to death by officer for following a police officer to the airport.
It'd be a long headline, number one.
And number two, that's just, that's a bad way to go.
So, that's my crazy story from this particular troupe.
Okay, other things that I hate.
So, CNN.
They hate racism over at CNN.
Unless it's a bunch of saying, a bunch of people saying kind of racist things about Kanye West.
And they kind of like racism.
So, there was a full panel on CNN in which all of the members of the panel decided that it was totally okay to call Kanye West a token Negro and suggest that he is stupid because of his race.
But now all of a sudden, Kanye, because he's put on a MAGA hat and he's an attention whore like the president, he's all of a sudden now the model spokesperson.
He's the token Negro of the Trump administration.
This is ridiculous.
Okay, so that's great.
I'm glad that we now know that folks on the left can call people token Negroes and that's totally fine.
It is amazing what the left can get away with simply because they are members of the political left.
There's a reason people are not fond of this sort of rhetoric.
It's gross.
Okay, we will be back here tomorrow.
I will be back in Los Angeles, ensconced in my beautiful studios.
Unlike the Washington Post says, my studios are very nice.
Ensconced in our beautiful studios.
And I will be taking your questions in the mailbag.
So make sure to subscribe now is a good time to do 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.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caramina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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