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Oct. 22, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:33
The Republicans’ Best Friend | Ep. 643
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President Trump's approval ratings jump, migrants approach the southern border, and the left goes ballistic over the Department of Education's approach to sex and gender.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, I hope that you had an uneventful weekend.
We here at The Daily Wire had an eventful weekend, which means we had to go to Politicon and ruin our Sunday that way.
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All right, so.
The polls in the lead up to the midterm elections are starting to look a lot better for the Republicans.
The reason for this is because Democrats suck at everything.
So there's a lot of attempt on the right to claim that this is all Republican know-how and suddenly Republicans are good at things.
No.
Well, what's really happening here is that the Democratic mask is off and Democrats are garbage at everything.
Basically, when President Trump is the second thing in the news, that is a very good thing for Republicans.
When he is the first thing in the news, it's a problem.
So when Democrats spend weeks demonstrating they don't care about due process and that they will railroad a guy simply for political reasons, very good for Republicans.
When the lead headline is the leading 2020 contender for the Democrats setting herself on fire over a DNA sample, that's really good for Republicans.
When the lead headline is Democrats approaching Ted Cruz in a restaurant and screaming at him and his wife.
Very good for Republicans.
The best friend of Republicans right now is the insanity of the Democrats.
And you are seeing that full scale in the polls.
Also, obviously, you're seeing the effect of a very good economy on the Republicans.
The margin by which voters trust Republicans over Democrats on the economy has never been larger in the history of the polling.
Really, it's like R plus 17 in this poll, which is amazing.
Also, I don't want to give no credit to President Trump.
President Trump has done a couple of very good things.
Number one, he has taken proper economic measures that have really benefited the average American.
And number two, the President of the United States does make it feel like he is a change actor.
And usually in midterm elections, there's an attempt to vote for change.
Right now, what the polls show is that Republicans are actually seen as the party of change while being the party in power.
That's really unusual.
Usually the party out of power is seen as the party of change, but because Trump is so out of left field and so outrageous and so chaotic, The benefit of that is that he feels like a change agent, even though he is the guy who's sitting in the seat.
That is very good for a Republican.
So here is what the latest polls show.
According to the Wall Street Journal, voter interest in the midterm elections has surged to records within both parties, helping to drive up President Trump's approval rating while maintaining the Democrats' lead as the party most preferred to lead Congress, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll.
The findings point to an energized electorate buffeted by dynamics that bring great uncertainty to the outcome of an election just two weeks away.
And what the polls kind of show is that everything is narrowing.
Nearly two-thirds of registered voters show a high level of interest in the election.
That is the highest ever recorded in a midterm election since the Journal-NBC poll began asking the question in 2006.
Now, the reason for that is because largely of the Democrats.
The Democrats were always going to be energized to vote against President Trump.
But now Republicans are really mobilized to vote against the Democrats.
I know that my interest in voting peaked significantly thanks to the Democrats' behavior during the Brett Kavanaugh saga.
And I know that most other Republicans feel the same.
The once large gap between Republican voters and Democrats voters' interest in the election has now been closed.
68% of Republican voters and 72% of Democrats Say they are very interested in the election.
That is the highest recorded for either party by the survey in a midterm election.
Also, President Trump's job approval rating has jumped to 47% according to the Wall Street Journal and NBC News poll.
That is the highest mark he has ever had in office.
In that poll, he is now higher than President Obama's average poll approval rating before the 2010 elections.
Now, it is worth noting that President Obama got skunked in the 2010 elections.
But with that said, President Trump has gained significant approval, only 49% disapproving.
So that's about as close to parity as Trump is ever going to get.
He's never going to be a 55% president.
He's just too polarizing a figure.
47% for President Trump is a very good number, and that is a re-election number.
If he gets up to 47% in the public approval ratings, he wins re-election in 2020.
That's an improvement from September.
That's when 44% approved and 52% disapproved of his performance.
And then Democrats decided it would be a great idea to shoot themselves in the foot repeatedly with an AR-15.
And now President Trump has soared in the approval ratings.
Democrats still do lead on the question of which party should control Congress.
Among poll respondents identified as likely voters, 50% prefer Democrats, 41% prefer Republicans, which is about the same as it was in last month's poll.
But the blue wave is now running into a riptide of uncertainty, according to certain pollsters, although Democrats are preferred in the national poll overall.
Here's the key.
So that means that in California, Democrats are really fired up.
In New York, Democrats are really fired up.
as the most competitive by the nonpartisan Cook political report, the parties are dead even on the question of which one should control Congress.
So that means that in California, Democrats are really fired up.
In New York, Democrats are really fired up.
In Ohio, not quite as much, or at least Republicans are just as fired up as Democrats are in Ohio.
In last month's poll, this is an amazing thing, in last month's poll, Democrats led by 13 percentage points among registered voters and six points among likely voters.
Interest in the election has jumped among many groups that tend to favor Democrats, Latinos, African-Americans, young people.
More than two-thirds of black voters showed high interest in the election.
That's up from 57% in the average of polls taken from January through September.
But you're also seeing a massive increase, a massive increase among white voters, among Republican voters, among older voters.
It's consistent.
So we do not know what the case is here, but there is a massive gender gap.
And this massive gender gap is, again, the result of two things.
President Trump is toxic to women and Democrats are toxic to men.
The gender gap is not one factor.
It's not that men love Republicans and love President Trump because they hate women or anything like that.
It's that President Trump is uniquely off-putting to many women, particularly suburban moms, and the Democrats are supremely off-putting to men.
And this is why you're seeing the polls close.
The gender gap that has actually opened up wide in the last month is not between women and kind of the normal electorate.
It's between men and the normal electorate.
Men are now favoring Republicans in heavy numbers.
This poll found Democrats with a lopsided advantage among female voters.
For the second month in a row, women in the survey say they prefer a Democrat-controlled Congress by 25 percentage points, 57 to 32, which is a massive gap.
Male voters, however, want Republicans to lead Congress by a 14-point margin, 52% Republican, 38% Democrats.
And competitive swing districts are mostly in suburban areas.
Urban voters favor a Democratic-controlled Congress by a 36% margin.
Rural voters favor the GOP by 31 points.
Among suburban residents, the parties are virtually tied.
44% favor GOP control.
45% favor a Democratic Congress.
Now why?
Because voters continue to trust the Republicans on the economy, on trade issues.
Republicans are preferred by a 17-point margin.
That's up from 8% in August.
The issue has been in the spotlight because President Trump was actually able to close a NAFTA deal.
So all of the talk about tariffs and trade wars, that has basically receded into the background.
So all of this is good news for Republicans.
Does that mean Republicans hold the House?
Is still more unlikely than not, but this upsurge is pretty amazing stuff for Republicans in the lead up to a midterm election.
And again, a lot of that has to do with the fact that the Democrats are just terrible at everything.
When I say they're terrible at everything, I mean they are completely off-putting on the most basic, basic issues.
And that's what we are seeing.
That is the story of today's politics, is how off-putting the Democrats are.
Mitch McConnell, for example.
Cocaine Mitch, as we are fond of calling him.
Cocaine Mitch was eating at a restaurant.
He was confronted by protesters.
If this thing becomes consistent, It is not good for the country, and it is certainly not good for the Democratic Party, which seems to be embracing it in a way the Republican Party is not.
Now, Nancy Pelosi was also confronted over the weekend, and protesters shouted at her.
The difference is, high-level Republicans condemned that.
High-level Democrats are not doing a great job of condemning what's going on here.
Look at these protesters confront Cocaine Mitch and Elaine Chao.
They're eating at a restaurant, and, I mean, frankly, they're just lucky that Cocaine Mitch didn't go ballistic on them and tell them to say hello to his little friend.
I don't know why you'd want to go up against Cocaine Mitch and Elaine Chao.
They will claw out your eyes and feed you to the ravens.
But this is what these protesters decided to do.
Oh, yeah.
Why don't you get out of here?
Why don't you leave the entire country?
Ditch next!
Here's what I love.
This is how you know it's Kentucky.
Okay, the way that you know this is Kentucky is the protesters show up and they start shouting at cocaine Mitch and all the patrons are like, get the hell out of here.
Nobody likes you.
Leave.
And this is why it's so funny.
I've been asked before if anybody has ever confronted me at a restaurant or tried to make trouble at a restaurant.
I'm like, no, I eat kosher.
Those are all my friends.
Right?
You come into a kosher restaurant and you try to confront me?
These are all my buddies.
This is my security.
Right?
The Jew crew.
Okay?
So we will fight you off.
But Cocaine Mitch basically has that in Kentucky as well.
So he just activated his goons to basically fight back against these guys just by sitting there.
The cool collected turtle.
Gotta love it.
Okay, meanwhile, Democrats determined to show that they are just as nutty as you think they are in other ways as well.
They've decided that Beto O'Rourke is the most important person on planet Earth.
He is deeply important.
Why have they decided Beto O'Rourke is important?
I have no idea.
They're trying to say that he's sort of like Barack Obama, except without half the charm or the racial appeal.
But they're still trying to manufacture this kind of quasi-enthusiasm for Beto O'Rourke.
There was a report from ABC News that really fawned over him last night.
But the best stuff, the best stuff from these campaigns, and it was true for President Trump, and it's the thing I despise most about politics generally.
It's true for Obama and Trump.
Anybody who has any level of political notoriety has a certain number of fans who are completely crazy.
And those fans do completely crazy things in public.
I don't mean wearing T-shirts or lining up for book signing.
I mean what I'm going to show you in just a second, because it's astonishingly bad and really embarrassing.
And you got to imagine that these folks, the day after the election, they wake up and they go, what was I thinking?
Was this what I wanted to do with my life when I was 12?
Was this the image that I wanted to project to the world?
We'll get to all that in just a second.
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When I say folks have made fools of themselves for Beto O'Rourke, I remember back in 2008 when the Democrats actually had small children sing hymns to President Obama, then candidate Obama.
Now Democrats have gone even beyond that.
Here is a bunch of Beto O'Rourke supporters.
I don't know why.
Doing YMCA, but BETO.
In unison.
It's not good.
Wow.
Time to stand up and choose.
Time to end the cruise blues.
Time to share the good things of you.
Now, what I love about this most is the move that was made by Democrats that Beto O'Rourke draws an incredibly diverse crowd.
If you can't see this, this is all old white people and a small girl.
That's really what it is.
It's like all a bunch of old white people who can barely move.
It looks like workout night at the local old age home.
I mean, it looks like it does when you actually go down to the YMCA and you see the people who are 60 in the water doing physical therapy, except they're doing BETO for Senate.
So that was strong, but that was not the strongest entry in the Beto worship hymnal.
And the strongest entry comes courtesy of some crazy ladies who decided to cut the weirdest video I've seen in this election cycle.
Well, I can't say that.
I mean, I've seen so many weird videos in this election cycle.
I can't.
But this one is pretty astonishing.
Here we go.
I don't even know what this is.
But listen, if you can bear to.
Had a Ted Cruz yet?
Uh-uh.
By the way, where'd you meet him?
I first saw him on Ellen DeGeneres.
He's taking on the GOP.
You get the picture?
Yes, we see.
And Beto does it without a super PAC.
Here he comes now!
He's married with kids, but he's still my man.
Man, man.
He played guitar in a rock and roll band.
Like Bernie Sanders, but he's got a tan.
There's nobody my Beto compares to.
Like JFK with a ten dollar hairdo.
Hey, Ted Cruz, you better watch your back.
Believe it or not, this is not a parody of Beto supporters.
These are actual Beto supporters.
I know people are telling me to cut this, but I can't.
It's mesmerizing.
I know people are telling me to cut this, but I can't.
It's mesmerizing.
It's mesmerizingly bad.
I feel so much better now.
OK, well, this is not actually a parody of Beto supporters, So good stuff there from the Beto supporters, really demonstrating that they don't care too much about a guy driving over a median line, being super drunk and crashing into a truck and then fleeing.
And also, I mean, I can see why they don't care that much about drunkenness, considering you would have to be drunk to think that was a good idea.
But there you are.
So I can't imagine why Republicans are responding the way that they are, except for Democrats.
Again, the theme of today's show, Democrats, terrible at everything.
Continuing with that theme, My the woman who I've chosen to catcall on a routine basis, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the future congresswoman from Brooklyn.
Over the weekend, again, you wonder why folks in the United States are not taking Democrats maybe as seriously as they should, because they don't deserve to be taken seriously.
Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the weekend saying that we should fight global warming the same way we fought the Nazis.
Well, I don't see really how bombing the Germans is going to help, but I mean, I'm willing to try if she is, I guess.
Here is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggesting that I guess we're supposed to, I don't know, invade Normandy to stop global warming or something?
Here she is, the most intelligent advocate for her position the left can present these days, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
We had a direct existential threat with another nation, and this time it was Nazi Germany and Axis, who explicitly named the United States as an enemy, as a enemy.
And what we did was that we chose to mobilize our entire...
It's very difficult to hear what she says the last...
When we talk about existential threats, we can stop her because it's very difficult to hear.
Because when we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to the country was around World War II.
So she knows nothing about history.
There was an entire Cold War that existed for several decades after World War II, as it turns out.
And so we've been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before.
Right when we bombed the Germans.
I mean, don't stop her, she's rolling.
She says, none of these things are new ideas.
What we had was an existential threat in the context of a war.
We had a direct existential threat with another nation.
This time it was Nazi Germany and Axis, who explicitly made the United States as an enemy.
As an enemy.
History lessons with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez are some of my favorite history lessons.
We had a direct existential threat with another nation.
This time it was Nazi Germany and Axis.
Not Axe Body Spray.
Okay, you mean the Axis Powers?
Oh, that's what you mean.
And what we did was we chose to mobilize our entire economy and industrialize our entire economy, and we put hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country.
We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100% renewable energy, and that's just the truth of it.
So we need to draft every male of military age, have them live in barracks for four years, ship them overseas, put women in the factories, and ration the butter.
Good idea.
Good.
Yeah.
Don't see how that's going to go around.
Why don't we take them seriously?
I just don't understand.
Speaking of not taking them seriously, a very serious issue right now is cropping up on America's southern border.
So, as folks know, I'm pretty libertarian when it comes to immigration.
I'm somebody who believes that there should be free movement of labor, not citizenship.
You shouldn't be able to come in the United States and become a citizen and vote.
You shouldn't be able to get taxpayer dollars.
But if you want to come here and work, I really don't have a huge problem with it.
But Even I, a libertarian on immigration, believe that we ought to have actual borders in the United States, meaning defensible borders.
You don't just get to cross our borders because you want to cross our borders.
A country without borders is not actually a country.
This caravan issue is a serious issue.
This is according to the Associated Press this morning.
A growing caravan of Honduran migrants streamed through southern Mexico on Sunday, heading toward the United States after making an end run around Mexican agents who briefly blocked them at the Guatemalan border.
They received help at every turn from sympathetic Mexicans who offered food, water, and clothing.
Hundreds of locals driving pickups, vans, and cargo trucks stopped them to let them clamber aboard.
Bessie Jacqueline Lopez of the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula carried a stuffer stuffed polar bear in a winter cap that seemed out of place in the tropical heat.
It's the favorite and only toy of her two daughters, four-year-old Victoria and three-year-old Elizabeth, who trutched beside her gleaming with sweat.
Listen, I have sympathy for folks who want to escape crappy places to come for a better life.
That doesn't mean the United States has an obligation to take in anyone who wants to get in without any sort of vetting procedures or determination as to whether this person is going to help the country or not.
That's not the way this works.
We live in a different time than we did in 1907 when there was no vast welfare state for people to take advantage of, when the structure of the economy was substantially different.
Again, I'm for free movement of labor, but you have to control your borders.
She says, My goal is to find work for a better future for my daughters.
I have sympathy for that.
Go claim asylum or try to apply through legal immigration means.
You don't just get to march across the United States' southern border.
And yet the left has claimed that's exactly what should happen.
President Trump has taken to Twitter to respond to all of this.
We'll get to that.
And here's what he says.
He says, you know, we'll get to that in just one second.
President Trump's response to the migrant crisis and the Democratic response to the migrant crisis.
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So, President Trump has responded to this growing caravan of migrants that have left Latin America and are moving up through Mexico, Latin and Central America, and moving up through Mexico.
He has responded, I think, properly by pointing out a couple of things.
One, we need border security.
Two, the countries that are allowing them to do this are doing so with the intent of creating a pressure situation on our southern border.
Why should we continue funding governments that are going to continue creating those situations?
If the Honduran government is going to allow folks to simply walk over the border to Mexico with the intent of going to the United States, why exactly would we be funding that government?
Same thing is true of the Mexican government.
Same thing is true of the Salvadorian government.
There is no reason for us to back governments that are going to create pressures on our southern border without actively working with us on the immigration issue.
That's correct.
That's correct.
We do have procedures.
made to stop the onslaught of illegal aliens from crossing our southern border.
People have to apply for asylum in Mexico first.
And if they fail to do that, the U.S. will turn them away.
The courts are asking the U.S. to do things that are not doable.
That's correct.
That's correct.
We do have procedures.
One of the problems here is that you can actually show up at a point of entry and you can apply That's the legal way to do this.
That's not what these caravans are doing.
Some of these caravans are simply finding places that are open in the United States border and crossing there.
Trump says the caravans are a disgrace to the Democratic Party.
Change the immigration laws now.
Now, I'm not sure what immigration laws he wants changed specifically.
We actually just have to enforce the laws that are already on the books.
You're not allowed to illegally enter the country.
We are allowed to deport people.
We can streamline that process.
Maybe those are the laws he wants changed, but it is true that the Democratic Party has been using the immigration issue as a club against Republicans, suggesting that Republicans don't care about Latino folks because they want to defend America's borders.
That argument isn't working very well, specifically because a lot of Latinos in the United States are also interested in living in a country with borders.
They're not interested in living in a country where anyone can go and come as they see fit.
One of the great lies of the media is that everyone agrees with an open borders agenda.
Virtually no one in the United States actually agrees with an open borders agenda.
And it's pretty obvious that there's an actual agenda to this caravan.
It's organized.
Not only is it organized, it's organized for the cameras.
The AP reports, hundreds of migrants applied for refugee status in Mexico in the southern city of Ciudad Hidalgo.
By Sunday evening, the Interior Department reported it had received more than 1,000 requests, but most of them were not doing this.
A far bigger group forded the Suchiat River from Guatemala to the Mexican side individually and dozens at a time and resumed the trek at first light, marching 10 abreast on the highway.
Si se pudo, they chanted in Spanish.
Yes, we did.
Well, we don't have to let those people cross the border.
Presumably some of those folks are from Mexico.
They're not necessarily from countries to the south of Mexico.
Their destination on Sunday was the city of Tapachula in the Chiapas state.
additional travelers came from since about 2000 had been gathered on the Mexican side Saturday night.
Presumably some of those folks are from Mexico.
They're not necessarily from countries to the south of Mexico.
Their destination on Sunday was the city of Tapachula in the Chiapas state.
Under a blazing sun, small groups of 20 to 30 paused to rest in the shade of trees on the side of the road.
By afternoon, the caravan had evolved into long lines of walkers straggling for Basically, what this looks very much like is the Middle Eastern migration that has swamped a lot of Europe.
That's what this looks like, just visually.
Now, the numbers are not the same, obviously, as you're seeing from immigration from North Africa and the Middle East into islands off the coast of Italy.
But the imagery is the same.
It's a group of folks who are trying to escape a worse life and simply cross the border illegally into the United States.
Again, the United States is a sovereign nation.
We can't afford to simply take in everybody that we would want to take in.
Out of economic necessity or out of some sort of sympathy for the folks crossing the border.
You cannot have a country that is the strongest economy on planet Earth taking in thousands and thousands of people illegally without vetting them and without any sort of skill set.
That does not make for a good economy.
This is one of the reasons why it's so funny.
Folks on the left, they love Norway, they love Denmark, they love Sweden.
The immigration restrictionists have been winning in Norway, Denmark and Sweden.
You cannot actually have a full-on socialist state in terms of redistribution of wealth when you have an underclass that is coming that does not have a skill set.
One of the things about the Nordic countries, the Scandinavian countries, is that they've basically banned immigration.
Well, the United States, the left in the United States wants it both ways.
They want full-on open immigration at the same time that they want to raise social spending to heights never before seen in human history.
That is not a recipe for victory.
And that's why President Trump, the Republicans are going to win on this issue.
Even Lindsey Graham, who's a real dove on immigration, right?
Lindsey Graham, famously one of the Gang of Eight, along with John McCain, a big fan of immigration reform.
Even he said, listen, this is not something we can do.
Nancy Pelosi would welcome these caravans.
I don't know what happened to Lindsey Graham, whether he bumped his head or something, but Lindsey Graham 2.0, the reset, is really good.
And here's Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina, saying Nancy Pelosi will welcome these caravans.
You want to be the country of people that run you up and down the hall and spit on you?
Or do you want to be a country of Republicans who can actually deliver for working families out there, that will put good judges on the court, that will stand up to the enemies of this country?
Nancy Pelosi will welcome the caravans here.
Donald Trump and the rest of us will stop them.
Okay, well, that is exactly right.
And that's not out of lack of sympathy.
That's because a country that has a rule of law must abide by that rule of law.
Democrats who continue to push this issue are going to lose.
It's funny, because Democrats are so ensconced in their own bubbles.
I mean, what polls show is that Democrats have far fewer Republican friends than Republicans have Democrat friends.
Because Democrats who live in blue areas actually see Republicans as nasty, evil human beings, and so they won't even talk to them.
They actually believe that it's a mainstream view that people should be able to flood into the country.
They actually believe that it's a mainstream view that gender and sex are completely separate.
And not only that, that if a man calls himself a woman, that that man is then a woman.
The latest evidence of this, I mean, this is an amazing story, is the way the media are covering An attempt by the Department of Education to define what Title IX actually says.
So here's the headline from the New York Times today.
It says, Now when you read that headline, what does that sound like to you?
It sounds like the Trump administration is saying there are no such thing as transgender people or people who suffer from gender dysphoria or gender identity disorder.
That's what it would sound like from that headline.
Is that what's actually happening?
No, that's not what's actually happening because that's idiotic.
Nobody is saying there aren't people who are transgender.
What the Trump administration is saying is that under the law, laws that have to do with sex discrimination are specifically focused on biological sex.
They're not focused on you thinking you are a member of a different sex.
So when the Civil Rights Act was written and it included language about men and women and sex discrimination, it did not mean that it is sex discrimination for you to say that a man who shows up in a classroom, a fifth grade classroom, dressed as a woman And you say, that's not cool.
We're not going to do that.
That's not the same thing as saying a woman can't work in the classroom.
That's not sex discrimination.
That's what the Trump administration is saying.
They're saying that behavior by men is not the same as being female.
That's the actual... I'll read you the actual article.
It doesn't ban transgender people.
That's not what they are doing.
The media is so dishonest with regard to how they cover transgender issues because they refuse to even acknowledge the fact that there is such a thing as biological sex.
It's utterly self-defeating.
What the left suggests is that gender and sex are exactly separate, but gender is sex.
Right, so gender and sex are completely separate.
You can be a man, but your gender is female, and that makes you a biological female.
That makes you an actual woman.
This is how they want to read the law.
That makes no sense under any circumstances.
I will explain in just one second.
And they think this is a winning issue.
I mean, it's just, it's insane.
It's insane.
First, let's talk about that thing, that clunky, awful thing you're wearing around your wrist.
You want something nice?
You want something that looks like this?
I mean, let's be real.
Check out that watch.
It's a nice watch, right?
I mean, it's a nice, clean-looking watch.
It's classy, well-designed.
Well, what you need is a movement watch.
Movement has come pretty far from being crowdfunded kids working out of a living room.
In the past year, they've not only introduced a ton of new watch collections for both men and women, they've also expanded to sunglasses and fashion-forward bracelets.
I have two movement watches.
My wife has a movement watch.
My mom has a movement watch.
So does my father.
What's great about them is they're really kind of minimalist and classy looking.
And they are not expensive.
They are luxury looking watches at non-luxury prices.
Movement watches are not going to tell you how many steps you've taken, how many calories you've saved.
They're just going to tell you the time.
That's it.
That's what they do.
And they are very good at that.
Movement watches start at just $95 at a department store.
These would cost you $300, $400, $500.
Movement figured out by selling online they could cut out the middleman and retail markup, providing the best possible price.
They have classic design, quality construction, styled minimalism, and you get 15% off today with free shipping and free returns by going to MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
See why the movement keeps growing?
MVMT.com slash Shapiro for that discount, 15% off.
MVMT.com slash Shapiro.
Go join the movement.
Okay, so we are going to get to more of the left's bizarre take on science in one second.
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So when President Trump rails at the fake news, this is what he's talking about.
This sort of headline from the New York Times.
Transgender could be defined out of existence under Trump administration.
We're just gonna disappear the transgenders now.
No, that is not what they're doing.
Okay, here's what they're doing.
Quote, the Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as biological immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.
The most drastic move yet in a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law.
Well, because gender is biological and immutable and it is delivered at birth.
Now, what the left has said is they've redefined the terms.
One of the great areas of confusion in the transgender debate is what the hell everyone's talking about.
Really, I mean that.
Because sometimes when people on the left say gender, what they mean is expressed feminine or masculine qualities, and sometimes what they mean is actual sex.
And it is impossible to tell which unless they actually specify, and then they shift the definition based on what they want their point to be.
So if you say, okay, I accept that there's such a thing as an effeminate man, because there are men who are effeminate.
Okay.
And they say, no, that means they're a female.
You say, no, no, no, that doesn't mean that they are a biological female.
They say, well, it means they are a female gender.
You say, well, no, it means that they are an effeminate man, a man with feminine qualities.
And they say, well, but there are thousands of genders.
Here's the problem with defining gender as the expression of effeminacy or masculinity.
This means that there are literally 6.8 billion genders, 7.3 billion genders.
However many people there are on the planet, that's how many genders there are because we each have an individual amount of effeminate or masculine characteristics.
We all have individual amounts of masculinity, of testosterone and estrogen.
We are all created differently.
Based on genetics and environment.
So if you're going to say that there are only that the left is really the one making the case there are only two genders.
They're saying that if you're a feminine man, you're actually a woman.
And if you're a masculine woman, you're actually a man.
If you want to define gender as just expressed characteristics of femininity or masculinity, there are 7.3 billion genders on planet Earth, which means it's meaningless.
It's a word that means nothing.
If you want to say that gender has to do with biology, Now, you have to separate it into sex.
Sex is based on Y-chromosomes and X-chromosomes.
Now, there are intersex people.
There's a very, very small percentage of the population.
That is not the argument being made by transgender advocates.
They're arguing that you can be fully genetically male and still female.
All of this makes no logical sense.
It's completely confusing because it makes no sense.
There is no internal consistency or logic to the transgender civil rights movement.
They can't even define their terms.
If they simply want to say people should be treated well, I'm with you.
If they want to say that I have to pretend that a man who says he is a woman is a woman, that Caitlyn Jenner is just as much a woman as my wife, give me a freaking break.
And everyone with half a brain on planet Earth knows this.
But here's what the New York Times says.
First of all, sex assigned at birth is the dumbest term in the world.
If you want to say gender assigned at birth, at least now you're being consistent with the terminology.
But even in that sentence, you can see the terminology shifting, right?
First of all, sex assigned at birth is the dumbest term in the world.
If you want to say gender assigned at birth, at least now you're being consistent with the terminology.
But even in that sentence, you can see the terminology shifting, right?
There's gender and then there's sex assigned at birth.
You don't assign a sex at birth.
Babies are born.
They are what they are.
When my girl was born, she was a girl.
I didn't assign her girl.
You know who assigned her girl?
Genetics.
God.
That was sort of baked in.
You know how I know?
Because she's a girl!
My God, people!
And the same thing with my son.
When he was born, You know how I knew he was a boy?
I looked at him.
Wow.
This was difficult.
And it turns out he is in fact a boy.
Amazing that the coincidence that he comes out and he has all male characteristics and that he's also a boy.
Unreal.
Just amazing.
Almost scientific.
Okay, so here's what they say.
I love the New York Times.
This is their way of slandering religious people as bigots.
single-sex programs, and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept.
Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.
I love the New York Times.
Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.
This is their way of slandering religious people as bigots.
It's not people who actually use their brain and recognize that there are men and women, and these are two separate categories, and that maybe they're women's groups that want to remain women's groups and not have men who believe they're women in those groups.
And the same thing for men's groups.
And the same thing for bathrooms.
No, it must be that it's those crazy people who believe in the Jesus.
It's those people.
If it weren't for those crazies who believe in the Jesus, then everything would be fine.
Then we could all acknowledge that men and women are exactly the same, except for a little bit of appendage down below.
But here's what the New York Times says.
Now, so here's the bad stuff.
Okay, what's the bad thing the Trump administration did?
Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that will receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by the New York Times.
The department argues in its memo that key government agencies needed to adopt an explicit and uniform definition of gender as determined on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective, and administratable.
The agency's proposed definition would define sex as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals a person is born with, according to a draft reviewed by the Times.
Any dispute about one's sex would have to be clarified using genetic testing.
How in the world is that not just basic rationality?
If you claim you're a woman, I should be able to objectively tell whether you are a woman or not.
It shouldn't be up to you to decide.
And it's amazing to me that the same left that has now come around to Elizabeth Warren is not of Native American, Because not... Well, if she says she's a Native American, why isn't she a Native American?
She should be.
Why not?
She is more Native American than Caitlyn Jenner as a woman.
So what exactly is the problem here?
It's truly amazing.
So you wonder why the right doesn't trust the media?
You wonder why people are resonating to the right?
It's because the left insists that we absolutely frontally lobotomize ourselves on basic concepts like what is a woman and what is a man?
And we're supposed to pretend it's a great evil when the Trump administration says gender discrimination means discriminating against women, not discriminating against men who believe they are women.
It's an amazing thing.
I want to explain more in just one second.
So Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was specifically written with discrimination against women in mind.
This is what Title IX of the Civil Rights Act does.
Title IX bars discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.
That is what it is for.
Okay, it says, this is what Title IX says, okay?
Quote, this is from the Education Department.
Now, notice the word that is used there.
No person in the United States shall on the basis of sex, of sex, not of gender.
participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
Now, notice the word that is used there.
No person in the United States shall on the basis of sex, of sex, not of gender.
Now, even if it had said on the basis of gender in 1972, that still would not have meant gender as the transgender left wants to explain gender now.
In 1972, In 1972, nobody was foolish enough to believe that a man who said he was a woman was actually a woman.
Nobody.
Okay, this is not a thing.
And so to redefine, so they're doing a twice switch here.
They're doing a linguistic and legal twice switch here.
What they're saying is, number one, that provision of Title IX doesn't refer to sex, it refers to gender.
And gender is just expressed feminine or masculine characteristics.
Then they are saying that by gender, we actually mean sex.
So a woman who says she is a man is actually a man.
So just to get this straight, Title IX, which was designed to protect women from male discrimination, now is designed to protect men who believe they are women from discrimination on the basis of discrimination against women.
No.
No, I'm sorry.
This is, like, just no.
There's nothing in the law that suggests any of this.
And for the left to go nuts over this or suggest transgender people are being defined out of existence?
No.
What this is saying is there needs to be an objective measure of male or female before we can determine whether someone is being discriminated against on the basis of their sex, as opposed to the basis of their behavior.
Now, you can still outlaw discrimination on the basis of behavior.
If you really think this is an important thing, why don't you just try to pass a law?
This is why the left won't actually do what they want to do.
If the left actually did what they say they want to do, what they would do is they would pass an anti-discrimination law that would say no school can fire any man who shows up dressed as a woman at work.
This is what they would say.
No school can take any action against anyone based on perceived gender identity.
They can actually do this.
But instead, because the left wants to hijack the law, this is what the Obama administration did, they're forcibly rewriting regulations in order to carve the heart out of laws and interpret them in exactly the reverse of what they were meant to be.
If the left can't win elections, they'll do it through regulation.
They did the same thing with regard to carbon emissions.
They tried to use the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon emissions.
There's nothing in the Clean Air Act that suggests carbon emissions can be regulated by the EPA.
Win an election, guys.
You want to do this stuff?
Win an election, and then pass legislation that you think the American people like, and then we can answer as to whether we think you're right or wrong.
But they don't want to actually do that.
Instead, they just want to sit outside and shout and scream.
Like small children.
Okay.
Meanwhile, this is a story that I just have to touch on because I think that it is important and obvious.
We have forgotten all the obvious things in our society, obviously.
I mean, that's basically what today's show has been about.
Global warming is not Nazism, and we can't respond in the same way.
Also, America has borders and we have to enforce them.
Also, men are men.
Women are women.
Men who believe they are women are not, in fact, women.
And trying to define gender and sex as the same thing sometimes and define them as completely separate other times leads to linguistic and terminological confusion.
These are obvious things.
Other obvious things.
You're going to be happier in your life if you have less sex partners before you get married.
The Atlantic now has reported on a study over at the Institute for Family Studies.
Nicholas Wolfanger, He's a sociologist at the University of Utah.
He's found that Americans who have only ever slept with their spouses are the most likely to report being in a very happy marriage.
Meanwhile, the lowest odds of marital happiness, about 13 percentage points lower than a one-woman partner, belong to women, who have had six to ten sexual partners in their lives.
For men, there's also a dip in marital satisfaction after one partner, but it's never low as it gets for women.
This is what the graph shows.
Why?
Because marriage is a very good institution.
And it turns out that when you reserve yourself for marriage and you make sex special and connected to a level of emotional and spiritual intimacy, you're likelier to lead a happier life.
I speak as someone who has led this life.
My wife also led this life.
Thank God my parents led this life.
I think that is a good life.
And the promise of the sexual revolution, that free sex all around is going to make everyone happier, is a bunch of crap.
It is not true.
It has never been true.
It is a false promise.
Act morally, you will live a happier life.
Attach yourself to one human being, and recognize that sex is more than just getting your rocks off.
You will lead a happier life, and by the way, your sex life will be happier too.
All of this should have been obvious, but we as a civilization have decided to discard the obvious in favor of the attractive, and that, of course, is a huge mistake.
Okay, time for a couple of things I like, and then some things I hate, and we'll do a Federalist paper.
things that I like.
Over the weekend, Andrew Klavan, who is not quite as execrable as Michael Mulls, he gave me some reading recommendations.
One of the things I love about having Drew in the office is that we are constantly talking books and literature and going back and forth recommending books to each other.
There's a great meme that I saw today.
Have you seen that meme from... What's the show where the guys are throwing the chair at each other?
We have a room full of humans.
You know the meme of the guys shouting at each other and then one picks up a chair and throws the chair at the other guy?
Is it bounty hunters?
I'm trying to remember.
In any case, it's a very famous meme online in which these two guys are arguing.
One picks up a chair and throws the chair at the other guy and people have sort of pasted in text.
So the meme shows a guy, one of the guys saying to the other guy, saying to the other guy, you already have enough books.
And the other guy saying, no, I want to go to the bookstore.
And the guy says, the first guy says, read the books you already have.
And the second guy's like, but I want new books.
And then he throws a chair.
That's me to myself every day.
And so Drew is constantly recommending new books.
My book pile around my bed is now, I believe, 45 deep.
And it just continues to grow.
But I knocked out a couple over the week.
It's American Chopper.
That's what it is.
Okay, so in any case, one of the books that Drew recommended, and it was a quick and easy read, is the book Submission by Michelle Wielbeck, which I'm obviously mispronouncing.
This book was a massive bestseller in France.
It was translated into English.
What's hilarious about this book is because Wielbeck is a Very famous author.
The left in the United States has to take him seriously, even though he's obviously supremely right-wing.
It is a very, very right-wing book.
It's not right-wing for the reason that a lot of people think it is.
The basic plot line is that the Muslim population in France has grown to such an extent that the Muslim Brotherhood has a party in France that wins 21% of the vote.
They get into a runoff with the National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, and they form a coalition with the Socialists in order to actually win the presidency of France.
In the process, they decide to privatize a lot of the education system, And create an Islamic education system.
The main character is a professor in that education system who basically has to decide whether to convert to Islam to maintain his job or not.
Now, a lot of people have taken this as like, oh, it's an Islamophobic novel.
It's talking about the evils of Islam.
Now, it does talk at length about the evils of radical Islam.
It talks about the fact that Islam is patriarchal and Okay's polygamy and is okay with the mistreatment of young women and all of the rest of it.
But what the book is really about, more than any of that, is the emptiness of the West.
How the West has completely, completely ripped away the heart of its own content.
That the original appeal of the West was based on eternal truths and religious values, and those values have been completely subsumed under the rubric of an empty humanism that gives people no reason to actually live with meaning.
Basically, we've said to ourselves that we can substitute hedonism, sex, a nice happy feeling about others for actual drive toward doing something worthwhile with your life.
And so the main character in the novel basically goes around in this kind of empty post-Christian Europe, feeling like he's got nothing to keep him going and having promiscuous sex with as many people as he basically wants.
And eventually he realizes that he's got nothing going for him.
I don't want to give away the ending of the book.
Suffice it to say that the book is really more a critique of Western Europe than it is of Islam.
It's much more of a critique of what the Europeans have done to take away their reason for existing and that this is leading to the complete hollowing out of one of the great civilizations in world history.
It's well worth reading.
Now, it is X-rated.
Wheelbeck is sort of famous for his sex scenes.
I will say they're incredibly raunchy.
You can skim them, so that's the good news.
It's only about a 240-page book.
You'll cut out about 70 pages of the book if you just skip the sex scenes, so it becomes a lot shorter read.
But it's worth reading because his take on what Western civilization has become is, I think, Well, it is worthwhile.
The nonfiction version of this book, not about Islam, but about the emptiness of what's happened in the West, is my book, which is coming out next year.
We have the cover for it.
It looks really good.
I can't wait to bring it out.
It's really exciting.
All right, time for some things that I hate.
All right, so.
Late last week, a couple of actresses decided that fairy tales were bad.
Kristen Bell was probably, maybe, half-joking.
But there was this talk by Kristen Bell and Keira Knightley that princesses don't need to be saved, we don't need to read stories to our daughters about princesses being saved.
Here's the reality.
Princesses do need to be saved, and princes need to be saved.
Men need women, women need men.
We save each other.
This is what fairy tales are largely about.
Even if you read the fairy tale of Rapunzel, at the very end of Rapunzel, The guy carves his way through a thicket.
No, actually, it's Sleeping Beauty.
Which one does he go blind?
In the original fairy tale, there's one where a guy has to carve his way through a thicket of thorns.
I believe it's Sleeping Beauty.
And he's actually blinded in the process.
And only when the princess cries into his eyes is he reawakened.
I can't remember whether that's Rapunzel or Sleeping Beauty in the original version.
I'm sure our emailers will tell us hundreds of them.
In any case, The idea that fairy tales are all about female submissiveness and men sexually abusing women is just ridiculous.
So that didn't stop, of course, Amnesty International from suggesting that Sleeping Beauty and Snow White are completely evil because women have, it's Rapunzel, that's what I thought, that women have fallen into these spells and now they must be awakened with the kiss of true love.
There's no consent though, guys.
There's no consent.
So Amnesty International cut this absurd little video That has nothing to do with the actual fairy tale.
And then they suggested that this was what the fairy tale is.
Okay, for those who can't see, it's a prince approaching a sleeping princess in a glen.
And he goes in for the kiss.
But then he decides that he's instead going to sexually abuse the woman by putting his hand between her legs.
Because this is what happens in the fairy tale, obviously.
Dude, seriously.
Yeah, dude.
Seriously.
What?
This?
Nah.
Nah, it's cool.
I'm a prince.
She's a princess.
We were gonna, you know, we messed around at the party, so we're just picking up where we left off.
But is she into it now?
She told me earlier she wants the D from the P. From the P?
Yeah, that's me.
The prince.
The P. I'm the P here.
The prince.
What?
We should have made a contract or something?
No, but, uh, I mean, did you ask her if she wants to?
Well, I guess.
Not really.
It says, no consent, no fairy tales.
So apparently, so my favorite meme that came from this was somebody took the Sleeping Beauty, like the Disney Sleeping Beauty, and showed the prince bending in, leaning in to kiss the princess.
And then he gets very close, and then he says, wait, she hasn't consented.
And then the next picture is just of Skeleton Sleeping Beauty, because she's dead.
The whole point of the fairy tale is that she dies if you don't kiss her.
So if the question is, can you give someone CPR to wake them up without their consent?
The answer is yes, you can.
In life-saving situations, if you, like, was there any guy who actually saw the movie Sleeping Beauty and was like, oh man, now I'm gonna go to parties and rape chicks.
Like, was there anyone who did that?
Was there anyone who watched Snow White and they're like, oh, that was, did you see the hotness of that non-consent with all the dwarves sitting around?
Really?
That was their thing?
Oh man, look at all the forest animals watching, this is hot!
It's just absurd, but this is the point that we've reached.
Anything will teach a boy, apparently, to be a rapist, and a girl to submit to rape, because that's our culture.
There's a great irony in this.
Sleeping Beauty came out in, I believe, 1954, 1956.
Cinderella came out around the same time.
All of these came out in the 50s and 60s.
All of the women who watched these movies growing up ended up being part of the 60s and 70s.
The most empowered group of women in human history.
But what happened?
Didn't they watch Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella?
Yes, they did.
And you know what?
It didn't teach them that they ought to let themselves be raped.
My goodness, you dolts.
Okay, so, other things that I hate.
Bernie Sanders is obviously attempting to set up himself for a 2020 run, which is just great.
When will the boomers leave us alone?
When?
When?
Just go away, guys.
Just retire.
Okay, Bernie Sanders, the octogenarian crazy loon bag from Vermont, who spent most of his life being completely useless slash counterproductive, and now has emerged to be useless and counterproductive on a national scale.
He rips into President Trump.
He says, President Trump is setting a terrible example for our children.
Right.
Yeah, I got it.
Dude, I know.
I know.
But you're a socialist and a crazy person.
I don't understand how that's a solution to President Trump setting a bad example for our children.
You know, and all of us who are parents, I've got four kids, seven grandchildren, we all have kids.
You know, we try to raise our kids to be honest, to treat other people with respect and with compassion.
And what kind of terrible example, regardless of your political views, doesn't matter whether you're conservative or progressive, you want your kids to be honest and decent.
What kind of terrible example does this person in the White House give to our children?
I mean, he is just teaching our children all the wrong things.
Unlike Bill Clinton, who received oral sex in the Oval Office.
Unlike Ted Kennedy, who drove a woman into a river and let her die there.
Donald Trump is uniquely bad.
Uniquely, uniquely bad.
I'm sorry, I'm not going to hear it from people who are completely silent about this sort of bad activity from people on their own side.
Now, I've been very consistent calling out President Trump's bad behavior.
And I was consistent in calling out Ted Kennedy's behavior and Bill Clinton's behavior.
Bad behavior is bad behavior.
But the partisan weaponization of bad behavior, that I find almost completely useless.
If you're not going to call it out on one side, you can't call it out on the other.
Honestly, you have to be consistent in the attempt to uphold virtue.
And that holds true on the right too.
People who are willing to let Donald Trump off the hook for his personal behavior, but rip on Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton?
Doesn't work that way either.
Okay, time for a quick Federalist paper.
So every week we go through a Federalist paper.
We are all the way up to Federalist 48, making steady progress.
This one written by James Madison.
In this one, Madison continues to discuss separation of powers.
In Federalist 47, he began that discussion.
He asks how the branches can protect themselves against usurpations by the other branches of government.
How can the executive protect itself against the legislature?
How can the judiciary protect itself against both?
He points out that he thinks that the real danger is legislative usurpation.
This just demonstrates that the modern form of government that we have in the United States is very, very far from what we originally had.
We did not have a regulatory state when the United States was first created.
Madison was not greatly fearful of the executive branch usurping power or the judicial branch usurping power because he believed the legislature could simply defund the executive branch or restrict the jurisdiction of the judicial branch, both of which it has the power to do.
But now, in today's government, it seems that in many cases, the legislative branch has become almost a vestigial organ of government, except when it comes to massive spending programs like Obamacare.
But here is Madison's original case.
He says, the legislative department derives a superiority in our government from other circumstances.
Its constitutional powers being at once more extensive and less susceptible of precise limits, it can, with greater facility, mask, under complicated and indirect measures, the encroachments which it makes on the coordinate departments.
So in other words, because the legislature has more power, and is given more power under the Constitution, that gives it more ability to usurp power from the other branches.
He argues that usurpations by the executive and judiciary are unlikely.
Why?
Because he says, as the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people, and has in some constitutions full discretion, And in all, a prevailing influence over the pecuniary rewards of those who fill the other departments.
And dependence is thus created in the latter, which gives still greater facility to encroachments of the former.
In other words, the legislature has the power to take away money from the other branches.
Restrict jurisdiction.
We shouldn't have to worry about usurpations.
Now, there's one problem with the founding vision for how the government was supposed to balance itself.
The main problem is the perception by the founders that the big problem is going to be ambition, right?
What they said is the ambition was going to counteract ambition.
This is also said in the Federalist Papers that the legislators were going to be ambitious.
They weren't going to stand for the executive encroaching on their power.
The executive was going to be ambitious.
The executive wasn't going to stand for encroachments on his or her power.
Same thing in the judiciary.
The problem is, the legislature, because of the regulatory state, actually is not ambitious enough.
The legislature now has an incentive to kick every tough question over to either judiciary or executive.
If it's a tough constitutional question, they don't feel the necessity to argue whether it's constitutional or not.
They just say, we'll pass what we want, let the judiciary decide what it wants to do.
And they want to pass laws that are highly nonspecific.
The more non-specific, the better.
Because if you pass a law that says, I want the executive branch to do good stuff, and then the executive branch gets to fill in all the blanks, and the executive branch fills in bad stuff, you say, hey, that's not what I passed.
I said I wanted them to do good stuff.
You see this with environmental legislation.
Environmental legislation is very often not detailed enough.
It gets kicked over to the EPA.
The EPA does tens of thousands of pages of regulations, and then Congress runs against the regulations it gave the EPA the authority to pass.
The regulatory state completely undercuts the bargain between the branches.
The same thing is true of the judiciary.
In other words, what we need is a legislature that attempts to grab back its power, whether we're talking in the context of war powers or in the context of environmental regulation.
Across the board, the legislature was designed to be the first among equals, not the president and not the judiciary.
OK, we'll be back here tomorrow with more updates on the migrant caravan and all the rest.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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