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Oct. 23, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:33
The New Democratic Agenda | Ep. 644
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Barack Obama is back with his take on 2018, Hillary Clinton learns to love federalism, and the anti-science left takes center stage.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
You thought he was gone.
You thought he wouldn't be back.
But, wrong you are.
He's back.
And we'll talk about him in just a second.
But first, let's talk about all of the events surrounding Election 2018.
If you look at the rhetoric from the leftist news outlets on the heels of Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation, they're trying to solidify the left for the midterms.
It is going to be a battle to hold the House.
Here's what's at stake if the Democrats take it.
All the positive policies Republicans have enacted over the past couple of years, all the things to help the economy, the tax cuts, the judicial appointments, the Cutting of the regulations.
All of it could be stymied if the Democrats take control of either the House or the Senate.
And when they start to obstruct, what effect could that have on the economy, on stocks, on other unknowns that might impact your savings?
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Can you afford another hit to your retirement, like the last downturn when the S&P dropped 50%?
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Well, we are watching in the news as the country seems to be on the verge of something really, really terrible.
It seems like something that's building up, frankly, on both sides.
A couple of parallel stories that are really ugly over the last 24 hours.
Story number one, George Soros, who is not a person I admire in any way.
George Soros is, of course, a leftist funder of a bunch of radical causes, but he is not a person who ought to be murdered.
And yet, an explosive device was found in the mailbox at his home on Monday afternoon.
According to senior law enforcement, as according to the New York Times, the device was proactively denotated by bomb squad technicians from the Westchester County Police Department.
The bomber's motive remains unclear.
Soros is a favorite target of right-wing groups.
He was not at home at the time.
The investigation has been taken over by the FBI.
All of this is ugly stuff.
Now again, I am no George Soros fan.
I think that George Soros does terrible, terrible things for world politics, and I think he backs awful causes.
That doesn't mean that folks should go out bombing him.
This is insanity.
And it's not just George Soros.
According to the Daily Caller, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's office in California was vandalized on Monday, according to an Instagram post by the Congressman McCarthy, who could be the future Speaker of the House.
His local office is in Bakersfield, California.
He posted photos of the suspect and some of the damage.
Two young men were caught on surveillance camera outside the office.
It had its windows smashed in by a large boulder.
And he doesn't know exactly who these folks are.
He put out the notice.
McCarthy's office, of course, is not the first GOP office to be vandalized in recent weeks.
A Republican Party office in Wyoming was intentionally set on fire two days after it opened in September.
Vandals later hit the Metropolitan Republican Club on Manhattan's Upper East Side in October, smashing windows and spray-painting anarchist signs on the doors.
All just wonderful stuff.
And, yesterday, there was a dangerous situation in Washington, D.C.
A suspected intruder was shot after kicking down the glass doors at WTTG Fox 5 on Monday.
He was previously known to both Fox executives and police.
He had leveled threats against both previously.
D.C.
police responded to the building on Wisconsin Avenue in the Friendship Heights neighborhood, as officials say that the man had been shot in the station's lobby by an armed security guard after forcing his way Through the glass doors.
His name was George Odoms and he apparently started walking directly toward the desk station in the direction of the main part of the building.
At that point, the security guard shot the guy.
He is in critical but stable condition.
It's apparently this guy has mental health issues but the problem is that we now live in a society in which we don't know who has mental health issues and who is being politically motivated and who has mental health issues and is being politically motivated.
We're living in an incredibly volatile time and that's unusual because the economy of the United States is thrumming along.
We're doing really well, economically speaking.
We're not in the middle of any major foreign crisis, and yet we're at each other's throats politically, and the bleeding edge of that fight is actually bleeding.
I mean, the bleeding edge actually carries the possibility of serious violence.
Heating up the rhetoric on both sides is obviously not a worthwhile cause, and yet that seems to be happening.
Barack Obama, who was one of the contributing factors to the breakdown in social fabric in the United States during his presidency, he continued that crusade yesterday.
He was campaigning in Nevada against Dean Heller, who's the sitting senator, and he just made clear that the sort of political polarization that he supposedly preaches against, he's actually very much for.
Here's President Obama back on the stump for the Democrats, and he is saying that President Trump is a tin-pot dictator.
It is not a Democratic or a Republican idea that we are not supposed to pressure the Attorney General or the FBI to use the criminal justice system to try to punish political opponents.
That's not how America works.
That's how some tin-pot dictatorship works.
That's not supposed to be America.
Okay, well, here's the problem, and this is really the problem with President Obama.
You're going to see this repeated throughout his little speech that he gave yesterday in Nevada.
Everything he accuses the right of doing, he actually did while he was in office.
He says things like, you're not supposed to influence the FBI.
You're not supposed to influence your Attorney General.
His own Attorney General, Eric Holder, called himself Barack Obama's wingman.
That was Eric Holder, his own DOJ head, calling himself the President's wingman.
The President has asserted executive privilege to protect Eric Holder from a Republican Congress over the Fast and Furious scandal.
So this is just nonsense.
And when the President says that you're not supposed to activate executive agencies to target political opponents, That's exactly what his IRS did.
His IRS targeted conservative 501c3s, pro-Israel 501c3s.
The evidence was extraordinarily solid in that case.
The DOJ didn't do a serious investigation, nor did they prosecute anybody.
So when the President says that President Trump is doing all this stuff, when Obama says that Trump is doing all of this stuff, just remember, President Trump is a reaction to President Obama.
And the more you look at American history, and history in general, What you really do see is that the nature of the human being is to swing from side to side, that we react to things that happen in our life.
And we usually overreact to things that happen in our life.
So we react to President Bush by putting in President Obama, then react to President Obama by putting in President Trump.
But the pendulum, in order for it to start swinging less wildly, It takes a force of collective will.
It takes all of us saying to each other, we are not going to allow this pendulum to swing quite as wildly as it has been in the past.
If you look at the vacillations between the presidencies right now, I would say that if you looked back in the 1960s, like the difference between say LBJ and Richard Nixon on policy, what you were looking at was a vacillation that was Semi-major, but not enormous.
The swing of the pendulum was not quite as far.
The same thing is true with Eisenhower and JFK.
The swing of the pendulum was not quite that far.
If you look at how far the pendulum is swinging now, it's almost at 180 degrees.
The pendulum is swinging wildly side to side, and that's dangerous for the country, because eventually the pendulum is going to swing over the bar, and things are going to get really insane.
President Obama did not help that.
This revisionist history where President Obama was a great peace-bringer, this revisionist history where President Obama did not create conflict inside the United States, where he was a unifying figure as opposed to a polarizing figure, that is just a lie.
When he was elected, maybe he was a unifying figure for five minutes, and then he proceeded to govern as an extraordinarily far-left guy, and then he also proceeded to polarize the country along ethnic, racial, and sexual lines.
It's a real, it's just, it's obvious that he's doing this.
He trolled the right into insanity and now President Trump is trolling the left into insanity.
This is all reactionary stuff.
Here's President Obama, again, he's such a troll.
He's such a troll.
When people accuse President Trump of being a troll, I'd like to remind folks, the first presidential troll was Barack Obama.
Here's President Obama trolling people in Nevada yesterday, saying that he was very committed to the truth as President of the United States.
Here's just one simple fact.
This is a fact.
Unlike some, I actually try to state facts.
I believe in facts.
Right?
I believe in a fact-based reality and a fact-based politics.
Okay, that is just a lie.
He did not believe in a fact-based reality, a fact-based politics.
It's just not true.
And he says that he didn't lie, he didn't like to fib like some people.
Really?
How about if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?
How about if the president doesn't have authority to grant executive amnesty?
How about those men died in Benghazi because of a YouTube video?
How about the Iran deal is being pursued because of a new moderate policy pushed by the new Iranian moderate administration?
The president lied every five seconds.
Barack Obama was a congenital liar while he was in office and he was replaced by a guy who doesn't have tremendous regard for the truth either.
Again, reaction in American politics is almost completely proportionate.
Barack Obama was very far to the left, and Donald Trump is his funhouse mirror image.
And when Barack Obama says things like he tries to state facts and Donald Trump just goes out there and he lies all the time, it's just not true.
I like when he says that he's based in facts.
This is a president of the United States who took Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which said you're not allowed to discriminate against women, and tried to apply that to men who believe they are women, saying that this was somehow fact-based.
Almost nothing that Barack Obama did was fact-based.
Almost nothing he did was fact-based.
And this is why so many people reacted to Barack Obama.
They said, listen, if facts don't matter to the left, well, maybe they don't matter to us either.
All that matters now is victory.
Because that was the mentality of the left.
The mentality of the left was that slandering George W. Bush as a war criminal was fully justified in order to get Barack Obama elected.
That slandering John McCain as George W. Bush Part III was totally fine, so long as it got Barack Obama elected.
That slandering Mitt Romney as a dog-killing Evil genius who gave women cancer specifically so that he could fire their husbands.
Right?
That was totally fine so long as he won.
That Harry Reid was fine in saying that Mitt Romney didn't pay his taxes because, after all, they won.
This stuff does not spring from nowhere in American politics.
Evil in American politics, the nastiness of American politics, did not spring out of the ground full-blown like Athena out of Zeus's head.
That's not the way this works.
Barack Obama was the progenitor of Donald Trump.
Barack Obama was the predictable forebear of Donald Trump in retrospect.
And second, we're going to give you some more of Barack Obama's propaganda.
And the fact that the left doesn't even acknowledge any of this is one of the reasons why the right continues to act the way the right is acting.
We'll get to more of that in just a second.
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So, Barack Obama is a great reminder as to why Donald Trump is president.
And then he tried to take credit in Nevada last night for the way the economy is growing.
Now, let's be clear.
The stock market did climb under Barack Obama because it fell to all-time lows under Barack Obama also.
You'll recall that the economy collapsed in late 2008, right before the election.
That wasn't on Obama.
And then it continued to collapse until early 2009.
And then it started to recover.
And then we had the slowest peacetime recovery in American history.
I'm old enough to remember when folks were saying things like, a 4% GDP growth rate is no longer possible for the United States, and now we have had that for a couple of quarters in a row.
I'm old enough to remember when people said that the manufacturing sector in the United States was doomed to failure, that obviously is not true.
When folks were saying that the stock market was going to top out where Obama left it, that obviously was not true.
That job creation was going to top out, that obviously was not true.
There's no question the economy is growing faster under Donald Trump than it was under Barack Obama.
It is superheated.
Under Donald Trump in a way that it was not under Barack Obama.
Again, very, very slow recovery under Obama.
And whatever recovery is due to Obama, you really can only attribute for the first couple of years.
Because after that, it was the Republicans stymying every budget that Obama tried to propose.
Obama passed one budget in eight years.
Republicans rejected every budget proposal Barack Obama ever made.
And yet here is Barack Obama saying that if anybody gets credit for the economy, it's him.
Now, listen, I'm never a fan of crediting the president with the economy.
I just don't.
I think the economy is too complicated for that.
I usually think that it has more to do with a predictable policy emanating from the halls of Congress.
The fact is that since Republicans were elected in 2010, we've had a consistent rate of growth in the United States economy accelerating when they didn't have to battle it out with Barack Obama over regulatory policy.
If you actually want to attribute economic growth to any one body, give the credit to Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and all the other Republicans who have been instrumental in the formation of policy under Obama and under Trump.
But here's Barack Obama trying to take credit for himself.
Okay, we did not cut the deficit in half, so let's stop it right there.
on record.
We covered another 20 million people on health insurance.
We brought housing back here in Nevada.
We cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure the wealthiest Americans, folks like me, paid their fair share of taxes.
Okay, we did not cut the deficit in half.
Let's stop it right there.
When he says we cut the deficit in half, what he means by that is that he blew out the deficit in his first year, and then the deficit numbers went down the next couple of years.
And the reason that that is cutting in half, that's like saying, you know what I did Last month, I went $10,000 over my credit card bill.
This month, I went $5,000 over my credit card bill.
I just cut my deficit in half.
That's what he's talking about.
That's not cutting your deficit in half.
I mean, technically, it sort of is, but not really, considering that you're still blowing out the spending.
But, again, Barack Obama was the creator of the Trump phenomenon.
For the left to refuse to acknowledge this, putting it out on the campaign trail, it's such a mistake.
But this is the thing.
The Democrats really don't have a lot to offer at this point, and so they are doubling down on stupid.
The only person who seems to be discovering anything new, ironically, is Hillary Clinton.
I'm going to discuss that in just a second.
So, Hillary Clinton, one of the things I do love, about the Trump era is that the left suddenly realizes that when the levers of power are given to the other party, things don't wind up great for the left.
So the left is all in favor of federal power, as long as it's Barack Obama in charge.
When it's President Trump in charge, suddenly they discover federal power is bad.
And I'm pretty consistent on this.
I think federal power sucks all the way through.
I think the first rule of good governance is don't create a weapon that can then be wielded by the other side.
Folks on the left are for gun control.
You know what I'm for?
I'm for federal power control.
You reduce the amount of federal power available to anyone, and then you're not going to have to worry about the federal power being used against you.
One of the great ironies, though, is that Hillary Clinton, one of the great advocates of federal power of the modern era, she is now discovering federalism again.
Amazing how this works.
Donald Trump comes along, suddenly Hillary Clinton and the left are discovering that states are kind of great.
Here's what she tweeted yesterday.
A reality of a Supreme Court with a right-wing majority is that the states are a new important front in protecting civil rights, especially the rights of the most vulnerable among us.
Is that really a new important front in protecting civil rights?
Or does it turn out that the states were always an important front in protecting civil rights?
Now, folks are going to say, well, think about the fact that states were responsible for Jim Crow.
That's true.
It was also states that were responsible for failing to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act in the 1850s, leading to the Civil War.
The federal government was trying to force states in the North to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act.
States in the North were refusing to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act.
States are only as good as the people who comprise them, and their policy is only as good as the people who comprise them.
The one thing that is certainly true is that the United States, as a mixed state and national system, as it is put in Federalist 39, as a mixed system, state governments are designed to preserve the centrality of locality in American jurisprudence.
And the fact that the left is only now realizing this as soon as somebody who's in office they don't like is at the head of the federal government demonstrates just how dishonest they are.
Because here's the thing, Hillary Clinton and her ilk, if they ever got in charge again, how long do you think they'd stick by the states' rights proposal?
How long do you think they'd be in favor of states' rights?
The answer is five seconds.
Five seconds.
The left is just dishonest about all this stuff.
The same left that proclaims that Donald Trump is dishonest, this is dishonest.
When Hillary Clinton says she likes states' rights, no, what Hillary Clinton means is that she wants to use any obstacle to prevent President Trump from governing, but she doesn't actually believe in states' rights.
If she actually believed in states' rights, then presumably she'd want a devolution of authority to the states from the federal government across the board, including if she had been president.
We all know that that was never going to happen.
We all know that was never going to happen.
Instead, the truth is, what Democrats really want is to copy the policies of Scandinavian countries, where people forget to tell you this, but the policy in Scandinavian countries is not just a massive social welfare state, is a massive social welfare state paid for by enormous, unbelievably high taxes.
The taxes in places like Denmark and Norway, 50 to 60% on everybody making more than 50 or 60 grand a year.
And we're not talking about taxes on just the wealthy.
Even folks on the left are not willing to be honest about what exactly it would take to pay for all the crap that they are talking about.
Instead, what they will do is they will just kick the can down the road.
So what exactly are they proposing?
So they're not really proposing federalism, and they're not obviously proposing fact-based legislation.
The left is proposing spending a lot of money.
So now we are going to get, in the 2020 primaries from the Democrats, who can spend the most cash.
So we have Kamala Harris, who's proposing giving every poor family 500 bucks.
Based on nothing.
We really don't know where exactly this money is going to come from, how this is going to spur the economy, any of that stuff.
Cory Booker says, well, why do 500?
Why not do 100 times 500?
Let's give everybody 50 grand.
So why not give everybody 500 grand, by the way?
Why not 5 million?
Why not just helicopter pallets of cash over Newark?
And we'll just drop pallets of cash.
I mean, hopefully people get out of the way.
If not, they will be crushed by money and die happy.
That apparently is the idea from Cory Booker.
So according to Vox, which is the repository of all things stupid, that's not to say that everybody at Vox is stupid.
There's some intelligent folks at Vox, although why they remain there is beyond me.
Senator Cory Booker is introducing a bill aimed at closing the gap between rich and poor.
His idea is to give lower-income kids a sizable nest egg Well, you know what?
This particular proposal relies on people to use money well.
You know what else relies on people to use money well?
on a house or college tuition.
These opportunity accounts would theoretically make sure all children have significant assets when they enter adulthood, rather than just those who grew up in wealthier homes.
Well, you know what?
This particular proposal relies on people to use money well.
You know what else relies on people to use money well?
Basic reason and free markets.
So dropping cash on people without actually using that cash for good purposes is counterproductive.
We're going to get to some more of the Democratic agenda, the reason-based Democratic agenda Barack Obama talks about in just one second.
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Okay, so the Democratic fact-based agenda now revolves around Kamala Harris offering everybody $500 and Cory Booker offering everybody $50,000 paid for by, hmm?
Eh?
Okay, here is what the American Opportunity Accounts Program would look like.
Every child upon being born would be given an account seated with $1,000.
Every year through the tax code, children would receive up to an additional $2,000 deposit depending on family income.
Funds would sit in a low-risk account managed by Treasury with roughly 3% annual returns.
Accounts holders may not access the money until they reach age 18, and the only allowable uses are education, homeownership, and retirement.
Okay, so in other words, we are just going to basically buy a house and an education for you paid for by eh?
Eh?
Nobody really knows.
Okay, so that's really great.
You know what's another way of doing this, actually?
If you actually want to help young people, you know what's another way of doing this?
Privatizing Social Security.
Because that's basically what he's talking about here.
He's basically talking about taking people's retirement savings and putting them in an account for them, a lockbox for them, for many, many years, and then giving them to them much later.
It all sounds great, except for exactly how this money is going to be generated.
And folks on the left never talk about how the money is generated, they just talk about free money.
So, part one of the Democrats' new agenda is apparently, according to Hillary Clinton, federalism.
So, congratulations to all of us.
That's been around for a couple hundred years, now Democrats are discovering it.
Part two is give people lots and lots of free money.
And part three is Hating science.
So part three is, science is stupid and we don't need it anymore.
So yesterday, we talked at length about this new proposal from the Trump administration to define sex as, you know, the dictionary definition of sex.
Like there are males and females.
And we talked about the left's weird attempt to separate gender from sex and then to retroactively conflate sex and gender.
They're exactly the same thing.
And they're really pushing this hard now.
There's a person named Jennifer Finney Boylan who is a genetic male, which is to say a male human, and has had a bunch of surgeries and now considers himself female.
The piece in the New York Times is called Trump Cannot Define Away My Existence.
And this is so weird.
I love this argument from the left.
You can't define away my existence.
You literally define away the existence of millions of unborn children every single year.
They don't exist according to you.
Now, transgender people exist according to me, but that does not mean that they are actually members of the sex to which they claim membership.
I can fully acknowledge that people who suffer from the mental disorder known as gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria, those people exist.
Of course they exist.
I mean, they're there.
I know some of them.
Like, okay.
That's not the same thing as saying that you are actually a woman if you say that you are a woman.
And again, there's no objective evidence, there's no objective test I can use to determine that you are a woman if you say that you are a woman.
But here is the piece in the New York Times, the anti-science piece of the new democratic agenda, feelings over fact.
Here is this piece by Jennifer Finney Boylan.
I was surprised to learn on Sunday morning that I do not exist.
Well, that's weird.
She says, this will come as sad news to my children, to whom I've been a mother for over 20 years now.
Well, presumably, you were a father at one point to your children.
It will come as a shock to my wife, too, to whom I've been married for 30 years.
It would have been a disappointment for my mother as well.
The conservative evangelical Christian Republican, who, when she learned I was transgender two decades ago, said I would never turn my back on my child, and then quoted 1 Corinthians, these three remain, faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.
Okay, that's fine, but it also says in the Bible that male and female, he created them.
So, I mean, if we're going to selectively quote the Bible, you may as well quote the whole thing.
It has been a hard life for me these last 60 years, but on the whole, I felt grateful for the many blessings that have come my way, and being trans, not least.
It is so disappointing, then, and more than a little embarrassing, to learn I'm imaginary, a creature no more real than a cyclops or a hippogriff.
Again, you're a real human, but you're not a real woman.
You know why?
Because you are not genetically a real woman.
Now, you want to say that you are gendered feminine?
That you are a male who had surgeries to look more female?
And that you carry feminine attributes?
That is accurate.
That is accurate use of language.
It is not accurate use of language to say that you are a female.
On Sunday, news broke that the Trump administration seeks to narrowly define gender as an immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth.
Well, actually, they were defining sex that way.
And then you guys conflate sex and gender, so you say it's the same thing.
I admit I'm reluctant to react to this latest cruelty, which is obviously just one more cynical move clearly designed to stir the pot ahead of the election.
Trans people are the latest conservative whipping girl, like African Americans in the 1950s.
Or gay people in the 1990s and 2000s.
Nope.
Nope.
Gay people can objectively claim to be attracted to members of the same sex.
That's a subjective claim.
There is no way to objectively verify that.
So, that is what it is.
I can objectively verify your sex, for a variety of measures.
And black people, a white person who claims that they're a black person, is not in fact a black person, as Rachel Dolezal learned.
I was speaking at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Festival in Rockville, Maryland this weekend, when I first read about the administration's intents.
Since then, I've thought a lot about Nick Carraway and the Great Gatsby.
And then this continues.
Look, there are toucans and puffins, there's a duck-billed platypus and a blue lobster, the Venus flytrap.
Isn't it a miracle that God has given us all these wonderful things?
Surely if there is room in this world for these, there should be room in this world for me.
Again, nobody is suggesting that transgender people should be mistreated.
But you do not get to tell the entire civilization to redefine biological sex on the basis of anti-science positions because of how you feel on the inside.
My favorite part of this piece is the suggestion that science is on the side of this policy.
There is no science on the side of the policy promulgated by the left that sex does not exist.
So they started off with sex exists, but gender is unconnected with sex.
And then they went to gender exists, but it exists on a spectrum.
Then they went to sex exists again, but it only exists on a spectrum.
Sex didn't exist for a while, now it exists again, but it only exists on a spectrum.
There's a spectrum of sex.
There's no spectrum of sex.
Human beings are sexually dimorphic.
If you want to suggest that there are other species where sex can change, fine.
But you are not a fish.
You're not one of these fish that changes sex.
You are a human.
Among humans, sex does not change.
That's not the way this works.
But this has been pushed by the hard left.
And so you get the odd spectacle of Stephen Colbert tut-tutting Trump, tut-tutting President Trump on this trans issue.
And how telling is the remark that he's about to make?
It's pretty telling.
I'll explain why in a second.
The Trump administration is thinking about writing new guidelines that say gender should be defined, quote, on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science.
Oh, now you care about science.
Wow, how convenient.
And listen to the crowd cheer that.
Shouldn't you be happy that they care about science?
I'm confused.
So you say that when it comes to climate change that the Trump administration is utterly anti-scientific.
When it comes to the EPA, they're utterly anti-scientific and that's bad.
But now they care about science when it comes to biological sex.
And that's bad.
Does he even see the hypocrisy in what he's saying himself?
The answer is no, because to the left, even science is malleable.
Now, my position on climate change, I've made clear multiple times on this program.
I did like an entire program on it a couple of weeks ago, talking about the new IPCC report.
The world is warming.
It's warming at a slower rate than the scientists said it was going to, according to their modeling.
Probably a majority of that warming, according to every scientist I've ever seen, including Roy Spencer, who is Wright's favorite climate scientist, suggests that the majority of that warming is due to human action.
That does not dictate global governance of the climate, nor does it dictate that we have to crush capitalism in spirit or in action.
But that is considered an anti-scientific position by the left.
And it is considered, I guess, bad form to mention science when it comes to biological sex now.
If this is the new democratic position, good luck with this, guys.
Good luck.
Okay, so in just a second, we'll talk about some other democratic positions and why the news cycle continues to cut in favor of the President of the United States.
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Okay, so I want to talk a little bit more about the science of transgenderism.
And I want to get into the specific details because I want to rebut all the arguments that you're going to hear made by the left over the next A few years, as they try to turn transgenderism into the new civil rights movement.
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So how stupid is the left's agenda with regard to the anti-science nonsense pushed by the transgender movement?
This is an actual tweet from New York Times Science.
The idea that a person's sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true.
And we've known that it's not true for decades.
Okay.
Well, realistically speaking, I suppose that's not true only in the most narrow sense.
It is determined by chromosomes.
It is determined by genetics.
And theoretically, you could have some sort of birth malformation when you are born that leaves you bereft of the genitalia that match up with your actual genetics.
So I guess in the very narrowest sense, it's true.
But the idea that that means that sex is on a spectrum among humans is just stupid.
I love this headline though.
Anatomy does not determine gender, experts say.
Right, genetics determines gender.
I love this.
Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided healthcare to people who do not fit the typical male-female pigeonholes, the typical male-female pigeonholes, as though they are just created by society, said that the Trump administration's latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge.
The idea that a person's sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we've known that it is not true for decades, says Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist And the executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, of course, at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York.
You want to talk about ascientific stuff?
Okay, talk about whether there are beneficial effects to transgender surgeries over time.
Okay, there is not good evidence to suggest that the end effect over the course of decades is actually significantly superior to no surgery, and yet this has become part of the transgender movement shtick.
Now, Let me be clear.
We live in a free country.
You want to go carve up your own genitals?
That's your problem.
Right?
You can find a surgeon who's willing to do that for you.
Go for it.
It's a free country.
But let's not pretend that the science is on the side of all of the claims that are being made.
I love this.
Barry down in this article, I say, genetics does play a role though.
Oh, you think?
Oh, you think?
By the way, you know how you know that it's not just genitalia?
Because if a male were to have his twig and berries physically removed in some sort of accident, he would still be a male.
Yet if he intends to do so in a surgery, we are now supposed to consider him a female.
Okay, that is not logical.
I want to talk for just a second about the sort of propaganda that's been promoted on this issue, and it really is insane propaganda.
So, the notion that is pushed by the left that transgenderism is not a mental disorder is completely ascientific.
Now, what the left does is they like to cite things like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, because the DSM-5 suggests that gender identity disorder is no longer a mental disorder.
Instead, what the DSM-5 says is that a mental disorder is a quote, "...syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning." Now, this is the funny part.
Socially deviant behavior and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders, unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individuals described above.
So in other words, if you have something that makes you think that a pink elephant is stalking you, unless this makes you feel bad, this is not actually a mental disorder, according to the DSM.
The definition makes room for it's making clear room for politically correct posturing, right?
If I am having a significant problem in and of myself, all I have to do is blame it on society's intolerance and it is no longer considered a mental disorder.
So if you are suicidal because you're a man who believes he's a woman, The DSM can still find a way to blame that on society.
All you have to say is the reason I'm suicidal is because people are mean to me in society, not because I've suffered with this terrible conflict inside my brain for my entire life.
Right?
Now it's society's fault.
This is how the DSM-5 avoids the obvious implication that if you're a man who believes you're a woman, you have a mental disorder.
If you're, by the way, if you're a fat person who believes you are skinny or a skinny person who believes you are fat, we all acknowledge you have a mental disorder.
If you're a skinny person who believes you're fat, it's called anorexia.
It's dangerous and it's a mental disorder.
If you're a person who believes that you do not need a left arm, right?
This is something called body dysmorphia.
This is a mental disorder.
But if you're a man who believes you're a woman and you don't need your penis, then it's not a mental disorder.
It's society's fault.
You explain that one to me.
None of this has anything to do with science.
And all of it is specifically designed to blame society for what is clearly and obviously a mental disorder.
The reason that I'm serious about calling it a mental disorder, and the reason I do so, is because you can't actually treat a mental disorder by blaming it on society.
If you want to come up with new treatments for mental disorder, the way to do that is not by saying that society at large is responsible for the discomfort of people suffering from the mental disorder.
I'm somebody who takes mental illness extraordinarily seriously.
My grandfather was either bipolar or schizophrenic.
There are some lines that are hard to sort of diagnose there.
He was institutionalized when my dad was a child.
He thought the radio was talking to him.
He thought the curtains were trying to strangle him.
He suffered from that.
That was not something where if we had blamed society's intolerance and just said, you know what, Nate?
The radio actually is talking to you.
It's just society can't hear what you hear.
That would have been foolish.
They gave him lithium and he was much better.
That does not mean there's a good treatment for gender identity disorder, gender dysphoria, but to pretend that the treatments are all available and that transitioning is the only available sort of fix and that everything else is society's fault is anti-scientific in the extreme.
And to quote the DSM, which is a political football and has been a political football for decades, as the sort of apotheosis of scientific knowledge is just silly.
It's just silly.
The definition of mental disorder itself is not scientific according to the DSM-5.
There's no way that you can pose a hypothesis and then debunk it.
It is not scientifically verifiable.
With all of that said, the left has embraced a bunch of positions that are unsustainable, I believe, in American politics.
The latest position they are embracing that is unsustainable in American politics has to do with this migrant caravan.
So, this migrant caravan, as we mentioned yesterday, is now approaching the American border, with presumably the help of the Mexican government.
You can see the Mexican authorities are driving alongside the caravan.
It is now 10,000 people large, and it is moving toward the border.
Now, there are processes for asylum in the United States.
All you have to do is go to a U.S.
embassy and apply.
Or you can go to a border checkpoint and apply.
And you can see the pictures, if you're able to watch this, because you subscribe at DailyWire.com, you can see the pictures.
I mean, these are marches stretching a mile long, ten wide, and there's an enormous, enormous number of people.
Well, President Trump, he got himself into trouble yesterday because he said, listen, there are some bad people who are coming in this caravan.
Now, are there bad people coming in the caravan?
Who the hell knows?
The answer is we don't know the answer to that.
Presumably, some of those people are bad.
Presumably, many of those people are not bad.
But the answer is we don't know who they are.
So how can we possibly open our borders this way?
What's happening right now as a large group of people, they call it a caravan.
And in that caravan, you have some very bad people.
You have some very bad people.
And we can't let that happen to our country.
Okay, so, you know, he's maybe right, maybe he's wrong, but we don't know.
Now, what the left proclaims that we should let all of these people in, presumably, but then why not let in the next caravan or all caravans?
Does everyone who wants to come to the United States because they're coming from a bad situation have the right to come into the United States?
Now, I am pretty libertarian when it comes to people who are immigrating for employment reasons.
This is why I think that we ought to let in more people through legal immigration methods in the United States.
But, let's recognize something.
The social structure of the United States is not the same in 2018 as it was in 1907.
The reason I use 1907 is that's when my ancestors got here.
The comparison here is not between the ethnicities of the folks showing up.
I don't care about ethnicity.
I really don't.
It makes no difference to me.
The question is, what is the social system that people are being integrated into?
When my great-great grandparents got to the United States, when they got here in 1907, and they arrived on the boats, they spoke Yiddish and had no money.
There was no social safety net.
They were immediately thrust into a capitalist economy where they had to learn English and they were forced by circumstance into assimilating specifically so that they could operate in the economy of the United States and become good American citizens.
There were people who left stuff behind in their home country to come to the United States so that they could actually live a better, more adventurous life.
No, I think a lot of immigrants still want that.
But the fact that we have a social safety net that picks up after everybody, the fact that if you have a baby in the United States, that baby is now an American citizen and you can take advantage of all of the benefits of American citizenship, that there are all these, you know, tremendous social safety nets available to you, means we have to be a little bit more circumspect about who we let in the country.
And again, citing the Scandinavian countries, The Scandinavian countries are really tough on immigration.
They're very tough on immigration.
And they should be, because the richer your social safety net, the more folks are going to want to take advantage of it.
And let's not pretend that there's no anti-American animus in this caravan.
There clearly is.
You can look at some of the pictures.
So some of the folks who are marching were carrying the Honduran flag.
So this one, I believe, is actually from Honduras.
Let's go back to the Honduran flag one.
So you can see At the front of this march, there are people who are carrying the Honduran flag.
Now, the claim of the caravan is that these are people who are attempting to escape from Honduras.
Honduras is a bad place, right?
It's a place where they can't live the life they want to live.
It's a place of little economic opportunity.
So why are you carrying the flag of that place?
When Cuban refugees got onto 1950s Chevys, inflated the tires and tried to float their way to Florida, they weren't carrying a Cuban flag when they arrived on American shores.
They were trying to escape Cuba.
That was sort of the point.
If you're marching from Honduras to escape Honduras, why are you coming here with a Honduran flag?
When my ancestors got here, they weren't carrying a Russian or Lithuanian flag.
They came to the United States ready to carry an American flag.
That is the point.
This idea that you can assimilate all cultures, including people who forcibly do not want to be assimilated, in a social safety net society is just not accurate.
And yet that's what Democrats continue to promote.
I mean, over in Honduras, by the way, in support of the migrants, they've been burning American flags at some of these protests.
This is a famous picture going around yesterday.
Somebody painted a swastika on the American flag and then burned it.
So then why do folks want in?
America's Nazi Germany is not really a great pitch as to, I also want to enter there.
You know, that push, again, it leads folks to the position that President Trump has taken, where he says he's a nationalist, not a globalist.
Now, President Trump said this at a rally yesterday, that he's a nationalist, not a globalist.
I've distinguished between nationalism and patriotism.
I'm not a big nationalist in the sense that I don't think that simple borders and living in the same place is enough of a rationale for you to be enthused.
I think that instead you actually have to be about ideas.
But what he's reacting to is the left's focus on globalism.
The left's belief that there should be no borders, that people should be able to cross willy-nilly into the United States and never assimilate because multiculturalism is the way to go.
You want to know why President Trump is popular?
It's because of this.
A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.
And you know what?
We can't have that.
You know, they have a word.
It sort of became old fashioned.
It's called a nationalist.
And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word.
You know what I am?
I'm a nationalist, okay?
I'm a nationalist.
Okay, the reason that you're not supposed to use the word nationalist typically is because it's largely been connected with repressive regimes who are focused in on commonalities in ethnicity and culture as opposed to commonalities and ideas.
But if he is posing sort of American interests against folks who want inundation of our borders, Then that's perfectly rational.
That's perfectly rational.
Okay, so it's time for... Are we up to some things I like and things I hate?
Is that where we are?
Okay, so let's do some things that I like and some things that I hate.
So things that I like today.
There's a book that was recommended to me by Andrew Klavan.
I've been going through kind of Drew's reading list.
It's called The Last Supper.
By Charles McCary, and it's a really good sort of action thriller dating all the way back.
It's sort of a Cold War thriller that dates all the way back to the 1920s and then carries forward through the Vietnam War.
It's really worth the read.
It's really well written, and I'm sort of a devotee of action thrillers, at least old-fashioned ones.
One of my favorite books is The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsythe, which is the best action thriller in the history of literature.
It's so good.
But this one is quite good too.
Charles McHarry's The Last Supper.
Worth a read.
Go check it out.
That's worth checking out.
Okay, other things that I like today.
I do enjoy PETA.
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Because they're totally crazy.
So I do enjoy them.
Here is what they tweeted out yesterday.
Cow's milk has long been a symbol used by white supremacists.
One more reason to hashtag ditch dairy.
Really?
Didn't know that was a thing.
So, apparently, I knew it was a thing only because of the New York Times, we talked about a piece earlier this week, in which white supremacists were guzzling cow's milk to demonstrate their genetic superiority because they could tolerate lactose.
Which, again, seems like not the world's most important skill set.
Like, you can't really put on your resume, tolerates lactose well.
That's not something that, like, if somebody put that on their resume for the Daily Wire, it'd be like, uh, this person's not getting hired.
But, but PETA's response is just as stupid, which is, Not, why should cow's milk be used by white supremacists?
It's cow's milk itself is indeed white supremacist, so you should not use cow's milk anymore.
Goat's milk, apparently, not white supremacist.
So that's good to know.
So I guess forcible milking of the goats is on its way.
And also, what do you do if you like chocolate milk?
If you like chocolate milk, are you also a white supremacist?
Further questions.
My children, big fans of milk.
Really enjoy it.
Did ever since they were babies, it turns out.
Were they white supremacists when they were small babies?
Because babies like cow's milk.
True.
True story.
So, PETA.
Doing Yeoman's work and demonstrating just how insane they are each and every day of the week.
Well done.
Well done, PETA.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Thing number one that I hate.
A new study, 25% of students say they were traumatized by the 2016 election.
Researchers surveyed Arizona State University students around the time of President Trump's inauguration in 2017.
Some had stress scores on par with that of seven-month follow-ups to school shooting witnesses.
25% of the 769 students reported clinically significant levels of stress.
Women, Black, Hispanic, non-Christian students reported higher stress.
So apparently, they now say that they are suffering basically from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Not kidding.
This is actually what they're saying.
So they're saying that they suffer from PTSD.
A quarter of these students.
They found it so traumatic, they now report symptoms of PTSD according to the study.
So, things that caused PTSD for young people in the past.
1910s, World War I, trench warfare.
1920s, aftermath of World War I and trench warfare.
1930s, the Great Depression and mass starvation.
1940s, World War II.
The 1960s, the Vietnam War.
The 1970s, vast social unrest, bombings in the United States.
2018, you lost an election.
Oh, you pansies.
I prescribed you, take some avocado toast and call me in the morning.
Really, PTSD?
PTSD from an election?
Listen, when John Kerry was poised to win in 2004, I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, because I was going to Harvard Law at the time, and while I was And while I was there, John Kerry was supposed to speak just down the road.
The entire town was abuzz because John Kerry was going to be the next president.
I went to Tower Records, which used to exist.
It used to be a place, kids.
And Tower Records was a place where they sold this thing called CDs.
And CDs were these things that had music on them and you played them.
So I went over to Tower Records in Harvard Square.
And I bought myself Mozart's Requiem and prepared for a deep, depressing evening.
As it turns out, the 2004 election was great, but I was prepared.
Was that PTSD?
No, it wasn't.
And come on.
Man up.
Man up.
Come the hell on.
If this is the generation we are reliant upon, no.
No, I think we're all screwed.
I think it's fair to say we're screwed.
If a quarter of all humans were, a quarter of all students were stressed to the level of PTSD, Yeah, we're jacked.
The United States is over.
Okay, other things that I hate.
This is actually a thing that I like.
So Amy Schumer confirmed that she was pregnant.
And she tweeted out, Chris, she's married.
Chris and I are thrilled and almost positive he's the father, which is funny.
Okay.
Well, just, I'd like to make a quick point.
I am extraordinarily excited and happy that Amy Schumer has a meaningless cluster of cells in her womb.
Could not be happier for her about this meaningless cluster of cells in her womb.
Now, do I believe it's a meaningless cluster of cells?
Of course not.
That's the point.
I think it's a baby, which is why it makes sense for me to be happy when people are pregnant.
What makes less sense is the idea that I can be happy about this meaningless cluster of cells in my womb if it's me, but if it's somebody else, I have no way to be happy for them because what do they think?
Maybe they think it's a meaningless cluster of cells.
Presumably, if Amy Schumer wanted to abort this cluster of cells, it would just be a cluster of cells.
The same people who say that we are erasing transgender people by saying transgender people exist but are not members of the opposite sex, which is biologically true, say that babies don't exist because they're meaningless clusters of cells.
Embryos are just meaningless clusters of cells, which is both anti-scientific and erasing human beings.
So, there's that.
Okay, you know what?
That's enough for today.
I'm ready to leave.
So we're gonna do another show tomorrow.
We'll be back here then.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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