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Oct. 26, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:54
Mail Bomber Identified: A Crazy Person | Ep. 647
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Time Text
The authorities arrest the alleged mail bomber.
The media demonstrate they have no intention of abandoning their biases.
And we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
All right, so I apologize for us starting late today.
Obviously, there's a lot of breaking news, and I'm going to give you all of the updates, plus the predictable media reaction, and why I was right and everybody else was wrong, because, I mean, that's what we do here.
We'll get to all of that in just a second.
First, let me remind you that you should not miss the latest episode of Andrew Clavin's Another Kingdom, performed by Michael Knowles, who is, in fact, excorable, but his performance is not.
Today we'll be live streaming the first 15 minutes of episode 4, titled Worst Homecoming Ever, which can also be the name of today's show.
Head on over to dailywire.com and subscribe to watch the full episode and get early access to upcoming episodes every Monday.
Go check that out right now.
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All right, so the latest breaking news is that the authorities have arrested the suspect in all of the attempted bombings of various Democrats and Democratic public figures.
I'm not going to say the name of the bomber because we have a policy on the show that we don't actually say the name of mass shooters.
I'm going to extend that to bombers as well, specifically because so many folks who are crazy actually like the publicity that is attached to the naming of bombers.
Now, we see those mass shooters.
This is also true of people who attempt to commit terror attacks.
One of their goals is to assure publicity for themselves and incentivizing people to do evil things because they want publicity is not something we're going to do.
I will give you the information about the guy, but I'm not going to give you his name.
So, the guy's 56 years old.
He's identified as a Native American Trump supporter.
Now, this is why it was so stupid for so many on the right to immediately leap to false flag.
And I don't mean asking questions.
I mean leaping to false flag.
You know, suggesting without any evidence that this must be a false flag attack, that this must be some sort of democratic operation.
The most obvious explanation for a person sending a bunch of bombs to highly public officials is that this is a crazy person.
And as it turns out, the person is indeed a crazy person.
Online records show that this guy has a criminal record, and he has owned companies called Native American Catering and Vending, as well as Proud Native America One Low Price Dry Cleaning.
He's a bodybuilder, and he is said to have been traced by DNA and phone records, and was flagged as a suspect after making previous terror threats to judges.
So presumably, This is all President Trump's fault.
Photos have emerged of a van that links this guy to pro-Trump, anti-Hillary Clinton stickers.
Here's what the pictures look like.
For those who can't see, the van is plastered, plastered with pro-Trump material.
It's just a bizarre van.
Like if you saw this on the street, you would figure absolutely crazy person.
There's an inverse proportion between the number of bumper stickers on your car and your sanity.
The more bumper stickers on your car, the more clearly we can assume that you're a crazy person.
So that means that this guy is a complete nut job.
Obviously.
If you just saw his van, you would say the guy's a complete nutjob.
Like, you wouldn't have to know anything else about him.
And then it's also the craziest bumper sticker.
So it's not just CNN sucks at bumper stickers.
It's pictures of President Trump and Mike Pence.
It is Hillary Clinton with a target over her face.
It's the same thing with Van Jones with a target over his face.
It's the meme of President Trump riding a tank with explosions in the background.
There's a bumper sticker on here that says, which I don't even know what the hell that's supposed to mean.
I mean, I always could have figured that it would be a soccer supporter who is going to be responsible for something like this.
Shocker!
I can't believe that somebody with this van is is sending bombs to people.
That's crazy.
Now, the media immediately jump exactly where you think they would jump, which is the guy isn't crazy.
He was a perfectly rational sane human being until President Trump came along.
Unfortunately for them, this has been lied by all available evidence.
So this person has been arrested some 10 times.
He was arrested back in 2002 for an attempted bombing threat.
Presumably, I guess that was President Trump's fault back when he was on The Apprentice or something.
Okay, but that's the take of the media today.
Law enforcement officials covered that white van.
It was covered in photos, as I say, of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, and had at least one sticker referring to Hillary Clinton.
Here is a little bit of tape from CBS News covering all of this.
The FBI covering the van, so all of that is just delightful.
They're covering up a van, it looks like, in the same location where an arrest was made, or at least there was a lot of activity.
And I wonder, you know what's interesting, guys?
And again, sorry Mel and sorry Anne-Marie.
Look at all that stuff in the windows.
Yes, I'm just noticing that the FBI, the picture that you're looking at right now is absolutely unbelievable.
What they're doing is they're covering up this van, which I caught a very brief glimpse of it, without 100% certainty, but I thought I saw a picture of Hillary Clinton in it.
The media are so excited.
I mean, listen to how the media are covering this.
Ooh, ooh, the van has pictures of Hillary and friendly pictures of Trump.
And you know what that means?
That means President Trump is responsible.
He deputized this man.
And that's what we're going to get.
We're going to get for now from here to the election.
We're going to get President Trump's rhetoric is what caused a crazy person to be crazy.
So let's just remember back one year ago, like a little bit over a year ago, a Bernie Sanders supporter went and legitimately shot, shot at dozens of Republican Congress people and nearly killed the House Majority Whip, Steve Scalise.
Shot him so badly he was in critical condition.
When he did, he arrived shouting that because the Republicans were killing people with their health care plan, that he was now going to kill Republican congresspeople.
Bernie Sanders had spent the prior month saying that the Republican health care plans was going to actually kill people.
This is something that Bernie Sanders said.
Was Bernie Sanders responsible for the crazy guy?
No!
Bernie Sanders was not responsible for the crazy guy.
Now, if you want to say, if somebody, let's say that a President Trump supporter went and just punched a protester, I would say, okay, a lot closer linkage between the rhetoric President Trump has used and that particular action.
Just as I say, there's a lot closer linkage between Maxine Waters saying, confront people in public places, and Democrats going and confronting people in public places.
Incitement to one activity is not necessarily incitement to sending bombs in the mail.
Or shooting people up on a congressional baseball field.
But the media have leapt to a particular conclusion.
Bernie Sanders in 2017 was completely innocent of what this guy did.
Agree.
And then they say, well, a crazy person, like an obvious crazy person, it is President Trump's responsibility what happened here.
And that is absolutely a bunch of crap.
And it's dangerous crap, too.
It is.
Because here's what the left says.
What the left says is the climate of polarization, the climate has gotten too nasty in this country.
It's just a bad, nasty climate of polarization that we have here in the United States.
And that's all President Trump's fault.
So maybe we ought to censor what people on the right are saying.
Maybe we ought to claim that people on the right are uniquely evil.
Do they understand that that claim actually radicalizes folks?
If they were two-sided about this, if they were objective about this, if what they said was, listen, everybody needs to tone down the rhetoric, Bernie Sanders needs to tone down the rhetoric, Democrats need to tone down the rhetoric, Republicans need to tone down the rhetoric, then at least they're consistent.
I've been saying that.
I've been saying that for literally years on this program.
I've been saying that.
But that's not what the media are saying.
What the media are saying is that every time a Democratic whack job does something, it's the fault of Democratic whack job.
Every time a Republican whack job does something, it's the fault of all Republicans across the country.
And that is going to drive people nuts, and it's going to make people less likely to tone down the rhetoric.
It's likely to make more people anti-media.
All of this talk about radicalizing people against the media.
The media don't need President Trump's help for that.
They do it pretty well themselves.
That doesn't mean that President Trump ought to be saying what he's saying.
It does mean that the Democrats in the media are absolutely radicalizing a population of people on the other side by claiming falsely that everyone on the other side is responsible for the actions of somebody who's clearly insane.
This stuff is really, really gross.
And the media were doing this in advance, right?
They were prepping this narrative for legitimately days in advance of the actual discovery.
We'll get to the Republicans and what they did wrong here, too, because President Trump's response to this was really, really idiotic.
Let me just show you some of the CNN chyrons that were preemptively attacking President Trump when they didn't even know who this guy was.
So, this was from yesterday.
And the host is standing in front of a screen that says, Manhunt for Serial Bomber.
And then it has profiles of the various people who had bombs sent to them.
Eric Holder, Maxine Waters, Robert De Niro, Joe Biden.
And then underneath, here's what the chyron says.
Manhunt for Serial Bomber Going After Trump's Targets.
The idea here is that President Trump somehow deputized this crazy person to send bombs in the mail.
That was President Trump's doing.
CNN was saying this openly.
They weren't trying to hide the ball here.
Here's another chyron.
There's a reporter on screen from the White House and it says underneath, CNN, Trump has no plans to claim any personal responsibility for inciting serial bomber.
Why would he have plans to claim personal responsibility for inciting a serial bomber?
Did Bernie Sanders claim that he had responsibility for inciting a serial shooter?
Is there, like, really?
Is there any evidence that President Trump incited this guy?
Did he send a piece of mail to this guy saying, you know, it'd be awesome?
Can you send some pipe bombs to Maxine Waters?
But this is exactly what CNN was claiming.
And you wonder why folks on the right don't trust the media.
This is why folks on the right don't trust the media.
It's just, it's absurd.
Here's Maxine Waters, a person who legitimately has said in the past few months that you should get in people's face in quasi-violent ways, in public places, on politics.
And now she's ripping into President Trump and saying he should take responsibility for an obviously crazy person.
By the way, this is why I objected to all the false flag garbage that so many on the right were spewing right out of the gate.
Because my feeling is that the obvious answer to this was it was a crazy person.
You know who sends bombs to people in the mail?
High profile people in the mail?
Bombs that don't work properly?
You know who does that?
Crazy people.
Yeah, but here's Maxine Waters blaming President Trump.
Maxine Waters, probably the most volatile and the most violent rhetoric using Democrat in the United States Congress.
Here she is blaming Trump for all of this.
I think the President of the United States has been dog-whistling to his constituency, making them believe that their problems are caused by those people over there.
And I think that they're acting out what they believe the President wants them to do and the way that he wants them to act.
Okay, that's crazy.
Okay, the idea that Trump wants people to send bombs in the mail is insane.
But that's totally what Maxine Waters would say.
You would expect her to say this.
And it's this sort of one-sided coverage that leads people not to trust the media.
Now, the media are not responsible for people sending bombs to them.
But the media are responsible for increasing a volatile climate.
You know, they blame President Trump for increasing the volatile climate.
I agree.
President Trump certainly has not tamped down the volatile climate.
But the media are part of that volatile climate, and they are making the climate more volatile, not less volatile.
And the fact that they are denying that demonstrates that they are completely out of touch with reality.
I have more on that, plus more information on the on the suspect, on the alleged bomber, in just one second.
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Okay, so new details on... I mean, this stuff is emerging minute by minute.
New details on the alleged bomber.
Again, we're not using his name on the program for reasons I specified a few minutes ago.
Apparently his Facebook and Twitter profile are filled with crazy conspiracy theories.
No!
I'm shocked!
Clearly, it's Trump's fault.
The Facebook account is almost exclusively pro-Trump content, including pictures and videos purportedly filmed at one of the president's political rallies.
The Twitter feed is littered with far-right conspiracy theories or violent threats aimed at some of President Trump's most outspoken critics.
He appears to have repeatedly tweeted about George Soros.
At one point, he purportedly wrote, you will vanish in a tweet aimed at the billionaire.
Soros is one of the people who received one of the bombs.
Other tweets falsely claimed that the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was a false flag operation orchestrated by Soros and his liberal allies.
The account also posted frequently angry messages at Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Her name was listed on the return account for all of the bombs.
Other prominent liberal activists, including David Hogg, who's a Parkland survivor, and Colin Kaepernick and Antifa, are targeted in other tweets.
Also, this person tweeted violent death threats and pictures of death at Sarah Zhang, who's a New York Times columnist who tweeted a bunch of racist anti-white stuff a while ago.
He also sent a gory image of a beheaded goat to comedian Jim Carrey.
So, in other words, this is an insane person.
This is a totally insane person.
And how do we know he's insane?
Well, besides the fact that his van is covered in bumper stickers like a crazy person, the Florida man has a significant criminal history and was previously charged with making a bomb threat in 2002.
The ruling in that case was not immediately clear on Friday.
He was also convicted of theft in 2014 and 2013 and battery in 2013.
In 2012, he filed for bankruptcy and declared in court filings he lived with his mother.
So yeah, clearly this is President Trump's fault.
Obviously, this is all President Trump.
His Twitter feed is gross.
He's a gross person.
I can't believe it.
Just a shock.
But again, the fact that he is nuts is not going to stop the Democrats from trotting out the lie that it's Republicans who caused all of this.
So Joy Behar is doing this routine too.
She did this preemptively.
She said that the entire GOP is to blame for a crazy person who lived with his mother and was arrested for bomb threats 16 years ago and then arrested a bunch of times in the past five years Including many times before Trump was president.
The entire GOP is responsible for this.
And I think that it's incumbent upon the Republicans in this country to start to speak out.
They did not open their mouths when they, he attacked your father.
They did not open their mouths when he attacked a gold star family.
Or he said he was going to grab women by their genitals.
Or when he said the second amendment will take care of Hillary Clinton.
They stayed silent and they are the perpetrators also.
Okay, what's amazing is that when Democrats are actually reminded of violent rhetoric used by Democrats in the past, then they get very, very angry.
And this is the part where the one-sidedness of the media is creating a more volatile political climate.
So, let's take, for example, Katie Tuer.
Katie Tuer over at MSNBC, obviously a member of the left.
And Katie Tour was reminded by a guest about some of the violent rhetoric used by Democrats in recent weeks.
She didn't like it.
She wasn't willing to talk about it.
Eric Erickson is the guy you'll hear talking about Democratic rhetoric.
But MSNBC will have none of it because obviously only one side of the political aisle is bad and volatile and uses overheated rhetoric.
Do we go back to the weather underground in 1960 or to McVeigh in the 1990s?
Have you ever heard a politician other than Donald Trump say, I'm so proud or give a kudos to another politician who body slammed a reporter?
Have you ever heard that from anybody else other than Donald Trump?
Well, and Katie, the response... Eric is going to answer this question.
Hold on, Donna.
Have you heard that from anyone else?
I think that Donald Trump is a symptom of what's going on in this country.
Your blood pressure going up over Donald Trump right now is a symptom of what's going on in this country.
My blood pressure is going up because he advocates violence.
Okay, the answer is no, it's terrible.
Right?
No, it's terrible when President Trump says that stuff.
Also, it is terrible when Democrats say that you should kick people, when they say that you should confront people in public places, when Bernie Sanders claims that Republicans are going to kill millions of people with their health care plan, when many, when a vast swath of the Democratic Party claim the Tea Partyers were actual terrorists.
To pretend that the volatile political climate in the United States is anything new is ridiculous, but this has been a long-standing Democratic tactic for legitimately decades.
I mean, after JFK was shot in 1963, Democrats tried to claim that it was right-wing rhetoric that had killed JFK, even though it turns out that it was a commie.
So there's nothing new under the sun, but it's increasingly frustrating, and this actually is dangerous for the country for two reasons.
Not just, and believe me, I'm going to get to what the Republicans had to say about this in just a second, including President Trump issuing an asinine tweet this morning, but What is dangerous about the media's take on this is when they suggest that rhetoric that does not incite violence is responsible for violence, they're criminalizing rhetoric.
And when they do it for only one side, it appears that they only want to criminalize rhetoric on one side, which leads people to believe that they are coming for you.
It leads to a feeling of threat.
And to fail to acknowledge this is to fail to acknowledge what's driving a lot of our politics these days, which is a reactionary feel that the other side is threatening you.
And it's present on both sides.
Now, let's get to the right-wing response to all of this preemptively.
So, there are people on the right, I think most people on the right, who said, listen, we need to wait for more information here.
We don't know who did this.
The most likely outcome is crazy person.
I said this.
Repeatedly, I said if you think this is a false flag attack or you jump to the conclusion it's a false flag attack based on nothing but confirmation bias, you're doing it wrong.
I've been saying that repeatedly over and over on this show.
I've said it on Twitter.
I've said it in my columns.
Okay, so I think most people on the right sort of agreed with that, but there was a substantial substratum on the right that suggested that this had to be a Democrat.
It had to be somebody on the left who perpetrated this because obviously it was too convenient for Democrats in the run-up to the election.
This sort of conspiracy theorizing is not good either.
The reason that it is not good either is because it allows people to believe that there are no crazies on their own side, that evil is entirely relegated to people who disagree with them.
It leads to more polarization.
And again, it's not good for the country when you jump to conclusions based on your own confirmation bias.
And right now, there's tremendous incentive to do just that.
There's not incentive for people to say, let's wait for more information.
Let's wait for more information is one of the least popular sentences in American politics, and it's usually right.
It's almost always right.
But it's the least popular phrase because if you jump to a conclusion and that jump ends up being right, your side says, ha, that guy gets it.
You know how you know he gets it?
Because his gut was right.
He gets it.
And if you're wrong, your own side says, well, his gut was right.
It's just that the facts didn't fit his gut in this case, but he still knows what's what.
So jumping to conclusions is being incentivized on every side right now, and it's really bad.
It's particularly bad when the President of the United States does it.
So legitimately, legitimately, just a couple of hours before the FBI arrested this suspect, President Trump started tweeting about the bomb stuff this morning.
So he tweeted out about CNN.
He's right about that one.
President Trump is correct about that one.
When he says the media rip him, and they criticize him at will, and when he responds they say it's like September 11th or Oklahoma City, and he's creating that.
He's not wrong about that.
But here's where President Trump does go wrong.
So he can't just stop there.
At 7.19am he tweets out, Republicans are doing so well in early voting and at the polls and now this quote unquote bomb stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows.
News not talking politics.
Very unfortunate what is going on.
Republicans go out and vote.
Mr. President.
This is stupid.
This is stupid, and this is immoral.
The problem with people sending bombs in the mail is not the impact on voting.
It's people sending bombs in the mail.
And the suggestion that this is all just a misdirect by the media when people send bombs in the mail to a bunch of prominent Democratic figures?
No, it is not.
And when you lend credence to conspiracy theories, all you are doing is fueling the flames of the volatility.
Okay, so basic bottom line of the show.
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All righty.
So here's how you can not suck.
Okay, a few rules for not sucking at this.
One, when there's not enough information, instead of you touting out your speculation or your jump to conclusion, just wait.
Because within 48 hours, there will be enough information.
And then you can make a judgment.
Two, don't attribute crazy people to your political opponents.
Attribute to your political opponents what is attributable.
Do not attribute to them that which is not attributable.
So, if you want to attribute mobs going and shouting Ted Cruz out of restaurants to Maxine Waters, that seems reasonable to me.
If you want to accuse President Trump of incentivizing people to punch protesters, I think even that may be reasonable.
But, if you're going to claim that President Trump is responsible for mail bombs, and you're going to claim that Bernie Sanders is responsible for shootings on congressional baseball fields, that is not reasonable.
Fourth, if you are going to start attributing the heightened political rhetoric in this country to violence, if you're going to start saying violence is coming from that, then you're going to have to recognize that this sort of heightened political rhetoric exists on all sides.
Because if you don't, then you're lying.
You're being dishonest.
You are.
Now, I'm not saying that it's happening equally on all sides, but I am saying that it is happening on all sides and we all need to take it down a pitch.
Okay, President Trump's political rhetoric is a problem when he says that, I mean, I criticized him heavily last week on this show for praising Greg Gianforte for body slamming a reporter.
If you're gonna do that, you also have to point out when Democrats use violent rhetoric, which they have been doing more and more often.
Hillary Clinton said two weeks ago that civility against Republicans, civility with Republicans, was simply uncalled for at this time.
If we are going to talk about heightened political rhetoric, we have to talk about it in an accurate way.
We are not doing that, and the media are not doing that, and that's creating blowback against the media.
Okay, finally, here's how you can, here's how you can really not suck at all of this.
Start to think about whether the stuff that you say is more likely to raise the temperature or lower the temperature.
And if it is raising the temperature, maybe you should think about whether it's appropriate to raise the temperature.
Sometimes it is.
Sometimes it's not.
But this is a mistake.
Okay?
This is a mistake to simply raise the temperature at will and then be surprised when the temperature is raised.
I'm hoping that the country Somehow comes back to its senses here.
But I fear that that's not going to happen.
I fear that the media are going to rip all Republicans for this sort of activity.
Republicans are going to simply claim false flag or simply going to blame Democrats for similar sort of activity.
And then we get a cycle that spins down into garbage from here until the end of time.
That doesn't have to happen.
That doesn't have to happen.
Crazy people do crazy things.
Separately, immoral rhetoric is immoral.
Thirdly, not all immoral rhetoric incentivizes violence.
And fourthly, maybe we should tone down the immoral rhetoric regardless as to whether it incentivizes violence.
If we do all those things, we can have a country.
If not, then we are in serious, serious trouble.
Now, speaking of nonsense that's being pushed by the press, the press coverage of the caravan is really quite astonishing.
So NBC News, I mean, speaking of media bias, when President Trump rips into media bias and then folks in the media say, there's no such thing as media bias, how dare he attack the media?
NBC News made their header on Twitter, an actual picture, an actual picture of the caravan, of the migrant caravan.
That is simply propaganda.
That is not news.
That is propaganda.
That is, these are victims.
These are people who are approaching the border, and this is President Trump's fault.
That's why NBC News does that.
The polarizing political environment did not begin with Trump.
It will not end with Trump.
It is going to continue from here till the end of time.
And then you see the rhetoric on the caravan issue, obviously being exaggerated on both sides.
So here was President Trump tweeting about the caravan issue yesterday.
And I'll explain what's wrong with this, because when I first read the tweet, I didn't really know what was wrong with it.
And then I looked into it a little more, and there's a problem with the tweet.
In sort of effect, it's correct, but in practice, it's wrong.
So President Trump tweeted out, to those in the caravan, turn around.
We're not letting people into the United States illegally.
Go back to your country, and if you want, apply for citizenship like millions of others are doing.
So people pointed out that the people who are trying to get to the southern border of the United States are applying for asylum.
You can't do that unless you're already in the United States or at the U.S.
border.
So you can't actually apply for political asylum from the country of origin.
However, President Trump's actual suggestion is that these people are not actually looking for political asylum.
Instead, they're looking for economic opportunity, which means that they would be fraudulently filing papers if they were seeking political asylum when they were really looking for economic opportunity.
So go home and apply the right way.
I don't think there's anything wrong with Trump saying, go home and apply the right way.
But if the idea is that it's illegal for them to approach the southern border and apply for asylum, that, of course, is not true either.
What is also not true is that the United States has an obligation to take in everyone who wants to cross the border no matter what, where they come from, or what their motivation is.
John Kasich is back.
I don't know why.
Oh God, no.
Please God, no.
Not John Kasich.
John Kasich, Ohio governor, he's back.
And he says that God, he's spoken to God.
Now, as a religious person who speaks with God three times a day, God doesn't talk back to me, but I talk to God fairly often, like a lot, okay?
But apparently God does talk to John Kasich.
And it's funny how the left will mock Mike Pence when he says that he has to pray on things in order to make a decision.
But when John Kasich is mouthing leftist platitudes in the name of God, then it's totally fine.
Here's John Kasich suggesting that God doesn't want us opposing the caravan.
And let's stop putting up walls around ourselves and not understanding the plight, the trouble, and the problems of others.
It is not right, and the Lord doesn't want it.
And our people, at their hearts, want to reach out to others.
Look at what they do in these storms.
They go and they rescue people they don't know.
They put them in their homes.
They feed them.
That's America.
Not all this garbage and this division and yelling and screaming and hatred on all sides.
Okay, well, it is also true that What Is America is maintaining a border, so there's that as well.
But even John Kasich, right, the guy who's going to bring us all together, can't stop himself from using this sort of overheated rhetoric.
It's a problem.
It's a problem.
Okay, so, meanwhile, speaking of overheated rhetoric, Megyn Kelly is going to be out at NBC.
She's out at NBC because they are basically fibbing about Megyn Kelly being a racist.
So, this was sort of predictable.
Megyn Kelly was not getting good ratings in mourning, and so they decided that they wanted to dump her, and then they found an excuse to dump her when she said on a mourning show that she didn't see what was wrong with people darkening their skin for Halloween costumes.
They accused her of being pro-blackface, as we've discussed over the last couple of days.
This was sheer, absolute nonsense.
It is just untrue.
We'll talk about the media's attempt to polarize the culture on the issue of race, and NBC's attempt to do so for political gain in just one second.
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So folks are willing to polarize political rhetoric for even tiny gains right now on every issue.
And that's the real problem.
Folks are blaming President Trump for the bombing today, for the attempted bombings.
Tom Nichols is one of the people who is doing that.
So Tom Nichols has a whole Twitter thread.
He's an anti-Trump Republican.
Uh, and here's what he tweeted out, and then I'm going to explain why I think that this misses the point.
He says, The question isn't whether MAGA Van Guy is nuts, since he clearly is.
That's not the president's fault.
The better question is whether the White House and the Trump media complex is pushing the crazy Jews so hard, it's making unstable people more likely to be violent.
I've said many times the lone wolf guys who pledge to ISIS or to white supremacy or to anti-abortion violence are kooks who aren't looking for a cause.
They have to go find the propaganda, and when they do, they mainline it.
The difference here is that really hateful stuff is coming in waves, not from foreigners or fringe groups, but from White House-sponsored rallies, from widely-cited internet sites that have zillions of followers, and from a four-hour window of hot crazy known as Fox in prime time, which is very convenient for Tom Nichols.
He says, no one in politics or wind-nut media made this guy send bombs, period.
What they did instead was superheat the political environment and flood crazy BS into the information space so regularly that unhinged guys like this think they're being patriots by sending bombs.
Okay, let's assume that's true.
Let's assume that when you heat up the political water that more frogs jump out of the pot.
Let's assume that that's the case.
Let's assume that.
Well, wouldn't the same hold true on the left when they overheat the political rhetoric?
When they say, for example, that Megyn Kelly is an absolute racist.
When they say that anybody who even mentions Halloween costumes is so racist that they cannot be employed.
And like Kirsten Powers has a piece today about how Megyn Kelly is a racist because she is white, which is Megyn Kelly said something really racist should not be a surprising sentence to anyone.
The original sin was that Kelly was hired by NBC at all.
Kelly had a long track record of racial demagoguery at Fox before she ever set foot at the NBC studios.
Now, again, is this heating up the political system?
I think it is.
I think it is.
How about this op-ed from George Yancey, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, which obviously needs a better philosophy department.
He has a piece today called, hashtag, I am sexist.
He says, it's time we men take responsibility for our role in the problem of violence against women.
He says that all men are guilty of violence against women.
He says, I've decided not to cut corners.
Join me with due diligence and civic duty and publicly proclaim I am sexist.
In fact, perhaps it is time we lay claim to a movement.
I am sexist.
Think about its national and international implications as we take responsibility for our sexism, our misogyny, our patriarchy.
It's hard to admit we are sexist.
I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, bona fides, but who am I kidding?
I'm a failed and broken feminist.
More pointedly, I am sexist.
There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male.
Toxic masculinity takes many forms.
All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.
For example, before I got married, I insisted my wife take my last name.
After all, she was to become my wife, so why not take my name and become part of me?
She refused.
She wanted to keep her own last name.
I was not happy, especially as she had her father's last name, which I argued contradicted her position against patriarchy.
But as she argued, this is my name and it is part of my identity, I became stubborn and interpreted her decision as evidence of a lack of full commitment to me.
Well, she brilliantly proposed that we both change our last names and take on a new name together, showing our commitment to each other.
Yeah, so obviously this guy is a real anti-feminist.
He says, if you are a woman reading this, I have failed you.
I mean, this is like a Maoist forced apology.
It sounds like a POW tape.
Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you.
I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism.
I know about how we hold on to forms of power that dehumanize you, only to elevate our sense of masculinity.
I recognize my silence as an act of violence.
For this, I sincerely apologize.
And really what he's doing is he's saying, I'm not a sexist because I'm apologizing for my sexism, but every other male is a sexist.
Is that superheating the rhetoric?
Is that polarizing our society?
Maybe just a little bit.
And let's point out the media's hypocrisy when it comes to these sorts of issues.
When it comes to these sorts of issues, every democratic male is considered a non-sexist in reality.
When it comes to the media, Megyn Kelly happens to be a person right of center.
Jimmy Kimmel is a person left of center.
Has anyone brought up the fact that if we're going to talk about blackface, Jimmy Kimmel in 2000 did an actual blackface routine on national television on Comedy Central.
This is Jimmy Kimmel in blackface, not only Mocking black people.
He's mocking Karl Malone specifically.
Mocking Karl Malone for not being able to speak English properly.
This is a lot closer to insulting black people than Megyn Kelly saying, I don't mind if someone dresses up and darkens their skin as Diana Ross to honor Diana Ross.
Okay, Jimmy Kimmel somehow has a show on ABC.
No problem.
Here's Jimmy Kimmel circa 2000.
Sometime at night, come along, look up in sky and say, what the hell going on up there?
Do UFO live on other planet?
Falling in hole like E.T.?
Come along, read on TV about white people getting deducted by alien.
Sticking all kind of hell up they butt.
And that's a damn thing.
Listen up E.T., you better stay the hell back.
Is that a problem?
Apparently that wasn't a problem for Jimmy Kimmel, but it's a serious problem for Megyn Kelly to suggest that dressing up as a black person to honor a black person is not that bad.
She actually has to lose her job over it.
They're going to pay her out, but she has to lose her job over it.
Again, the polarizing environment predated President Trump.
It will go far beyond President Trump because that is the nature of the politics that we have chosen.
And it's the nature of a politics that the left continues to push to its most radical extreme.
There's an opinion piece in today's New York Times that is fully anti-science.
It is completely crazy.
And yet this is now being touted as not only mainstream, but if you don't believe it, then you are apparently a bigot.
And the piece is by Dr. Fausto Sterling, a professor of biology and gender studies.
So a professor of something useful and a professor of something completely useless.
The piece is called Why Sex Is Not Binary.
The complexity is more than cultural, it's biological too.
So what does Dr. Fausto-Sterling say?
Dr. Fausto-Sterling points out that there are genetic sexual disorders that make people intersex, for example.
And she therefore suggests that because there are intersex people, there is not sexual dimorphism in human biology.
This is crazy talk.
Okay, it's just crazy talk.
She cites a bunch of ridiculous, honestly, ridiculous references.
Like this is my favorite, just because I happen to know something about this.
She talks about Jewish thought.
She says, So supposedly this means that it was a third gender.
No, you dolt.
Okay, as someone who actually knows this stuff, I will tell you exactly what the Jewish law was doing.
The Jewish law was saying, this person has two separate sets of genitals.
We don't know whether they're a male or a female.
Therefore, we are going to be as strict as possible in every circumstance.
So we will treat them as female for purposes of forbidding them from temple service, but we will treat them as male for purposes of forbidding them from shaving.
In other words, we don't know, but that doesn't mean male and female don't exist.
The case being made in the pages of the New York Times, And I asked my wife about this because she's a doctor, guys.
And that means, and so I asked her like, is there any, like, what does this even mean?
She says, no, this is a person trying to cast genetic disorders as the norm.
It's like saying that if somebody is born with spina bifida and therefore has a level of paralysis in their legs, this means that human beings are not two-legged walking creatures.
You don't change the definition of human being based on people who have certain genetic conditions, and you don't change the nature of male and female based on people who have certain genetic conditions.
Does that polarize the culture to do that and then claim everyone who disagrees is some sort of bigot?
Yes, it does.
Yes, it does.
And yet that's exactly where we are.
That's exactly where we are.
Okay, let's get to the mailbag because this has been a very tiring week and maybe some people in the mailbag can cheer me up.
So let's check it out.
All right, let's start with Jesse.
Jesse says, Dear Ben, I read Brave New World last year and found it to be hilarious.
What are your thoughts on it?
And what are some other books that point out the flaws in leftist ideology you would recommend?
Well, Brave New World is actually a very prescient take on what exactly a technology-centered hedonistic society would look like.
The basic premise of Brave New World is that there's a group of people who have basically separated sex and procreation, that they are drugged to be happy with a drug called Soma, that they are emotionally manipulated to be happy.
And then there are these group of primitives who sort of live out in the middle of nowhere as people used to.
The question of Brave New World really is whether the Brave New World is good or whether it's bad.
It's pretty obvious that it's bad for people who live in Western civilization, which means you have to ask yourself why.
As far as other books along those lines, obviously the works of George Orwell are along these lines.
Animal Farm in 1984.
There's a precursor to 1984.
It's a Russian novel, and I'm forgetting the name of it.
It's also very good.
There's a bunch of fiction, science fiction, that's sort of along the lines of Brave New World, post-apocalyptic fiction, obviously there's some of this.
Actually, a book I recommended this week, Submission, is sort of along these lines, a parodic take on what is happening in Europe.
I mean, the undercover story of the year is that the European Human Rights Commission ruled today, they ruled today, that it is proper to fine someone for speaking against the Prophet Muhammad.
Huge fan of the show.
Of course I'm going to be a strict parent.
new world.
Tyler says, Hey Ben, I was curious if you're going to be on a strict parent, a strict parent on who your children date when they are older.
Are you going to let your kids date or marry whoever they want?
Huge fan of the show.
Of course I'm gonna be a strict parent.
I'm not an idiot.
You think that I'm going to let my kids date whoever they want?
Kids are stupid.
Why would I possibly do that?
First of all, my kids don't get to date until they are of marriageable age, because I am not in favor of dating just for fun.
I think that that is a temptation to sin, and I think that it is a... Like, I don't think that you get anything out of it when you're 16 years old.
They can date when they're ready to get married, because dating is supposed to be for marriage.
It's not supposed to be for heavy petting, or going riding in the car, or any of that stupidity.
Okay, Spencer says, Well, I mean, you'd have to... Buber is the closest to an actual Jewish philosopher.
I don't know the work of Levinas that well, so I'm going to leave him out.
Hannah Arendt is not particularly a Jewish philosopher.
She's more of a philosopher who happened to be Jewish.
Her connection to Judaism is pretty strained.
Martin Buber...
He says that religion is basically a conversation between the divine and man.
I like a lot of that.
I don't like his anti-Zionism very much.
There are a lot of candidates out there.
I would be surprised if Rand Paul doesn't try to make another run.
I would be surprised if Nikki Haley doesn't try to make a run in 2024.
I'd be surprised if Mike Pence doesn't try to make a run in 2024.
There are a bunch of Republicans out there who probably would.
Well, I think that most people on the left are sincere, but I don't know that they've really thought through their own arguments, which is why I spend a lot of my time, when I talk to folks on the left, trying to get people on the left to recognize the consequences of their own arguments.
What do they actually believe at root?
And as far as antisemitism on the left, I've suggested that there are really three main types of antisemitism in the world right now.
There's kind of the alt-right antisemitism, which is old style racial and religious antisemitism.
Jews are inferior or bad or corrupt or greedy or communists because they killed Jesus and all of this kind of stuff.
That's type number one.
And that's pretty terrible and old school.
Type number two is Muslim antisemitism, radical Muslim antisemitism, which sort of conflates religious antisemitism with ethnic antisemitism.
And you see that throughout the world where hate crimes against Jews are rising in Europe as the radical Islamic population of Europe rises.
And the third type of antisemitism is leftist antisemitism, where antisemitism arises for two reasons.
One, the secular left doesn't like religion very much.
And two, the secular left very often believes that basic Distribution of resources that is not even means that the person who is more prosperous somehow victimized the person who is less prosperous.
Jews happen to be more prosperous.
They tend to achieve highly in intellectual areas.
The state of Israel is a wealthy state.
And so folks look at them and they say, well, they must have gotten wealthy by screwing somebody else.
And therefore, they are the bad guys in this particular situation.
Also, the state of Israel is a nationalistic institution.
The left does not like nationalism.
They think that internationalism and globalism is a better way of life.
I disagree.
Well, there are a couple who are just fantastic.
So, The Joker is great, but only because The Joker is just sheer chaos.
Lex Luthor is fantastic because Lex Luthor, at least in the modern iteration, under sort of Geoff Johns, Lex Luthor is taken as a character who is firmly convinced that we cannot give power to any one person or anyone being, because if we do, that person could use the power against us, which is actually the correct premise.
It's actually Batman's premise.
Batman sort of uses the same premise a lot in Batman vs. Superman in the comics.
That's really what Batman is saying.
He's saying we can't allow anybody to have this sort of power if they are going to You know, be judging us from above.
That's why you have to believe that the only reason Superman is allowed to exist in this world, in comic book world, is because he is truth justice in the American way.
Were he not, he would be a supervillain.
So I like Lex Luthor a lot.
And Magneto, obviously.
I'm not a Marvel fan particularly, but Magneto is a terrific villain.
John says, hey Ben, I've been married to my wife for over a year now, and I, like most men, have made her more conservative over time.
Well, you know, I think that most, I'm not sure that men make their women more conservative over time.
I think most likely marriage and living in an institution where you actually have to live Well, you know, honestly, I don't think it's about condescension.
tends to make people more conservative.
The one issue she will not budge on, however, is abortion.
I'm very cut and dry on it and do not agree with abortion for any reason other than if the mother's life's in danger.
It seems every time we talk about the issue, an argument ensues.
Do you have any advice on how to talk about the issue and highlighting the negatives of abortion without coming off as condescending?
Big fan.
Well, honestly, I don't think it's about condescension.
I think that it's more about you have to look at the actual biology of a growing human child.
And this isn't really about my moral system is better than your moral system.
It's really about morality forbids the killing of human beings.
This is a human being.
That's what science says.
You don't have to be condescending about that, but I'm not sure in what context this would really come up.
I know this.
When I first met my wife, She seemed to be a lot more pro-choice, and then as she learned more about the biology, she became more, she's probably more pro-life than I am at this point.
So biology tends to be the great leveler when it comes to this particular issue.
Okay, final question.
Sam says, hey Ben, my intellectual hero, love everything you're doing.
Question and joke.
When scientists find life anywhere, cells, bacteria, on other planets or moons, and we all celebrate the greatest achievement in human history, we'll have to be consistent in their hypocrisy and declare cells not a life, but in the other breath, say, they are the party of science and recognize cells are life, making a new definition of what's life once more.
This is stupid and exhausting.
Love the show.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is an argument that I've made.
I made it on Fox News when I did my Sunday special.
You know, this argument that life does not exist in single-celled organisms, as long as they're human, but they exist everywhere else, that obviously is logically untenable in every conceivable way.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, Thing I like today.
So I decided to do some cartoons end of the week, not only because cartoons have bombs in them, but also because cartoons are hilarious and joyous and fun.
And I think we've lost a lot of those things.
So here is a little bit of one of the great classical music cartoons of all time.
This is Bugs Bunny not being a transgender bunny.
But pretending to be female for purposes of deceiving Elmer Fudd.
Bugs Bunny was not actually a female bunny in a male bunny's body.
Here's Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in What's Opera, Doc?
Oh, Bonilla, you're so lovely.
Yes, I know it.
I can't help it.
Oh, Mona Hilda, be my love!
Be kind, my love, a longing burns deep.
It's so good.
Okay, so just go watch it.
The animation in these cartoons is really first rate.
And my favorite part of it is the Wagnerian horse.
The giant fat horse.
It's just great.
And Elmer Fudd wearing the Viking helmet and the whole thing.
It's just, it's terrific stuff.
So, yes, kids can watch this and it's really funny stuff.
Okay, go check it out.
Time for, enough of the joy, let's go back to hatred.
Time for some things that I hate.
So, Kurt Schilling was the hero of the 2004 Red Sox World Series team.
The New York Yankees had a 3-0 lead in the American League Championship Series, and the Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit.
I remember, I was in Boston at the time.
It was unbelievable.
And the Red Sox came back from a 3-0 deficit for the first time in baseball history, and they won the series.
In Game 6, Curt Schilling, he'd been injured in I believe Game 3, Game 2 or Game 3.
He'd been injured in his ankle.
And they didn't know if he'd be able to pitch again because his velocity just dropped.
He had torn a tendon in his ankle.
They invented a surgery where they stapled the tendon in his ankle down.
And then he went and he pitched Game 6 of the World Series.
And he was gutting through actual bleeding.
He started bleeding through his sock as he was pitching.
So he was the hero of the Red Sox championship season in 2004.
Well, now the Red Sox are in the World Series again.
And in the first game, they had a bunch of members of the 2004 Red Sox team throw out the first pitch together.
It was a lot of the key members.
Kurt Schilling was not invited.
Kurt Schilling was not invited because Kurt Schilling is right wing and the leadership team at the Red Sox is left wing.
He was the biggest star on that team.
He was the reason they went to the World Series.
He's the reason they won the World Series.
But here was Kurt Schilling talking about that yesterday.
Well, again, they didn't.
This is politics, unfortunately.
You know, we talk sports.
That's the name of the show, and that's what we do.
And we're going to keep talking sports, but the fact of the matter is, politics has crept in, starting in a very significant way with Colin Kaepernick, and it's just continued.
And that's not going to change, but that's not who we are or what we do.
And the fact of the matter is, I said last night, I sleep pretty good at night.
I know who I am, I know what I am, and my rings are still there, and my trophies are still on the shelf.
It's all good.
Okay, so, you know, that obviously is ridiculous, but that is the length to which polarization has gone.
Curt Schilling, forget about his political views.
The guy was the hero of the 2014, not invited to the World Series.
Just great stuff.
Okay, other stupidity, final stupidity for the day, and then we'll leave for the week, because I gotta take a break, man.
Mathematicians, this is according to Real Clear Investigations, mathematicians who want tenure at UCLA have to do more than show a facility with numbers.
They have to pledge in writing a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity.
All professors applying for tenure-track positions at UCLA must write a statement on their commitment to diversity, showing, for example, their record of success advising women and minority graduate students, according to the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.
This reflects a push by college bureaucrats to ratchet up requirements to achieve a more diverse campus.
This is so insane.
So instead of the burden of proof being on somebody to show that somebody's racist, instead, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that you are not racist by signing a forced statement under penalty of lack of tenure, showing that you are committed to diversity.
Now, not diversity in thought, obviously, diversity in ethnicity.
Now, what's weird about that for science and math departments is presumably you want to recruit the best candidates regardless of race.
And you know who is most affected by all of the affirmative action programs at top universities?
Not white folks, Asian folks.
There's an entire lawsuit against Harvard University about that right now.
But these universities have decided that ideology matters a hell of a lot more than actual efficacy of these departments.
And that is not a call for lack of diversity.
It's a call for a meritocracy, which matters a lot when you are talking particularly about merit-driven fields like math and science.
But I guess that we're not going to do that anymore.
We're instead going to force people to sign ridiculous Stalinist statements about leftist priorities before we allow them to teach math at a major university.
Solid job, universities.
Good job, guys.
Okay, well, we'll be back here next week.
We'll see how crazy things are then.
Have a safe weekend.
I believe I'm supposed to be on Meet the Press on CBS on Sunday.
Is it Meet the Press?
Which is the one?
Yeah, I believe it's Meet the Press.
So I will get the information out.
And I will let you know.
I'll tweet out all of that on NBC.
It's NBC's Meet the Press.
I will be on that on Sunday, is the plan.
So make sure to check that out.
And we'll see you here next Monday.
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.
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