All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 14, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
58:43
Congress Will Be Fun! | Ep. 660
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes her presence known, big democratic cities engage in big crony capitalism, and the Mueller investigation heats up again.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, brand new faces in brand new places we get to watch as the incoming Congress comes in and, you know, participates in some shenanigans.
We will talk about all of that plus the Mueller investigation and a non-shocking report on a global warming research report that it turns out was being skewed in a particular direction.
I will let you guess that direction.
But first, let's talk about your finances.
So, Dems have retaken the House.
Obviously, that is not going to be great for the economy.
They're going to be involved in attempting new regulations.
They're going to be shutting down the attempts to make the tax cuts permanent.
They're going to be doing an awful lot of things that aren't going to be great for the business climate in the country right now.
And that means that you might want to think a little bit more about diversifying your funds.
Right now, you should take a look at Birch Gold.
Can you really afford another hit if the stock market should take a serious hit like it took in 2007-2008 when the S&P dropped 50%?
Instead, you might want to think about doing a little bit of hedging.
Hedge against inflation, hedge against uncertainty and instability with precious metals.
Gold is a safe haven against uncertainty.
My savings plan is diversified.
Yours should be too.
I'm not talking about taking all your money out of the stock market and putting it in gold.
I'm talking about taking some of your money and putting it into precious metals because they've never been worth zero.
And again, They are a good hedge against inflation and instability.
The company I trust with precious metal purchases is Birch Gold Group.
Right now, thanks to a little-known IRS tax law, you can even move your IRA or eligible 401k into an IRA backed by physical gold and silver, which is perfect for folks who want to protect their hard-earned retirement savings from future geopolitical uncertainty.
Birch Gold Group has thousands of satisfied customers, countless five-star reviews, A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Check them out right now.
Contact Birch Gold Group and get a free information kit on physical precious metals.
It's a comprehensive 16-page kit showing how gold and silver can protect your savings.
Go to birchgold.com slash ben.
Ask all of your questions, get your answers, and then when you're ready to invest, talk to my friends at birchgold, birchgold.com slash ben.
That's www.birchgold.com slash ben.
Go check it out.
Okay, so the assumption going into the new Democratic-controlled Congress is that things were going to be pretty terrible.
And I think that assumption holds fairly true.
I think that Democrats are going to launch an endless round of investigations into everything Trump-related, the vast majority of which will not only be irrelevant but counterproductive.
I think that the Democrats are going to hold up the business of government for ridiculous proposals like massive carbon taxes, for example.
I think Democrats are going to be just as bad at governance as they ever were back when they were in control of the House from 2006 to 2010.
And Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House again.
But there is going to be some fun Democratic infighting, or at least there are indicators that there may be some fun Democratic infighting.
That was the early indication anyway.
So Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, who is the progressive leftist darling beloved of the radical members of the base, She went to a sit-in outside Speaker Pelosi's office.
And I want to show you that I think that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, while she doesn't know squat about economics, while she doesn't understand politics in a very basic way, she is a canny young politician.
She's a lot cannier than she's being given credit for.
And the reason I say this is because the headlines that emerged from this situation yesterday in Congress are not actually consonant with what happened yesterday in Congress.
So there's this big sit-in outside Speaker Pelosi's office.
There are a bunch of people who are protesting, saying they want a new subcommittee formed on climate change that has the power to push legislation.
And Ocasio-Cortez shows up at this big sit-in outside.
It gets all sorts of press.
I want you all to know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future.
It's so incredibly important.
Okay, so everybody was saying, well, look at her.
She's really going there to stand up to Nancy Pelosi and really push Nancy Pelosi hard from the left.
Well, this is much more of an inside-outside game.
Excuse me.
This is much more of an inside-outside game.
What we are watching instead is Nancy Pelosi pretending to be the moderate, and then Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez getting to be the person who pulls Nancy Pelosi in the radical left direction.
It's a good piece of politicking, I will say.
Nancy Pelosi then issued a statement saying, we are inspired by the energy and activism of the many young activists and advocates leading the way in the climate crisis, which threatens the health, economic security and futures of all of our communities.
I have recommended to my House Democratic colleagues that we reinstate the select committee to address the climate crisis.
House Democrats ran on and won on our bold campaign for a $1 trillion investment in our infrastructure that will make our communities more resilient to the climate crisis while creating 16 million new good-paying jobs across the country.
We welcome the presence of these activists.
We strongly urge the Capitol Police to allow them to organize and participate in our democracy.
In other words, Nancy Pelosi was fine with this protest.
She wasn't standing up to the protest.
It wasn't that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was there to actually Press Nancy Pelosi.
In fact, right after this happened, she walked out and she talked about how wonderful Nancy Pelosi was.
She said, really, what I'm here to do is to support the folks who are here.
And she talked about how much she admired Nancy Pelosi.
This is a point that Alaa Pandit was making over at Hot Air.
So, I think that this is a bit of good politicking from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, it turns out, is quite good at this.
Yesterday, she had an entire Instagram in which she walked around her new digs over at the Capitol building, and she took pictures, and she showed how there are tunnels underneath Congress, which are pretty cool, and she talked about how it felt like being at Hogwarts, and all of this is hip and young and cool.
This is something that Republicans should be worried about, is that if folks like Alexander Ocasio-Cortez turn out not to just be a bunch of babbling morons when it comes to economics, but they actually can take that babbling idiocy and then apply it with some serious politicking, that is a problem.
Again, I think that Ocasio-Cortez is canny and clever in how she has deployed her resources here.
So, for example, she was making a big fuss last week about how she doesn't have the ability to rent a house in Washington, D.C.
Well, then she filed her financial disclosure reports.
It turns out that she has something like $15,000.
$15,000 in her savings, in her checking account as of April, and she has something like $50,000 in stocks and bonds in her savings account, which means that, yes, she actually does have the ability to rent an apartment in Washington, D.C.
As often happens with a lot of candidates, there's a, there's a Great amount of posturing about how they stand with the working folks, but when it turns out that those problems don't actually apply to them, they just sort of fib about it.
And that seems to be the case with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well.
Now, on the climate change point, there's a big story out today that is going to get very little play beyond the original story in the Washington Post.
The Washington Post did cover it, but it's not going to be covered very much beyond that in, for example, the nightly news.
The story is this with regard to global warming.
A major study that claimed the oceans were warming much faster than previously thought was apparently baseless.
There were key errors in the study.
This is according to Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis over at the Washington Post.
And this does beg a question, which is, why is it that every single time there's an error in a climate change study, it tends to benefit people who say that climate change is a catastrophe?
When was the last time there was an error in a climate change study in which people said, you know what?
It turns out that we underestimated the amount of climate change that was going to happen.
I can't think of a single time, yet how many times has the climate change community overstated the amount of damage that climate change is going to do?
Routinely.
The modeling has always been off on the heavier side.
It's never been off on the lighter side.
The reason this matters is because economic intervention attempts to skew the economy of the United States or the global economy on the basis of global warming would cost trillions and trillions of dollars.
It would cost people lives.
It really would.
In developing countries particularly where they actually need carbon-based fuels in order to survive.
It would severely crimp quality of life in Western countries as well.
In order for you to make a claim that ought to happen, you really should have to make a claim that something dire is in the works.
But the climate change community, instead of actually substantiating that with the best available research, it turns out that they've skewed the research at every available turn.
And again, I'm not somebody who believes that climate change isn't happening.
I think climate change is happening.
I think the majority of it is due to human interaction with the climate, but I do not think that that necessarily means we have a catastrophe on our hands that requires a complete rewriting of the economy in a socialist direction, which seems to be the actual goal of a lot of these folks.
Here's the story from the Washington Post, quote.
Scientists believe a major study that claimed the Earth's oceans are warming faster than previously thought now say their work contained inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are.
Shocker.
Two weeks after the high-profile study was published in the journal Nature, its authors have submitted corrections to the publication.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, home to several of the researchers involved, also noted the problems in the scientists' work and corrected a news release on its website, which previously had asserted that the study detailed how the Earth's oceans have absorbed 60% more heat than previously thought.
Unfortunately, we made mistakes here, said Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at Scripps who was a co-author of the study.
I think the main lesson is that you work as fast as you can to fix mistakes when you find them.
Well, the other main lesson is that when you find data that are too good to be true in a political direction that you like, maybe you should take a second look at the data itself.
This tends to happen a lot in the scientific community.
Studies that back a leftist point of view are ballyhooed.
They are talked about as though they have proven the case of the left.
When in fact, sometimes the data is just not right.
The central problem, according to Keeling, came in how the researchers dealt with the uncertainty in their measurements.
As a result, the findings suffer from too much doubt to definitively support the paper's conclusion about how much heat the oceans have absorbed over time.
The central conclusion of the study, that oceans are retaining ever more energy as more heat is being trapped within Earth's climate system each year, is in line with other studies that have drawn similar conclusions.
And it hasn't changed much despite the errors, but Keeling said the authors' miscalculations mean there's a much larger margin of error in the findings, which means researchers can weigh in with less certainty than they thought.
And this has been one of the other factors in looking at climate change.
If you look at the IPCC report that recently came out, you know, a month ago, that IPCC report Specifically talked about the levels of uncertainty with regard to the level of climate change that was occurring or the level of damage that would occur because of climate change.
But nobody ever talks about level of certainty.
They never talk about margins of error.
Instead, they treat the bottom line finding as though it is writ in stone.
As though it is 100% certain.
And that simply is not true.
The study's lead author was Laurie Resplandy of Princeton University.
Other researchers were with the institutions in China, Paris, Germany, the U.S.
National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
Nature said, maintaining the accuracy of the scientific record is of primary importance to us as publishers, and we recognize our responsibility to correct errors in papers that we have published.
And listen, they should correct errors.
Good on them.
But the original study suggested that the amount of heat that was being absorbed by the oceans was very high probability, 60% above what they thought, which meant there'd be less time than originally thought to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and it drew considerable media attention.
But then it turns out that there's a major problem with the research.
There's a Britain-based researcher named Nicholas Lewis, and he said, so far as I can see, their method vastly underestimates the uncertainty, as well as biasing up significantly, nearly 30%, the central estimate.
This is basically just some guy in Britain who happens to know what he's talking about who blogged about it.
Very often the climate change community has simply dismissed such concerns out of hand.
How could we possibly take seriously people who blog for a living as opposed to the great majority of scientists who agree with us?
The skewing of science for political purposes is extraordinarily dangerous stuff.
Especially because it does have ramifications for what we do in our everyday lives.
It has ramifications for regulation and legislation.
And it's not just happening in terms of climate change.
It's also happening in terms of gender.
And we'll get to that in just one second.
But first!
Let's talk about the climate right now.
Around the country, millions of Americans are turning up the furnace for the first time and then spending a week freezing at night.
Why?
Because they didn't change out their air filters and it turns out it burned out their system.
This costly mistake is completely avoidable by regularly replacing the air filters at filterbuy.com, America's leading provider of HVAC filters for homes and small businesses.
You can choose from over 600 sizes, including custom options that ship free within 24 hours.
And for people who like to kick the can down the road, Filter Buy actually gives you 5% off your order when you subscribe for auto replacement, which means that you don't have to manually go in and get new filters every time.
They just come on a regular schedule.
This is so much easier than going to the hardware store, having to special order Filters Plus.
These filters are great, and they're made in the United States.
Filterbuy will save you time, money, and help you breathe better, as well as filterbuy.com, filterbuy.com.
Tell them that we sent you here at The Ben Shapiro Show.
Again, there's no reason for you to suffer through crummy air that is gonna make you feel gunky inside, it's gonna make you feel more sick, and it could burn out your entire HVAC system, doing serious damage to your budget.
Go check it out, filterbuy.com, filterbuy.com, and tell them that we sent you.
Okay.
Other areas in which the left has been skewing science in order to reach particular political conclusions.
This is an amazing, amazing story.
This one's out of Berkeley.
So, we talked about, a couple of weeks ago, the Trump administration making a determination that for purposes of federal contracting, for purposes of interpretation of federal law at the executive level, That male and female mean biological male and female does not mean transgender male or female.
Doesn't mean people who identify one way or another.
It means that we are going to identify you by your actual sex.
We're not going to use the made-up term gender in order to skew things and say that you're a woman when you're actually a biological male.
And the entire left went nuts.
How dare they say this?
There was a full article in the New York Times suggesting that sex doesn't even exist.
Forget gender.
Sex is a spectrum, which is nonsense.
Sex is not a spectrum.
The dichotomous nature of human sex is the reason that we can procreate.
Were it not for the fact that there are two sexes and not eleven, it would be very difficult for humankind to actually have descendants.
Well, the problem with bad science is that it creates bad social results.
And here's one example.
A Christian student senator, this is according to Cassie Dillon over at Daily Wire, a Christian student senator at the University of California, Berkeley is now being ousted from her position after abstaining, abstaining from a resolution that condemns the Trump administration for considering narrowing the definition of gender.
I'm not kidding you.
Abstaining.
So the student senator, a Christian, refused to vote along with a resolution that condemned the Trump administration for saying men are men and women are women, and now the student senator is going to lose her position.
The resolution was introduced on October 31st.
In response, Isabella Chao gave a statement explaining why she could not vote on the resolution because of her Christian beliefs.
She says, As a Christian, I personally do believe that certain acts and lifestyles conflict with what is good, right, and true.
I believe that God created male and female at the beginning of time and designed for marriage between one man and one woman.
For me, to love another person does not mean that I silently concur when at the bottom of my heart, I do not believe that your choices are right or best for you as an individual.
After lengthy conversations with many of my community leaders and advisors, I've chosen to abstain from voting on these bills tonight.
The resolution condemned the proposed Title IX changes that limited gender identity to physical sex.
The party of which Chao is a member of Student Action then cut ties with her, claiming there are inconsistencies between her beliefs and the party, including perspectives on reproductive health and wellness resources.
Sustaining was simply too much.
And, of course, she got called a bigot.
In just a second, I want to talk more about how bad science results in bad public policy.
This is a very obvious case.
I mean, it's really astonishing.
Again, a Christian student who was ousted from her seat in the Berkeley Student Senate for having the temerity to say, I'm a Christian.
I can't vote for this thing because it violates my values.
And so she abstained.
She didn't vote against it.
And thus she was labeled a bigot.
Teddy Lake, again, the student senator who introduced the resolution, he said, I cannot fathom the amount of cognitive dissonance required to make a statement as disingenuous and harmful as the one Senator Chow made tonight.
The contradictions present in her speech are frankly disturbing and irreconcilable.
Perhaps what most offends me, though, is Senator Chow's outrageous ass that we as a Senate class respect her beliefs as she does our.
Why is that outrageous?
And the answer is it's not outrageous.
But when you believe that your view is fact and everybody else's view is just an opinion, then you get to crack down on them.
Teddy Lake says, to that end, I'd like to clarify that what Senator Chao expressed tonight were not beliefs at all.
They were not beliefs at all.
They were hateful prejudices that deserve nothing less than the strongest condemnation for myself, my community, and my colleagues.
I have no obligation to entertain or engage with individuals who deny my right to exist loudly and proudly as a member of the LGBTQ plus community.
And well, this particular student senator never did any of that.
But again, when you back political opinion with bad science, you end up believing that your opinions are fact, and therefore can be crammed down on anybody else, and their opinions are not opinions, but in fact, simply hateful, knee-jerk prejudice.
Chao then sent an op-ed to the school newspaper, the Daily Cal, but that op-ed was rejected, because it reinforces her original statement, which they deemed a utilized rhetoric that is homophobic and transphobic by the Daily Cal's standards.
Pretty astonishing.
The Queer Alliance Resource Center condemned Chao and called for her resignation.
At the Senate meeting last week, students protested, hundreds, and even had a large banner that said, Senator Chao resign now.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
Pretty astonishing stuff.
Chow gave the Daily Wire a statement that for me and the church here at Berkeley, free speech is an issue that has been highlighted, but is not the primary issue at stake here.
As one of my staffers put it, this is people issue, people who feel hurt and unable to reconcile how the traditional Christian worldview can profess to love LGBTQ individuals while disagreeing with their lifestyles and the promotion of their identities.
Even if the church continues to be misunderstood and slandered, our responsibility is not to shout our beliefs loudly above the noise, but to emulate the unconditional love and truth of Jesus.
So obviously, this is a hateful, terrible person.
And we know so because science.
Speaking of which, I do love this story.
This is the best story of the day, or worst story of the day, depending on how you define it.
Apparently, there is a situation that has now arisen in which a school has punished a male teacher for refusing to watch a naked girl in the boys' locker room.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that, again, bad signs with regard to sex and gender lead to pretty terrible public policy ramifications.
In this particular case, a Florida school district, this is going to be Joy Pullman over at The Federalist, a Florida school district allowed a self-described transgender female student regular access to the boys' locker room with no advance warning to the boys or their parents.
Which again, if a boy walked into the girl's locker room and didn't proclaim himself a female, then we would understand that this would be sexual harassment at the very least.
A transgender boy, meaning a woman, a girl, walks into a locker room without telling the other guys first, and that's not a problem at all.
And if guys are uncomfortable, then that's their fault for being uncomfortable.
Yeah, that's not imposing on anybody.
The first time this girl walked in, she caught boys literally with their pants down, causing them embarrassment and concern by the fact that they had been observed changing by an obvious girl, said a complaint letter to Pasco County School District from Liberty Council, a pro bono constitutional law firm.
School administrators forbade teachers from talking about the change and ordered a male PE teacher to supervise the potentially undressed girl in the Chasco Middle School locker room, the letter says, when he refused to knowingly place himself in a position to observe a minor female in the nude or otherwise in a state of undress.
Administrators told him, quote, he will be transferred to another school as discipline for not doing your job in the locker room.
So now we are forcing male P.E.
teachers to view undressed girls who say they are boys.
When we all know that if a male P.E.
teacher looked at an undressed girl in the locker room who did not believe she was a boy, he would be fired and possibly prosecuted.
But now, this has to be forced.
Crammed down the throats of people who don't want to engage in conduct they believe would be unbecoming to their job and would cause serious problems with sexual harassment, for example.
Bad science leads to bad results.
Identifying science with your opinion also leads to bad results, whether we are talking about climate change or whether we are talking about gender studies or any of the rest of this sort of stuff.
Well, in just a second, I want to talk about the great irony of Democrats who apparently Well, I hope it's not imminent.
Today is talking about how terrible big corporations are, how they rip people off, how they harm the little guy.
And then they bribe those corporations as fast as they possibly can.
We'll talk about that in just a second.
First, let's talk about your imminent demise.
Well, I hope it's not imminent.
I hope that you live another 100 years.
I hope that you live for a long, but at some point, we're all going to plot.
So that means that you need life insurance.
You need to make sure that your family is taken care of in case, God forbid, something should go wrong.
Having life insurance is actually a pretty good feeling.
It's nice to know that if anything were to happen to you, your family wouldn't have to start a GoFundMe.
And Policy Genius is the easy way to get life insurance online.
In just two minutes, you can compare quotes from the top insurers to find the best policy for you.
And when you compare quotes, you save money.
It is indeed that simple.
PolicyGenius has helped over four million people shop for insurance.
They've placed over $20 billion in coverage.
They don't just make life insurance easy.
They also compare disability insurance and auto insurance and home insurance.
If you care about it, they can cover it.
So, if you've been avoiding getting life insurance because it's difficult or confusing, give PolicyGenius a try.
Just go to policygenius.com, get your quotes, apply in minutes.
You can do the whole thing on your phone right now.
PolicyGenius is indeed the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
Go to policygenius.com.
Again, only takes a couple of minutes to get this thing done.
And then it's done, and you don't have to worry about it ever again.
And by the time you would have to worry about it, you'd be dead, so it wouldn't matter.
You'd make sure that you had life insurance all locked up.
Go to policygenius.com, and again, get those quotes and apply in minutes.
It's the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
Okay, so, Democrats like Bill de Blasio, who spend their entire careers ripping on corporations.
Corporations?
Bad.
Business?
Bad.
Government?
Good.
Well, it turns out that in New York, And Virginia.
Democrats are more than happy to dump piles of money, just oodles of money, on top of big corporations like Amazon.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced, as we talked about yesterday, that it would split its much-ballyhooed HQ to its headquarters, too, between two cities, New York and Crystal City, an area just outside Washington, D.C.
Now, lest you think that Crystal City is actually a beautiful city made of crystal, it is not.
It is a pile of cement warehouses.
So it's basically like if Emerald City were made of Formica.
New York is obviously heavy Democratic territory.
The headquarters will be located in Queens, and the congressperson there is Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, so good luck to everyone involved.
Northern Virginia is a similarly Democratic area, and the governor there As a Democrat, of course.
So what goodies did Democrats give Jeff Bezos and Amazon for the privilege of hosting their new headquarters?
Well, the state of Virginia is going to give Amazon some $573 million.
Million dollars to produce 25,000 jobs.
Arlington will give Amazon $23 million over 15 years.
As Garrity points out, Arlington is actually raising taxes in order to pay Amazon to locate there.
Now, I want to be clear, Virginia is giving Amazon tax breaks.
It's not the same thing as them just dumping money on Amazon, but they're giving them all sorts of goodies, including the ability to have prior notice of FOIA requests regarding government documents related to Amazon, which is pretty incredible.
Meanwhile, New York opened its goodie bag as well.
Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is Thick as a block of wood, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is fond of dropping groundhogs, they grinned through the announcement that the state would give Amazon some $2 billion in tax credits and other incentives.
They received direct incentives, direct incentives, meaning cash, of $1.525 billion for creating 25,000 jobs, an average of $61,000 per job created.
The New York Times also reports the state also offered a capital grant to the company that could total as much as $500 million, right?
That's taxpayer dollars going to Amazon so that Amazon can build new offices.
It will also apply for additional incentives through existing city programs available to any company.
Tax experts said these programs could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Both New York and Washington, D.C.
can expect rising housing prices, strained public services, and additional tax dollars spent on Amazon.
Now, listen.
There is no bigger Amazon booster on planet Earth than I. I'm one of the first, probably, I think, 1,000 Prime members.
I am a huge Amazon fan.
I love what they do.
I'm an Amazon defender.
But...
This is not capitalism.
This is not the free market at work.
This is the government giving subsidies and goodies to a company to draw them to a particular area.
And as I mentioned yesterday, there's a great irony in the folks who are in New York and D.C., these major Democrats, New York and Virginia.
These folks talking about how big business is terrible and needs to be regulated and taxed.
But then, when we want to bring some jobs to town, we need to get rid of the regulations and we need to get rid of the taxes.
I said, well guys, you know what would be a great way to draw lots of business to your town would be to get rid of these regulations and taxes for everyone.
Crony capitalism is indeed alive and well in democratic areas like New York and Northern Virginia.
This used to be called corruption, right?
This used to just be called corruption.
Or at the very least, it was considered economic fascism.
If you go back to the actual fascist system of economics under both the Mussolini Italian system and the Nazi German system, if you look at how they ran economics, it was basically the government subsidizing particular firms with taxpayer dollars and giving them all sorts of goodies and freedom from regulation in return for those companies doing good things for a particular administration or for the government itself.
This is the same sort of economics.
It's kind of hilarious that these Democrats who spend all their days decrying corruption of corporations, you know, they have the whole entire Occupy Wall Street movement, they pretend that this is like Amazon's fault.
This isn't Amazon's fault.
This is the government's fault for deciding to go out of its way to pay Amazon to do things.
If the government were not a giant grab bag of cash, Amazon would have no capacity to grab the cash.
Now this did lead to a little bit of confusion yesterday on the right, because Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, we talked about yesterday, tweeted out that Amazon is a billion dollar company and it shouldn't receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks.
And a lot of people on there are like, yay!
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!
Woo!
She's on our side.
Well, in the same way that Occupy Wall Street was not on our side, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not on our side.
It's not that Democrats, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, want less government intervention in the economy.
Far from it.
She wants the government to actually take over particular industries.
And she's not even against crony capitalism.
She's very much in favor of it when it favors firms that she likes.
She just doesn't like Amazon.
Philip Wegman of the Washington Examiner points out that Ocasio-Cortez, her website explicitly calls for, quote, the electrification of vehicles, sustainable home heating, distributed rooftop solar generation, and the conversion of the power grid to zero emissions energy sources, all of which can only be attempted through massive subsidies and taxes.
And so what we have here, this is one of those areas where the Democrats and the Republicans are not that far apart except in the size and the scope of the giveaways.
When it comes to Democrats, they want to extend the Amazon model to all of their favorite businesses and sectors.
Republicans only want to extend the Amazon model to a few of their favorite business and sectors.
So President Trump likes to do this for the steel sector, for example.
And President Trump likes to do this for the auto sector.
He wants to do it for the auto sector.
Here's the problem.
Government do-goodism means taking money from some people and giving it to others.
That is not what we call Pareto-optimal efficiency.
Pareto-optimality is an economic term meaning any distribution of resources that leaves everybody better off and no one worse off.
So, if you and I make a trade, goods for services, I have money, I need you to do my plumbing for me, I give you the money, you give me the plumbing services, we are now both better off.
This is Pareto-optimal, right?
This has created an optimal situation.
But anything that is not Pareto optimal means you are taking from someone and giving to somebody else, and that is killing efficiency in the process.
Both Republicans and Democrats engage in this, and it's really an ugly thing.
It's an ugly thing, and it's, frankly, an unconstitutional thing.
It has nothing to do with the powers of the federal government, and when it comes to state governments doing the same, generally, the original state constitutions were not designed to actually fulfill all of the- to do all of these things.
Well, meanwhile, President Trump is apparently considering yet another shakeup of his administration.
A lot of chaos in the West Wing these days.
He apparently is going to remove Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christian Nielsen, and is looking at possible replacements for John Kelly as well, and those include Nick Ayers, who is Vice President Mike Pence's Chief of Staff.
Really good guy, Nick Ayers.
He'd make a terrific Chief of Staff.
John Kelly has been, shall we say, less than great in the Chief of Staff position in the Trump administration.
He's caused a lot of friction and a lot of conflict inside the West Wing.
He is not particularly politically astute, and the great lie that came about when he was originally appointed Chief of Staff Was that he was going to be excellent at sort of keeping everybody in line.
That obviously has been wildly untrue.
Nobody has been kept in line by John Kelly.
Instead, he sort of has an agenda all his own, and that has created some friction.
The White House has not responded to a request for comment on the timeline, but it would be sort of shocking if there isn't a major shakeup inside the administration.
Right now.
I think the shake-up in the administration is going to happen pretty soon.
Every shake-up that's happened so far, by the way, has actually made the administration better.
So I'm not opposed to the shake-up in the administration, but sometimes how it's done is uncomfortable.
For example, yesterday, the First Lady Melania Trump asked that the White House sever ties with Deputy National Security Advisor Mira Ricardel, a spokesman for the First Lady's office said on Tuesday.
Kind of rare for the First Lady's office to issue public statements ripping staffers, but she said it is the position of the office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in the White House.
Which is, owie!
That's a top staffer to John Bolton.
So that is, again, lending a feeling of chaos to the West Wing that they just don't need right now.
In a second, I want to talk about the latest in the Mueller indictments and all the rest.
I also want to talk about the media's complete failure to do its job on a variety of issues.
But first, let's talk about how you can protect your online security.
Well, look, as a public figure, I'm constantly in fear that I will be hacked or threatened online, spied on.
I don't want my emails compromised, my credit card number or online banking password stolen, but it happens to millions of people every single year.
So how can you protect yourself?
Well, the company I trust to defend my online security and privacy is ExpressVPN.
ExpressVPN secures and anonymizes your connection by encrypting 100% of your network data, hiding your IP address.
That means nobody can record or access your online activity.
Download ExpressVPN on your computer or smartphone, and then use the internet just the way you normally would.
You click one button in your ExpressVPN app, and you are now protected.
ExpressVPN is great for accessing content from anywhere with VPN locations in 94 countries and blazing fast speeds as well.
So go check them out right now.
The nice folks at ExpressVPN have extended special pricing of less than $7 per month to all my fans.
So visit expressvpn.com slash Ben to claim your discount.
Again, that is expressvpn.com slash Ben to learn more.
You want to keep all your online activity safe.
You don't need people up in your business.
ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
There's no- That's the reason why it's rated the world's number one VPN service for internet users.
ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
Okay, well.
We're going to get into the Mueller indictments and the latest on that.
Plus, we have some real goodies in things I like and things I hate today.
But first!
You're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
When you do, you get the rest of this show live, you get the rest of the Andrew Klavan show live, the rest of the Michael Molls show live.
Also, you get access to our Sunday specials, the complete version of our Sunday specials.
This week's Sunday special features former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who's just a fantastic person and a really clever, canny, and intellectually fascinating politician.
Here is a little bit of what that looks like.
Hi, I'm Stephen Harper, 22nd Prime Minister of Canada.
Join me on The Ben Shapiro Show this week, where we discuss a lot of controversial issues.
Donald Trump, trade, immigration, and my new book right here, right now, Politics and Leadership in the Age of Disruption.
A lot of good stuff in that interview.
You're going to want to go check that out.
We have all sorts of goodies.
Another Kingdom you get early access to.
You want to hear Michael Mowles read to you.
And you want to watch amazing art, go check out Another Kingdom.
But you can only do that by subscribing.
Also, make sure that if you are in Pittsburgh tonight, we are speaking, and this is my final speech.
this year on the YAF Speaking Tour.
We're at the University of Pittsburgh tonight, 6.30 p.m.
Eastern.
You can catch The Last Stop.
We're going to be talking about a wide variety of issues, as always.
We will do our famed Q&A, and I will be speaking specifically about right-wing and mostly left-wing anti-Semitism.
Bring a friend, bring great questions, bring a jacket, because it is indeed freezing out here.
Honestly, I'm from California.
This is unpleasant.
Hope to catch you there!
Make sure that you show up.
Also go follow us over at YouTube or iTunes.
Make sure you leave us a review.
It always helps us.
We have the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
So meanwhile, President Trump, even as he experiences some chaos in the West Wing, we are awaiting news from the Mueller investigation.
A couple of things to be made clear.
One, President Trump has not obstructed the Mueller investigation.
That is obvious.
If he had obstructed the Mueller investigation, they would know in the White House what's going on.
They don't know in the White House what is going on, even though the Mueller investigation is taking place under the auspices of the Department of Justice.
Bloomberg is reporting that new indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference are expected this week.
CBS says that, citing multiple people with knowledge of the investigation.
One of the people claiming that they will be indicted is conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, who made his name a few years back, claiming that he had proof that President Obama was in fact born in Kenya, which he was not.
He told viewers of his YouTube livestream broadcast on Monday he'd been cooperating with the inquiry since receiving a subpoena from FBI agents at his home in August.
He said he expects to be indicted for some form or other of giving false information in the probe, despite doing everything he could to cooperate.
He said the possible charges arose related to Roger Stone, who of course is close friends with the Trump campaign, and Roger Stone had ties with Russia and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Of course, his lawyer, David Gray, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment as of Monday night.
Because it turns out, you know what's a really bad idea?
Going in public and then talking about your status as a possible indictment target from the FBI.
That's always not the smartest thing to do, just as a lawyer.
First rule of being a client to a lawyer, shut your face.
Don't go out and say things.
Really, really dumb.
Any new indictments would come amid recent turmoil at the Justice Department.
Of course, the Democrats are looking forward to trying to claim that Matt Whitaker, the new acting AG, is obstructing justice and preventing indictments from coming down.
Meanwhile, President Trump is apparently going to answer written Russia probe questions this week.
This is according to Reuters.
President Trump is expected to provide written answers to questions from the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election as soon as this week.
The questions apparently relate only to Moscow's involvement in the election, not obstruction, which is good for Trump because the fact is that Trump doesn't actually, there's no proof and there's been no evidence, That Trump himself was involved in Russian efforts to interfere in the American election.
The obstruction stuff would be a lot tougher for him, because obviously it would be targeting him particularly, even though, as I say, I think obstruction at this point, there's no evidence for it either, and it would be baseless.
Among the topics covered is that June 2016 meeting between the President's son, Donald Trump Jr., other members of the Trump campaign team, and a group of Russians, according to the source.
That, of course, is not particularly shocking.
that has always been the big sore thumb in this entire investigation for the Trump campaign, was that June 2016 meeting in which Donald Trump Jr. released emails publicly showing that he had said to a Russian friend of his with connections to the Russian government that he would be interested in hearing what a Russian-connected lawyer had to say was that June 2016 meeting in which Donald Trump Jr. released emails publicly showing Rudy Giuliani declined to comment.
So did Peter Carr, spokesman for the special counsel.
Trump's lawyers have been negotiating with Mueller's team since last year over whether he's actually going to sit for an interview.
The question still has not been settled, the source said, on Tuesday.
So we will see how all of this shakes out.
I really don't think that there's going to be an indictment brought against Trump or anyone in his inner circle.
I think there's a lot of talk going around right now about Donald Trump Jr. fearing that he will be indicted for some Until we actually see the evidence and see the indictment, we're not going to know the answer to that.
However, if this entire debacle, I mean, if this entire investigation comes down to nothing, These screams will never cease to be heard across the land from the anchors over at CNN, from the left, which has fully expected for now two years that Trump would basically be deposed from office by the FBI for Russian interference in the election.
And the thing about all of that is it's been a complete waste of time.
Imagine if the Democrats, instead of spending the last two years whining about Russian interference in the election, And again, I think that Russian interference in the election is a terrible thing.
The Russians should be stopped from doing it.
But instead of them suggesting that Trump is an illegitimate president because he worked hand-in-glove with the Russians, imagine if they just spent the last couple of years focusing in on President Trump's other myriad foibles.
They did enough to win what will end up being a wave election in the House, and by the time all the votes are counted, Republicans will have lost nearly 40 seats in the House in this last election cycle.
It turns out that President Trump has a lot of vulnerabilities.
But if Democrats want to distract themselves with myth stories about how Hillary Clinton actually won the election, and it was the Russians, the evil, nefarious Russians who stole from Hillary Clinton, I mean, I guess that they can do that.
It just seems wildly counterproductive to me.
It doesn't seem like a smart electoral strategy.
But, you know, this is what the media do.
And speaking of what the media do, In just one second, I want to get to a new poll showing that Americans are really quite unhappy with the media, and for quite good reason.
Here is the poll.
So there's a poll out today, and what it shows is from Zogby Analytics.
It says that 72% of Americans believe the media is dividing Americans and spreading hate.
Which, I don't know where the other 28% have been, but that obviously is true.
According to Zogby, 47% of Americans strongly agree that the mainstream media has played a major role in dividing Americans along racial, gender, and political lines, which has led to a spread of hatred and misunderstanding among some people.
And 25% somewhat agree, and 13% somewhat disagree, 16% strongly disagree.
So that means that a huge number of Americans rightly believe, correctly believe, that this is, that the media have done an incredible job dividing America.
And that's largely because the media have done an incredible job dividing America.
I mean, they have Al Sharpton out there proclaiming that Trump has declared war on minorities.
Al Sharpton, a guy whose involvement in the 1991 Crown Heights riots We are ready for action, because we are under an administration that has declared war on us, and we want to know whose side everybody's on.
down and a few people were murdered.
This guy is being trotted out by the left.
I mean, the guy still has a show on MSNBC and he's talking about how Trump has declared war on minorities.
We are ready for action because we are under the administration that has declared war on us and we want to know whose side everybody's on.
Am I right?
Okay, so there's Al Sharpton.
Again, not divisive, President Trump, divisive.
The media, treating Planned Parenthood as non-divisive.
So the media, CBS this morning, had on the new head of Planned Parenthood, with the caption, the doctor's in.
Well, the doctor's in the womb killing the baby is what the doctor is in.
But, this woman's name is Leanna Wen.
Listen to the... I mean, this is the most softball interview in history for a woman who will be overseeing the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of unborn children every year.
Here she is being given the royal carpet treatment from the CBS This Morning crew.
Well, this is deeply personal to me.
I was a patient in Planned Parenthood, and so was my mother and my sister, just like one in five women in America.
And as a doctor, I am proud to lead our organization as we deliver life-saving care to two and a half million people every year.
And what I want to do is to shape the future for my son, Eli.
And it's a future where all people are treated the same, that all people have the right to health care, and where it's a society where we trust women.
Abortion is so nice and so happy, according to the media.
But don't worry, Trump's dividing the nation, not the media.
You know, this extends to college campuses, this sort of mentality.
Who's dividing the nation?
It's very funny.
There's a letter that was put out suggesting yesterday, I spoke at the Ohio State University yesterday, and there's a letter that was put out by an Antifa-associated group, in which the Antifa-associated group Basically suggested that I was divisive.
They spelled divisive D-E-V-I Which is not how you spell the word divisive.
So I'm mostly divisive in my insistence on proper spelling in any case Antifa said that I was divisive and then they showed up And then they showed up outside the lecture, and the lecture was not disturbed, so they have every right to do this, obviously, and fine, if they want to do this, go for it.
They showed up outside the lecture where they chanted F. Ben Shapiro, and also chanted John McCain's dead and Reagan's dead.
Really nice folks, these members of Antifa.
There's a journalist, kind of a YouTube journalist named Fleckus, who showed up at the rally outside and asked a few pointed questions to members of this rally.
Hey guys, it's Floodgates.
This week we're at Ohio State University for a YAF speech.
Ben Shapiro's here, and these college kids are not happy about it.
We're gonna see what's going on.
Are you guys for or against Ben?
Against Ben.
Do you think he should speak tonight or no?
No.
No.
Not at all.
About free speech and the Constitution, how does it work?
That's a good point, but he shouldn't be allowed to have free speech if he's gonna preach the kinds of things that he preaches.
Well, what are some of the things that you're talking about, though?
I don't know what he said specifically.
Do you know any quotes or anything?
I don't know what he said specifically.
I just don't agree with his platform.
Are you for or against Ben?
Against Ben Shapiro.
Against Ben?
Yep.
I'm against Ben Shapiro because, uh, I mean... Does he have the right to speak under the Constitution, you think?
Shut Shapiro down!
Shut Shabiro down!
Yeah, I agree.
Shut Shabiro down!
Shut Shabiro down!
That works for me.
So solid stuff from the protesters.
They're not the one, but I'm the one who's divisive.
I love this.
This is an email that was posted by the Moral Scholars Program Student Advisory Council.
They said, Shapiro's rhetoric has the potential to threaten the emotional and mental safety of much of the campus community.
They said that, apparently, one of the complaints is that no one should address a person by the pronouns they've chosen for themselves, which is not something I've ever said, actually.
What I say instead is that you cannot force me.
Listen, I'm not saying Trump isn't divisive.
That is not a thing that happens in a free country.
He is.
But I'm the divisive one.
Again, and when it comes to people who are divisive, I think that the media has a lot.
Listen, I'm not saying Trump isn't divisive.
He is.
But the media are extraordinarily divisive.
The people on campus who are divisive are not people like me.
The fact that one side is being called divisive while the other side's divisiveness is being ignored is kind of a problem.
Okay, well time for a couple of things that I like and then a couple of things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
So last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Oren Kass in advance of his new book.
He has a new book out and it's called The Once and Future Worker.
It's a really interesting and I think useful book.
He and I have some significant disagreements on policy but Oren is one of the better thinkers in the conservative movement right now and one of the better thinkers overall.
He's a guy who actually is trying to address some of the problems of folks who are living in towns where jobs are being lost, where people are being left behind and here's what that interview sounded like.
So here we are for Things I Like Today.
I really wanted to talk with Oren Kass.
He's the author of The Once and Future Worker, which is just a fantastic book.
Now, as folks know when they listen to or watch the show, I never have guests on the program, like ever, ever, ever.
Oren is the first guest I've had in months.
And the reason for that is because Oren is not only one of the most intelligent commentators on the right, he's somebody who's actually thought through a lot of deep policy wonkish issues having to do with the future of the economy.
Oren, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thank you.
I'm glad we had a chair for me.
Exactly.
So the premise of The Once and Future Worker is that the kind of focus on free trade, globalization, free markets, all of that is fine, but it is missing the central point of that human beings need labor in order to feel meaning.
I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
You know, I think most of how we do economic policy, whether you're left of center or right of center, is just focused on consumer welfare.
How do we get enough stuff to people, and how do we make sure the amount of stuff you can buy keeps going up over time?
And that's important.
I don't want to minimize that, but what it leaves out is that people don't care only, or even mostly, about how much stuff they get.
It turns out that people care a tremendous amount about their ability to be a productive contributor, to have work that's meaningful to them, to be able to support a family, to be able to pass those values on to kids.
And when all you focus on is the consumer side, when you say more free trade is always better, no matter what it does to our industry, when you say it doesn't really matter if people are losing their jobs, we can write them a bigger check, expand the safety net.
You lose that.
And I think that's what we've seen in America.
We've gotten lots of GDP growth.
We keep expanding the safety net.
And yet on the things that really matter, community strength, family formation, mobility and opportunity for kids, that's not coming along with it.
And I think it's because we've lost that focus on work.
Now, on that last point, do you think that there's a possible reverse correlation, meaning that we actually lost meaning in churches and communities, and then when the economic loss hollowed the rest of it out, then we see this sort of broad depression across the country?
Or do you think it's the lack of jobs that leads to the decay of the social fabric?
In other words, does the decay of the social fabric predate the loss of jobs, or is it the loss of jobs that creates decay of the social fabric?
I think it goes both ways.
I think there have certainly been a lot of trends, especially since the 1960s, that are contributing to the decay of the social fabric, and they compound each other.
I think when you lose some of those other very values-oriented things, you lose people's commitment to working in some cases.
But I think it runs the other way also.
I think work really is foundational.
Two values transmission, two people's engagement and commitment to their communities.
We know from very good social science research that it is incredibly important to family formation, especially for men.
It's really important to family stability, especially for men.
And it's really important to the outcomes that children have.
So I think it's one of the key pieces.
And and especially importantly, if we're talking about kind of policy, what do we do?
I think it's the one where we can actually have effect.
I don't think we're going to Have a bunch of policy reforms that get people back into churches or that, you know, have those kinds of effects.
I do think we can really do a lot more on the policy front to build a labor market that's going to work for everybody.
Now, for conservatives, some of this sounds pretty scary just from the top, simply because, you know, we had Tucker Carlson on the Sunday Special a few weeks ago and Tucker was saying things like, well, in order to preserve jobs, let's just outlaw automated driving.
And Bernie Sanders has basically said, we need to regulate the economy, chain up the economy, make the economy work for us, and we'll tame the power of the savage beast and make it work for these jobs.
Whereas the traditional sort of libertarian view of economics is that jobs are a byproduct of consumerism, that it's essentially supply side, not demand side.
So with that being the case, where do you draw the line as to what is the policy balance?
I mean, are we looking at regulation of the economy?
Are we looking at tamping down free trade?
Where are the limitations that we're talking about collectively putting on the economy that scare the daylights out of people like me?
No, I think that's exactly the question.
And as you just said, the options that we have on the table that most people are talking about are either, let's just kind of keep doing what we're doing and do more redistribution, or let's somehow kind of regulate and force the market to be what we want it to.
And we know that that latter one, let's just yell at the market until we get something we like, doesn't work.
You get worse outcomes.
But I think what's really important to recognize, and where libertarianism and conservatism actually depart a little bit, Is that the labor market or any market, it's just a neutral thing.
A market's outcomes aren't inherently good or bad.
They're just reflecting the conditions that they're operating in.
And if you're a libertarian, you look at a market outcome and you say, whatever it is, it's good.
Per se, we like the market outcome as the desired result.
I think conservatism is a little bit more nuanced than that and says markets are a fantastic mechanism.
They protect freedom and choice.
They promote competition.
But if a market's landing in a place that's bad for society, that's not maintaining our social endowments, then that's a problem.
And the labor market is not like other markets, because the labor market is about people.
We can't be indifferent to where the labor market lands.
If where the labor market is landing is in a place where a lot of people don't have work, or a lot of regions can't find ways to stay viable, we can't say, well, that's the efficient solution.
We have to say, that's not good enough.
Um, but we don't say that's not good enough and therefore yell at it.
We have to take a step back and say, what are the conditions that are causing it to land here?
And how can we change those conditions in ways that would move it somewhere else?
So can you give me a couple examples of that?
Because again, it seems like it's pretty easy to run into sort of Bernie land here, um, where, you know, yelling at the market turns into actual regulation of the market or turns into high tariffs or, or a variety of Yeah, sure.
So one example is education.
And recognizing that the way that we train people as they are growing up is crucial to who can work and what kind of work they can do in the market.
redistributionist measures that would actually help. - Yeah, sure.
So one example is education.
And recognizing that the way that we train people as they are growing up is crucial to who can work and what kind of work they can do in the market.
Our education system today is focused entirely toward producing college graduates.
Our high schools are essentially now college prep academies.
We push people into college.
We massively subsidize keeping them there.
And yet, less than one in five people actually go smoothly high school, college, career.
Everyone else falls out somewhere along the way.
And if all you care about is getting economic growth, you could say, well, look, as long as those people who make it through are productive enough, we're going to be able to make everybody happy.
But what if we actually care about is those folks who are falling out along the way, the people who are barely completing high school, most people still won't complete a community college degree in this country.
If the question is, how can we make sure that they are productive and can support families also, you would do education differently.
You would say a much bigger focus in our high schools needs to be on people who aren't headed toward college, on getting people ready to be in the job market, giving them technical skills, actually getting them on the job and learning what it means to have a job.
A lot of the money that we spend subsidizing college would be much better spent subsidizing first jobs for people, getting them into the workforce.
Making employers want to invest in their training.
And so that's not picking winners and losers in the economy.
That's not Bernie Sanders style, you know, I order you to pay X amount.
That's saying if we want a labor market that works for more people, what are we doing to equip people to succeed in the labor market?
Well, folks, if you're interested in a book that is filled not just with problems, but with actual attempts at solutions, the book is The Once and Future Worker.
Oren Kass is the author, one of the best thinkers in America right now.
Oren, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it, too.
So what makes Oren really interesting is that, you know, he and I disagree, I think, on a fundamental level about what the labor market is for and the goods and bads of the labor market, but he's actually attempting to come up with some solutions in an open public forum with open public debate, and good for him for doing that.
Okay, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
So as I suggested yesterday, the media were going to wildly miscover everything that is currently happening with regard to the Gaza Strip in Israel.
There were 400 rockets that fell yesterday in Israel.
No state worth its salt would stand for this sort of thing without significant Blowback and that significant blowback has not even come I mean Benjamin Netanyahu just had his defense minister resign on him Because the defense minister said that Netanyahu wasn't doing enough to defend the state of Israel the New York Times however because the New York Times New York Times is that it's like boxing They they their explainers are garbage the New York Times explainer of what just happened in Israel and Gaza Doesn't mention that Hamas is a designated terrorist organization
Which seems to be, like, you know, the key to the whole thing.
They don't mention the number of rockets that were fired at Israeli civilians, which is a thing that is the entire story.
So they don't mention that it's Hamas, and they don't mention the number of rockets, which is the only reason we are having the conversation at all.
Once again, and when it comes to the media's willingness to Go along with radical Muslim anti-Semitism because it fits into intersectional theory.
It's really quite gross.
I'm going to talk about this a lot at University of Pittsburgh tonight, but I think that it bears more repeating because it's pretty ridiculous on its face.
Other things that I hate today.
So this is just a terrible story.
Obviously, There's been a lot of media focus on a group of high school students in Baraboo, Wisconsin, who are holding up what appears to be a Nazi salute.
This is Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC talking about it.
I think it has a graphic of the actual photo.
There's the photo.
Okay, so the actual photo is a bunch of kids, some of whom seem to be holding up their right hand in a Nazi salute.
One kid in the front row is giving the, kind of, the OK sign, which has been interpreted as a white supremacist sign because 4chan white supremacists decided they were going to actually, you know, turn it into that.
So, there's debate over what exactly this photo shows.
So, the media have suggested that this is all these kids joining in a Nazi salute.
The photo, the photographer, he says that this was as innocent as the boys and girls going to the prom.
Gus' son, he's the photographer.
His son is one of the teens in the photo and he is a retired teacher.
He said he told the teens to wave goodbye heading off to the prom for the picture taken in May on the steps of the Souk County Courthouse.
One of the teens in the image, Jordan Blue, contradicted that account.
He says that Gust instructed the group of mostly white men to pose that way.
He said, I felt upset, unsafe, disappointed and scared.
I felt unsafe because I go to school with them.
I don't believe in what they represented and the symbol they shared.
They knew it was wrong, but they still did it.
So we don't actually know what happened in this photo at this time.
This group of overwhelmingly and nearly, indeed it appears to be universally, white kids in Upper Wisconsin throwing the Nazi salute.
Some kids are not, some are.
You know, until we actually hear all the facts, it's hard to say all these kids are actual Nazi sympathizers.
Here's where I think this is.
Here's where I think this is.
I think that people are idiots.
I think people do idiotic things a lot.
I don't think these kids are actual white supremacists.
I think that these kids have a lot to learn about throwing Nazi signs in a civilized society and what that means to folks.
You know, that that is actually a bad thing to do, that even when you do it parodically, you know, even when you're doing it as a joke, that it actually means something, and that it's a problem, and that you shouldn't be doing it, and that it's inherently offensive to throw a Nazi salute.
This is not a thing that should really be joked about.
However, do I really think that these kids are like going in the back room and they're lighting up the tiki torches for Richard Spencer or something?
No, I don't.
I think that probably what happened here is that both things were true.
My guess is that the photographer said to them, guys, wave like you're about to go to prom right now.
And then one of the kids said to the other kids, well, man, it looks like we're doing a Nazi salute.
And then the kids were like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
And they started doing that, right?
That would be my guess based on no evidence whatsoever.
But Is it true that people are ignorant of history?
Yes, it is true that people are ignorant of history.
Is it true that high school kids are stupid?
Yes, it is true that high school kids are stupid.
Is it also true that we in this country are going crazy over issues that should not raise to this level?
That this should not be a national issue when some high school students do a dumb thing that involves no violence against anybody?
You know, I think it's overblown.
I think that as a person who's not fond of Nazis, right, I think that this is overblown, and while these kids need better education, I'm not sure why this is being featured on national news broadcasts when a local high school has a bunch of students who are 17 years old who are morons.
Like, why is that a thing?
And when the story hasn't even been fully fleshed out yet, when basically it's a couple of competing stories about what exactly happened here.
Okay, so we will be back here tomorrow, tonight.
Again, if you're over near Pittsburgh, we are speaking at the University of Pittsburgh.
And when I say we, I mean the Royal We.
I am speaking at the University of Pittsburgh.
And I'm going to be like an athlete.
Ben Shapiro is speaking at the University of Pittsburgh.
So you can go check that out tonight.
Hope to see you there.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
▲
Export Selection