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Dec. 3, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
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Goodbye, 41 | Ep. 671
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President George H.W.
Bush passes away, Russiagate continues to unfold, and Paris bursts into flame.
We'll get into all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, man, so much to get to.
A lot happened over the weekend in Russiagate, and of course, President George H.W.
Bush passes away, and this leads the media to discover that honor did exist in the Republican Party at one time, but no longer does.
We'll get into all of that in just one second.
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Over the weekend, President George H.W. Bush, Bush 41, as they call him, passed away at the age of 94.
H.W.
was, in fact, an American hero.
His entire life was dedicated to American public service.
According to the Associated Press, the public viewing for President George H.W.
Bush will kick off four days of events that will include a state funeral at Washington's National Cathedral on Wednesday and a private service at President Bush's longtime church in Houston on Thursday.
His body is supposed to arrive in Washington today for public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda, which is a rare honor that is only bestowed on a few.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell called him a perfect American for how he served his country in so many capacities.
He died at his Houston home at age 94 over the weekend.
His crowning achievement as president was assembling the International Military Coalition, according to the Associated Press, that liberated Kuwait from invading Iraq in 1991 in a war that lasted just 100 hours.
At the time, he was ripped up and down for not invading Iraq directly and going after Saddam Hussein.
He said that was beyond the mission.
And obviously, later events seem to have justified that to at least a certain extent.
He was a humble hero of World War Two.
He was just 20 when he survived being shot down during a bombing run over Japan.
He enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday.
He, in fact, forewent his actual gale Scholarship to instead go into the Navy.
He was shot down while he was in the Navy.
In fact, they have tape that was played during the 1992 and 1988 presidential runs that showed him actually being dragged out of the ocean by fellow members of the Navy.
He's the youngest Navy pilot in America at the time.
He was dragged out of the water.
Here's some of that footage.
Here's what it looked like.
September 2, 1944, USS Finback rescued Lieutenant Junior Grade George H.W.
Bush, who was shot down while attacking Chichijima.
During this time, Bush was attached to USS San Jacinto while serving with Torpedo Squadron 51.
Bush later becomes the 41st president of the United States.
Well, it's interesting because Michael Dukakis' campaign manager said in 1988 that the moment they saw that footage on television, they knew that Michael Dukakis was never going to be president because, again, the footage is pretty heroic.
Shortly after he left the service, he married his 19-year-old sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, in a union that lasted until her death earlier this year.
He turned his attention to politics in the 1960s.
He was elected to his first two terms in Congress in 1967.
He then went on to serve as ambassador to the UN and China, head of the CIA, chairman of the Republican National Committee before he was elected to two terms as vice president of the United States.
And then, of course, he served one term as president of the United States before being defeated by Bill Clinton in 1992 in a hotly contested election that saw Ross Perot win 19 percent of the popular vote.
Now, what's been fascinating to watch in the aftermath of George H.W.
Bush's death is the sort of sepia glow that has been cast on George H.W.
Bush by all of his political opponents.
We saw the same thing happen to Senator John McCain after McCain's death earlier this year.
Suddenly, all the people who spent their careers talking about how John McCain was a warmonger were saying that he was just the great example of American statesmanship.
We saw the same thing with George H.W. Bush immediately after his death this weekend.
Suddenly, he was a great American statesman.
Suddenly, he was a wonderful man.
Suddenly, he was just an example of the kind of person who could unify the country.
We saw this with Mitt Romney after he lost in 2012.
He gave a concession speech and suddenly the left was like, wow, look at that.
That guy's great.
Where was that guy during the campaign?
And many of us were saying, well, he was there the whole time.
You were just forcibly ignoring the fact that Mitt Romney was a good man so that you could slander him and attack him so he wouldn't become president.
It was the same thing with George H.W.
Bush, who in 1991 was ripped by the left as a warmonger, who was ripped by the left as an incompetent, who was ripped by the left as Cold, aloof, not in touch with the American people, a racist in 1988 for running the Willie Horton ad, right?
He didn't even run it.
It was a super PAC kind of quasi-associated with his campaign that ran the Willie Horton ad.
But who was George H.W.
Bush as a man?
I think that the best clip that shows who he was as a man, this comes circa 1979.
So in 1979, George H.W.
Bush, who was coming off running the CIA, he ran for president in 1979.
And he ran against Ronald Reagan.
He ran against Bob Dole.
All these people would go on to become presidential candidates in their own right.
And he was asked specifically about whether he was tough enough to be president, which is an amazing question to ask a guy who volunteered for the Navy and then was shot down, going on to complete his mission, by the way.
Here is George H.W.
Bush being asked about his toughness circa 1979.
I don't equate toughness with just attacking some individual.
I don't attack... I equate toughness with moral fiber, with character, with principle, with demonstrated leadership in tough jobs where you emerge, not bullying somebody, but with the respect of the people you led.
That's toughness.
That's fiber.
That's character.
I've got it.
And if I happen to be decent in the process, that should not be a liability.
Okay, and then he was asked specifically about his political opponents in that clip.
He's asked about Bob Dole.
He says, is Bob Dole too aloof?
And he says, no.
He says, is Ronald Reagan too old?
He says, no.
And then he specifically refuses to attack his other political opponents on the stage.
And that was fairly common for George H.W.
Bush.
Now look, As a very conservative Republican, was I the biggest fan of George H.W.
Bush's presidency?
I mean, to be frank, I wasn't there for most of it, at least into politics.
I was four years old when he took office and I was eight when he left.
But in retrospect, do I look back at his presidency and say that was a shining example of what an American presidency should be?
No, I have severe policy differences with George H.W.
Bush.
George H.W.
Bush.
Did not keep his promise not to raise taxes.
George H.W.
Bush sold AWACS to the Saudis.
George H.W.
Bush, you know, on foreign policy.
I am not with the common consensus that in 1991 he shouldn't have gone and deposed Saddam Hussein at the time.
It would have certainly saved America a lot of trouble in the long run if he had done so.
But With all of that said, was George H.W.
Bush a deeply honorable human being?
There's no question he was a deeply honorable human being.
He was a good man.
This is a good man with a good wife and a good family.
And we're seeing the same thing happen to George W. Bush in the aftermath of his presidency.
Suddenly a guy they were attacking as Bush-Hitler is now being recast as a man who wanted Americans to get along.
Totem of a kinder, gentler era.
And this is exactly what you're seeing folks on the left say about George H.W.
Bush.
Juan Williams says, you know, the transformation of H.W.
Bush into the party of Donald Trump demonstrates that there was a kinder, gentler time in America.
The way I think of it, Chris, is sort of optimism versus pessimism.
Mourning in America, a kinder, gentler America, versus American carnage, as a message coming from the leader to the American people.
So when I think of President Bush, I think of someone who crossed the aisle.
You know, I was really taken by what Carl just said about his best friend being a Democrat and, well, he's served those two terms in Congress.
And, of course, he followed Reagan's So I'm not a huge fan of George H.W.
Bush's bipartisanship while he was in office and while he was president of the United States, but I'm getting rather tired of a bunch of folks on the left who would have ripped George H.W.
Bush while he was president, now turning around saying it was a kinder, gentler America.
No, it wasn't.
It's just that you like every Republican once that Republican is no longer in office, and you specifically use those Republicans as clubs to hit the current Republican.
Let's be frank about this.
When Senator John McCain died, there were all these tributes that came in from the left.
People who had called him a warmonger and said that John McCain was the guy who was joking about bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, and ran.
They were doing this whole routine while he was alive, he dies, and suddenly the man is just a semblance of a time gone by.
And now it's the same thing with George H.W.
Bush.
Are you sensing a sort of pattern here, a pattern from the left that because Donald Trump is president, every Republican who is not Donald Trump is now seen in a kinder, gentler light.
The fact is, the reason the press are paying this sort of attention to George H.W.
Bush is not because they've suddenly been struck by the honor and decency of the man, George H.W.
Bush.
It is also because of the fact that so many folks on the left want to see George H.W.
Bush contrasted unkindly with Donald Trump.
And I'm not going to pretend that in terms of character, Donald Trump and George H.W.
Bush are on the same plane.
I don't think they're on the same plane.
I don't think that George H.W.
Bush is the kind of man that Donald Trump is, nor do I think Donald Trump is the same kind of man as George H.W.
Bush.
They're very different human beings.
George H.W.
Bush was a man who volunteered to serve in the military.
Donald Trump is a man who did not.
And not only that, you know, used a number of excuses to get out of the draft.
George H.W.
Bush is the kind of man who devoted his life to public service.
Donald Trump is the kind of man who has devoted his life to, you know, to business and fame.
None of that is specifically a rip on Donald Trump, but the contrast is not kind to Donald Trump between George H.W.
Bush and Trump, which is, of course, exactly why the press is making that contrast in the first place.
Don't trust the press when suddenly they start telling you that a Republican is wonderful, because the only Republicans that the left thinks are wonderful are ones who are out of office or dead.
I mean, that's the basic rule of thumb here.
And every so often, Every so often, they sort of let the mask slip.
Franklin Fuller let the mask slip over at the Atlantic when he suggested that George H.W.
Bush was not a man of courage, right?
He actually did not.
Here's how he concluded his eulogy of George H.W.
Bush.
And this is a rare Example of honesty from the left on how they actually felt about George H.W.
Bush while he was alive.
Here's what Franklin Foer, who is disgusting, said over at The Atlantic.
Obituaries present George H.W. Bush as the last of the Republican moderates.
In reality, he was an archetypal representative of the modern party, a man whose sense of duty failed him when it came to resisting the rise of racially revanchist libertarian forces.
He embodied an establishment that wrote a very nice thank you note.
But good manners are hardly the same as moral courage.
Prudence is sometimes hard-hearted.
Those who are mourning the passing of the old establishment should mourn its many failures, too.
That's how the left really felt about George H.W.
Bush.
And don't let them put on the mask of mourning in order to pretend that George H.W.
Bush was something different for them than Donald Trump.
You and I, we can see the differences between George H.W.
Bush and Donald Trump, which were many and myriad, some in favor of Bush in terms of character, some not in favor of Bush, maybe in terms of policy.
But for the left, the only reason that they are now donning the mask of mourning when it comes to George H.W.
Bush is that they can attempt to proclaim that Donald Trump is significantly worse by any sort of comparison.
Hey, in just a second, I want to talk to you about George H.W.
Bush's final words.
I mean, whenever a man of honor dies, it's a loss, obviously, to the country.
And the stories of his death are pretty moving and talk about that in just one second.
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All right.
So the stories of President Bush's death are really moving.
I mean, this is a man with it's hard to imagine a better American family.
A son who is a governor, another son who is president of the United States and governor of Texas, a family and third generation of politics.
Pretty amazing stuff.
Again, as I emphasize, I think that it is fair for people on the right to talk about the goodness of George H.W.
Bush if they didn't spend their careers attacking him as a bad man.
People like Franklin Fuller over at The Atlantic, I think, are more reflective of what the left really thinks about George H.W.
Bush.
Again, Franklin Fuller ripping into George H.W.
Bush, saying he didn't have any moral courage.
When's the last time Franklin Foer signed up for the military in the middle of World War II?
It's just, it's just amazing.
Just a quick final note from Franklin Foer before we get to the last words of George H.W.
Bush.
Franklin Foer writes, one of the great counterfactuals of American history is pondering what would have happened if George Bush had exerted greater control over the destiny of the Republican Party.
What if the moderate Republicans of the late 50s and early 60s had aggressively owned the civil rights agenda and rendered the cause of racial justice a bipartisan concern?
By the way, they did.
More Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act as a percentage than Democrats did.
If the old-money Republicans could have mustered that leadership, stood firm against the flow of segregationists into their club, it might have precluded the invention of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy and the generations of racialized politics that followed.
Does anyone really believe, by the way, that this was all about George H.W.
Bush failing to stem the flow of racists into the Republican Party?
But this is how the left really thinks about all of these folks.
This is how the left really thinks about all of these folks.
In any case, James Baker, who was George H.W.
Bush's lifelong friend and Secretary of State, he was on CNN, which actually, their coverage of H.W.
was excellent.
And James Baker was talking to Jake Tapper about H.W.' 's final words.
They got the kids on the phone, and each one of them spoke to him, and he spoke back, or mumbled back anyway.
And then they got 43 on the phone, and 43 said, I love you, Dad, and I'll see you in heaven.
And 41 said, I love you, too.
And those were the last words that he ever spoke.
I mean, that's pretty amazing.
You can't ask for more from a life than that.
It is amazing when somebody gets to live the life that they sought to live, even when they pass away.
It's obviously a credit to them as a human being.
If you can live your entire life and die saying, I love you, your children, it doesn't get a lot better than that, especially when your child happens to also have been president of the United States.
Pretty amazing stuff.
All right.
Meanwhile, Russiagate continues, and the left is fully invested in Russiagate, that this is what's going to take down President Trump.
You can see the excitement from so many folks on the left.
Now again, the evidence is not in that President Trump actively colluded with the Russians to steal the 2016 election or anything like that, and so the left is now shifting their argument.
They've shifted their argument several times.
The first was that the Trump campaign had been compromised by the Russians.
The Russians basically had compromat, you remember, on President Trump, and they were going to use that compromat in order to affect his role in office.
That has not been proved.
There is no evidence of that.
Then they shifted the argument to President Trump was coordinating with the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and the DNC, and then to militarize the release of those emails to win the election.
Again, that has not been proved either.
Then it turned into President Trump maybe received some of those emails.
And they point out connections between Roger Stone and other members of the sort of Trump coterie.
And that has not been proved yet either.
So now it's moved to President Trump had business relationships in Russia at the same time that he was running for president.
And that's true.
But that's also not criminal, as even Andrea Mitchell over at MSNBC was recognizing.
She says, you know, President Trump is saying it's not illegal for him to do business in Russia.
That, of course, is exactly true.
President is correct.
It's not illegal for an international businessman to be doing the business.
The conflicts of interest are profound.
It's not illegal yet.
And she is right about this.
Jake Tapper made this point last week also.
That's not stopping Democrats from now trying to say that because Trump had business contacts in Russia, that means that he was in some way compromised.
So Adam Schiff The representative from California who has his pup tent set up outside the media headquarters.
I mean, again, it's amazing.
He's actually brought an electric generator.
He's dug a pit for the outhouse.
He's starting to hook up the plumbing, but he hasn't actually connected it to the main line yet, right outside these headquarters.
He was on ABC's This Week talking, again, about Michael Cohen and Russiagate and President Trump.
What Michael Cohen was saying and others were saying about when this business deal ended was not true.
And what's more, the Russians knew it wasn't true.
That at the same time that Donald Trump was the presumptive nominee of the GOP and arguing in favor of doing away with sanctions, he was working on a deal that would require doing away with sanctions for him to make money in Russia.
That is a real problem.
It means that the compromise is far broader than we thought.
There we go.
So it's compromise.
We're back to the original theory, except again, the theory is not supported by any evidence.
Donna Brazile, former head of the DNC, she was saying the same thing.
And Michael Cohen pleading guilty to lying to the FBI that this is, in fact, a smoking gun.
It is not a smoking gun of anything other than Michael Cohen lied to the FBI because he lies to a lot of people, Michael Cohen.
Michael Cohen once boasted that he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, but instead this week he delivered a smoking gun.
The fact that, oh yeah, that's a smoking gun.
Because, once again, he said that what I provided before was consistent with what the President wanted me to say because I wanted to stay loyal to the President.
Smoking gun, saying, he said essentially that the White House, the President was lying at the time that he had no business dealing with Russia when he was looking to Okay, the president has not testified.
The president, you know, did say that he had no business ties with Russia.
Again, it's gonna come down to what is the meaning of is, right?
The president's gonna say, I didn't have business ties with Russia, right?
We were in negotiations, it didn't happen.
So that's not me lying.
People on the left gonna say, well, you know, you're implying that there were no, at any time, business ties with Russia, and there were.
In any case, none of that is criminal, as Andrea Mitchell says.
And this is leading a lot of folks on the right to More and more rip into the Mueller report.
Rudy Giuliani, the president's attorney on these matters, he says that Robert Mueller is acting unethically, that basically he's culling together a bunch of people he says have lied to him, but there's been no underlying crime.
So at no point has anybody been actually convicted or pled guilty to collusion with Russia regarding the election, which was the original charge.
Instead, everybody's being gotten on ancillary crimes of lying to the FBI about matters that really have nothing to do with the central contention.
That's what Giuliani is saying.
He's not wrong.
I think the special prosecutor has stepped over the line now with the way he's intimidating people in order to tell what he believes is his version of the truth.
This is what's wrong with these special prosecutors and independent counsels.
They think they're God.
I mean, they think they know the only truth that exists, even if there's a lot of doubt about it.
They seem to want to people at any cost, including the cost of ethical behavior or the rights of people.
Okay, so Rudy Giuliani obviously quite upset about all this.
So is President Trump.
Trump, President Trump tweeted out this morning, a series of tweets says, Michael Cohen asked judge for no prison time.
You mean he can do all the terrible, unrelated to Trump things, having to do with fraud, big loans, taxis, et cetera, and not serve a long prison term?
He makes up stories to get a great and already reduced deal for himself and get his wife and father-in-law, who has the money off Scott Frey.
I do like that he spelled Scott Free capital S-C-O-T-T.
Free.
So there's a dude named Scott Free.
He lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.
I will never testify against Trump.
This statement was recently made by Roger Stone, essentially stating he will not be forced by a rogue and out-of-control prosecutor to make up lies and stories about President Trump.
Nice to know that some people still have quote-unquote guts.
Bob Mueller, who's a much different man than people think, and his out-of-control band of angry Democrats don't want the truth.
They only want lies.
The truth is very bad for their mission.
Okay, so in a second, I'm gonna say why I think that President Trump's sort of half right and why he's sort of half wrong.
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So President Trump obviously upset with the Mueller investigation.
Why?
Because the theory is that Mueller is basically getting a bunch of people to cop to things that are not major crimes in order to get them to flip on the president and say things that are untrue.
Now, a couple things can be true at once.
One can be that there is no underlying crime here.
Two can be that the Mueller report is actually just a report and not a criminal indictment.
That it turns out that what Mueller is actually attempting to do is compile a bunch of mean stuff about Trump without any sort of criminal indictment in the offing.
And thing number three can also be true, which is that Mueller, in order to get that information, is going after people for Relatively minor crimes.
Lying to the FBI is not a minor crime, but about issues that are not exactly criminal is not exactly a major crime either.
The person making this case is, of course, Andrew McCarthy over at National Review.
And it is important to note before we start into McCarthy's case that That Mueller is not allowed to suborn perjury himself.
So if Mueller were to get Cohen to lie about Trump, if he knew that Cohen were lying about something, and he said, listen, I'm going to prosecute you and put you in jail unless you lie about Trump, that is in and of itself a crime.
So Mueller is not doing that.
But it is also true that it is possible Cohen is going to testify about a lot of stuff that's not actually criminal.
It just makes Trump look bad.
And that's McCarthy's take on all of this.
He says no prosecutor builds a case the way Mueller is going about it.
What prosecutor says, here's our witness lineup, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex Van Der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, and what is it they have in common, ladies and gentlemen?
Bingo, they're all convicted liars.
For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says.
If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you're not going to convict a lowliest grifter, much less the President of the United States.
Instead, what you have to do is build your case by having your cooperating accomplice, witnesses, plead guilty to the big scheme you're trying to pin on the main culprit.
They say there was a big thing Trump was trying to do, I was a part of it, now I'm testifying about it, but no one's actually testifying to any of that stuff.
He says, in short, you build a case by first establishing the foundational criminal offense.
Juries do not convict people because they like or trust the prosecution's witnesses.
They convict because they are persuaded that justice demands redress for a real crime.
Note that word, crime.
But there is no crime here.
That is why from the beginning of the Trump-Russia investigation, and certainly since Mueller's appointment on May 17th, 2017, we have stressed that the probe is a counterintelligence investigation, not a criminal investigation.
Mueller does not have a crime he is investigating.
He is investigating in hopes of finding a crime, which is a day and night different thing.
So here's what McCarthy concludes, I think correctly.
He says, that brings us to the where there's smoke, there must be fire talking point Mueller fans have been trying out.
If all these people are lying to cover up something, that something must involve some egregious criminality.
That's ridiculous.
We know from our own daily lives that crimes account for only a very small percentage of the things people lie about.
Indeed, throughout the 1990s, Democrats insisted that prosecutors should leave Bill Clinton alone because everybody lies about sex.
People lie about things they are embarrassed or ashamed of.
Politics is a seamy business, but politics is not a crime.
Consequently, if you criminalize politics, if you turn a prosecutor loose to investigate political campaign activities, you are apt to find unsavory conduct that is not criminal, but that some people will lie about.
So why exactly is Mueller turning lies into guilty pleas?
First, he's not going to indict the president, so Mueller is not worried about the lack of credibility of these witnesses.
Second, he knows the media is going to cheer everything that he does.
The media reports Mueller is investigating the Trump-Russia collusion.
Dozens of people have been charged or convicted, but they will not report that no one has been charged, much less convicted, of any crime involving collusion between Trump and Russia.
And third, defendants convicted of making false statements are useful because Mueller is writing a report, not preparing for a jury trial.
Convicted liars never get cross-examined in a report, nor do they give the bumpy, inconsistent testimony you hear in a courtroom.
So this is really so Mueller is just putting together a report.
He's not actually putting together a criminal indictment.
And that means that he is cobbling together all of these various guilty pleas on lies that have nothing to do with the main topic to get these people to spill the beans about a non-criminal scheme that embarrasses Trump.
And that's Trump's main case here.
And that's the case you're going to see Trump's legal team make.
None of this is impeachable.
Some of it may be embarrassing.
But what is Robert Mueller doing here?
And Robert Mueller's case is going to be, listen, when people lie to the FBI, that's a crime.
And it is my job to prosecute people who commit crimes.
This means that the real danger that President Trump is in, legally speaking, is of suborning perjury.
If Trump told Michael Cohen or anybody else that they ought to lie to the FBI, that would be the only criminality that I think Mueller is going to uncover here.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe there is an underlying crime.
And after all this time, after two years, Mueller comes forward with the big reveal.
And the big reveal is that Trump and Putin were in the back room hacking Hillary Clinton's emails together, like Matthew Broderick in war games.
Maybe that's what was happening.
But absent that big reveal, all that's happening here is Trump is turning all the people around Trump Into criminals in order to get them to testify to material that is non-criminal, but very damaging to President Trump going into 2020.
And that's why Team Trump is so upset.
And that's why President Trump is so upset.
And I think at least part of that seems to be justified.
Now, I'm waiting to I'm going to wait until the Mueller report comes out to say whether I think that this is terrible or dishonest.
And again, two things can be true at once.
One, Mueller can be honest.
Mueller can be doing his job and that job Again, Bill Clinton was not impeached for committing an underlying crime.
He was not impeached for committing sexual assault against Paula Jones.
He was impeached for committing perjury.
He was impeached because he suborned perjury.
President Trump could get caught in the same trap here simply by dint of the underlying crime.
So we'll see how all of this plays out.
Now, meanwhile, we'd be remiss if we did not talk about the situation in France, because right now France is basically on fire.
The footage from France is absolutely astonishing.
Here is some footage of the police firing rubber bullets into crowds over by the Arc de Triomphe.
People marching down the center of Paris.
And the police, who you will see in black here behind the barricades, firing rubber bullets into the crowd of people who are wearing yellow.
It's pretty amazing stuff.
And so, I mean, full-scale rioting in the streets of France.
You can see, I mean, it's legitimately like a pitched street battle.
People throwing rocks at each other, the police officers who are ducking behind their shields and then firing rubber bullets into the crowd.
The destruction is pretty astonishing as well.
We have some of the pictures of the destruction.
Here's what some of the destruction looks like.
Not just the smoke in the streets.
People burning cars in the streets.
People being water-hosed in the streets.
Pretty amazing.
People who are graffitying all over the historic sites in France.
People broke into the museum gift shop over at the Louvre, I believe.
People overturning stuff in the streets.
People destroying some of the historic artifacts and statues from the First French Republic in the Arc de Triomphe.
Pretty incredible stuff.
So what are all these riots about?
It turns out that reality has its day.
Reality suggests that people are going to riot when they feel economically dispossessed.
And they feel economically dispossessed when you decide to tax them extraordinary amounts of money to pay for your global warming agenda.
That's really what's happening in France right now.
I'm going to talk more about that in just one second.
But first, it's uncomfortable in France, but you don't have to be comfortable down below.
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Also, before we go any further, and I have a lot more to get to on today's show, trade policy and the New York Times ripping on Hanukkah because what would a day be in the New York Times without a bit of anti-Semitism or self-hating Jewry?
We'll get to all that in just a second.
But first, you have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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As always, only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, so make sure to subscribe today.
Coming up in 2019, I have to announce this, The Ben Shapiro radio show will be extended to three hours is what you get when you subscribe.
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That's a hell of a pitch.
If you're going to sign up for the holidays, I am now expending three times the effort to make sure that you enjoy your subscription.
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So over in France, Emmanuel Macron, who was the newly elected French prime minister who defeated Marine Le Pen in a runoff that was hotly contested.
He is wildly unpopular.
His His popularity ratings are now like 26%.
The press loves him.
People of France, not so much.
Now, this is breaking out into riots.
According to the UK Daily Mail, graffiti was removed from the Arc de Triomphe today after anti-Macron protesters stormed through Paris on Saturday.
The protesters occupied the city center.
They torched cars, smashed windows with clubs and axes, stole an assault rifle from riot police, firing tear gas and water cannon in France's worst urban rioting in years.
The French president today vowed to bring the rioters to justice as he has inspected wreckage on the Champs-Élysées.
The Yellow Vest protesters, which began as a rebellion against a fuel tax hike, but have expanded into weeks of civil unrest today.
There's a massive strike of ambulance employees, which is, I'm sure, great for folks who need to get to the hospital.
And spread across the country on Saturday, ended with 133 people injured, including 23 police officers and 412 arrested last night.
I want to correct myself, by the way, Macron is the president of France, not the prime minister.
Two separate offices.
Macron was jeered by lingering Yellow Vest supporters before chairing a crisis meeting with ministers amid calls to declare a state of emergency or even send in the army to quell the violence.
So why exactly are people protesting?
Because gas prices in France are out of control and 60% of those gas prices are due to fuel taxes.
Those fuel taxes are largely created to pay for the crackdown in global warming.
Now, is the earth cooling specifically faster because of all this?
No evidence of that, but it's sure hitting the pocketbooks of a bunch of people in France.
This is why when folks on the left say, listen, there's no cost to good carbon policy.
There is no cost to raising the carbon tax.
It's going to create jobs.
Everyone will be happier.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, going great in France, isn't it?
So, Macron, Held talks with his prime minister and interior minister at the Elysee Palace nearby.
Images showed the inside of the Arc de Triomphe ransacked, with the statue of Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic, smashed and graffiti scrawled on the exterior.
The French leader spoke with police and firefighters on one of the avenues near the Champs-Elysees, with some yellow-jacketed protesters shouting, Macron, resign!
A government spokesman said it was out of the question that each weekend becomes a meeting or ritual for violence because this was the second consecutive Saturday ending in violent carnage in Paris.
The capital was calm on Sunday, but a motorway was blocked by yellow-vested protesters in Lyon.
So things are breaking down.
And they are breaking down because it turns out that when you want to pay for socialistic programs, then people get angry.
This is why when everybody says, look, all the people in Europe, they're so happy.
Everything is so great.
Why don't you spend some time over in these places and see what the civil unrest looks like in places like France before you talk about radically raising the taxes on American citizens to pay for carbon emissions.
For example, protesters said the riots yesterday were the start of a revolution and violence which echoed the near revolution of 1968.
Frederick Lagasche of the Alliance Police Union, he called for a state of emergency.
He said we are in an insurrectional climate.
Lagasche said army reinforcements should be brought in to guard public monuments, freeing up the police to deal with other trouble spots.
And so things have gotten very ugly over in France.
There are consequences to public policy.
Euronews has a pretty good summary of what exactly is happening in France.
They say discontent was triggered by the government's measures to keep increasing a direct tax on diesel, a fuel commonly used by motorists in France, as well as the carbon tax.
Protesters see these as disproportionately affecting those who use their cars to get to and from their jobs every day.
Their core demands are to put a freeze on fuel tax increases due in January and measures to boost spending power.
The hike in fuel prices is due to three things, according to Euronews.
Volatile crude oil prices, the carbon tax, and diesel and petrol taxes.
And the taxes are used to help finance the general budget of the state.
So it is not just that they are used for carbon taxation, they're also used to pay for the exorbitant social system in France.
France has serious problems.
The riots in France over the past few years have come in part from Radical Muslim immigrants.
You've seen riots in France that have been disproportionately from those folks in particular areas of the country.
And you've also seen from the right in France, which is very upset with the taxation policy in France.
Civil unrest tends to follow giant government and this is what's happening.
In France, because again, you can't have these policies without some consequences accompanying them.
Policies have consequences, sort of the theme of today's show, at least in part.
And that is why President Trump is now backing off tariffs on the Chinese, because President Trump is looking at the economy and starting to realize the tariff policy Undercuts everything that he is currently trying to do.
In an announcement yesterday, Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump put their bilateral trade war on pause momentarily, striking an agreement to hold off on slapping additional tariffs on each other's goods after January 1st, as talks continue between both countries.
President Trump decided this was a big win for him, even though the reality is that if Trump hadn't threatened tariffs in the first place, we wouldn't be lowering tariffs in the second place.
President Trump created a lot of trade Chaos.
And then when the trade chaos is temporarily postponed, the stock market jumps, which is exactly what you're seeing today.
In a White House readout of a dinner at the G20 summit in Argentina, Xi and Trump discussed a range of nettlesome issues, among them the trade dispute that has left over $200 billion worth of goods hanging in the balance.
The statement read, President Trump has agreed that on January 1st, 2019, he will leave the tariffs on $200 billion worth of product at the 10% rate and not raise it to 25% at this time.
American and Chinese officials will continue over the next three months to negotiate lingering disagreements on technology transfer, intellectual property, and agriculture.
Meanwhile, China will agree to purchase a not-yet-agreed-upon but very substantial amount of agricultural, energy, industrial, and other products from the United States to reduce the trade imbalance between our two countries.
China has agreed to start purchasing agricultural product from our farmers immediately.
Well, it sounds like a win for us, except for the fact that they were already purchasing an enormous amount of agriculture from us before, right?
They were purchasing basically our entire soybean supply, for example.
And it turns out that President Trump's tariff policies, rather than lowering the trade deficit, actually increased the trade deficit in expectation of the tariffs.
According to Bloomberg, the U.S.
trade deficit widened in July by the most in three years.
The gap with China hit a record as the Trump administration imposed tariffs on a range of Chinese goods, prompting retaliatory levies from Beijing.
Turns out that trade policy is all fun and games until the actual consequences of the trade policy become known.
I'm glad the president is backing off of all of this.
It is one thing to crack down on the Chinese for fraud and intellectual property infringement.
It's another thing to impose tariffs just because President Trump thinks he's protecting domestic industry.
He is not, in fact, protecting the domestic economy by taxing American citizens for Cheaper goods from abroad.
OK, meanwhile, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gotten herself in the headlines again, this time by tweeting something insanely stupid again.
Now, I know, according to the media, we're not supposed to cover Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right?
This is the way this works, is that the media say that the new congresswoman from New York is a godsend.
She's a fresh face.
She's wonderful in every way.
And then if we talk about her in places like this, it's, oh, you're obsessed with her.
Oh, you're obsessed with her.
I mean, this is just high-level media trollery.
If you decide to make her a celebrity, and then we talk about the fact that she can't legitimately add numbers together, like basic numbers together, then it's our fault.
And then it's our fault.
How dare we?
You make her a celebrity, but if we comment, oh, we're obsessed, we're obsessed.
Listen, she's a public figure.
When she tweets something dumb, then she should be called out for it.
This is a tweet that has 66,000 likes.
Here is what she tweeted.
$21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions could not be traced, documented, or explained.
$21 trillion in Pentagon accounting errors.
Medicare for All costs $32 trillion.
That means 66% of Medicare for All could have been funded already by the Pentagon.
And that's before our premiums.
This is mathematically illiterate.
Illiterate.
The reason it is mathematically illiterate is that we have not actually spent $21 trillion in the entire history of the Republic of the United States on defense.
Okay, we spent $700 billion in total last year.
She also claimed at one point, I believe, that we had $700 billion in fraud that same year.
Okay, this number does not add up.
That is not a correct interpretation of the numbers that she is looking at.
Also, acknowledging that your program is massively expensive to own the cons.
Big win for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but oh, sorry, I'm not supposed to point out when she says something really dumb because that means that we are obsessed with her here.
We're supposed to just pretend that none of this is happening.
So, good stuff from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Meanwhile, in other things stupid, the New York Times has a piece today about the Rockettes.
The Rockettes are too white.
This is according to Ginia Belafonte.
Now, if you think that folks at the New York Times are race-obsessed, you would be correct, because everyone at the New York Times has lost their minds.
Here is what they write over at the New York Times.
Ginnia Belafonte, November 30th.
She says, I was by myself.
It says, Plenty of old people and middle-aged people.
Many of them were wearing Santa hats.
The crowd was overwhelmingly white.
This means that it's a bad show.
If a crowd is overwhelmingly white, it must be bad.
If the crowd at the latest Beethoven concert is overwhelmingly white, that means Beethoven is bad.
I mention this fact...
Because at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, the Rockettes, whose performances are taken in by almost one million people every holiday season, are themselves almost all white.
So not all white, almost all white.
It's not enough that they have some non-white members of the cast.
It's not diverse enough.
It's just like segregation.
The show I saw featured, as far as I could tell, only one African-American dancer in the lineup of close to 40.
There were, in the end, more camels on stage than black women.
By the way, if you go to a Rockettes show and your first inclination is to start counting the black women, I'd say you have a problem.
Among the 80 dancers who made up the Rockettes core, 10% are women of color, a spokesperson for the company told me.
You're only seeing half the cast during any given show because there are so many performances to fill, on weekends up to six a day.
Regardless of that, any variance in skin tone is obscured by lighting and makeup that have the effect of creating a stultifying homogeneity.
They need a New York Times columnist to tell them how to run the Rockettes, which has been a continuous show on Broadway for decades.
Ancillary cast members in the pageant, non-rockettes, include a black man playing an elf and a black man playing a bell man.
Oh no!
By the way, speaking of playing an elf, my sister, a Jewish girl, played an elf in her elementary school public school production of A Christmas Thing.
I guess that was also anti-Semitic or something.
The Rockettes are the creation of someone named Russell Markert, who first brought them to stage in St.
Louis in 1925, oversaw their direction at the Radio City Music Hall from the 30s until the 70s.
His goal had been to build the most precise and uniform dancing troupe in the world, and to that end, he imposed height requirements for the women in the line.
These expectations have continued, unabated.
Such a vision accommodates little tolerance for difference.
I agree.
I think that the Radio City Rockettes should be forced to perform with people who are paraplegic, for example.
I think that the Radio City Rockettes, half of them should be in wheelchairs.
I think it wouldn't change the nature of the show at all, and it would show a massive understanding of the diversity of modern America, if that were to happen.
We should have a bunch of people who are short.
We should have a bunch of people who are super tall.
They should dance to whatever they want to dance to, actually.
There shouldn't actually be any sort of attempt to make them dance in line or in lockstep.
That's fascistic.
We should actually just let them dance how they want to dance.
If some want to dance jazz, that's cool.
If some want to breakdance, that's totally fine as well.
If some want to scoot along on their butt for no reason at all, like my two-and-a-half-year-old son, I think they should do that too.
Because that's diversity.
That's diversity.
And all those people should be racially diverse.
Those people should be diverse in terms of sexual orientation.
They should be diverse in terms of gender identification.
I don't see why the Radio City Rockettes can't be a bunch of mustachioed men.
I don't see, like, all of this I think is just un-American.
So thank you, New York Times, for really hitting in on the spirit of the holiday.
Really honing in on what makes the Radio City Rockettes run the way they're supposed to run.
Okay, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
As we watch France burst into flame, and as we recognize that America still is the greatest democratic republic in the history of the planet, despite all of the problems that we experience, it is worth reviewing why.
That is, the book that best describes this is Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
I know, you were recommended this in high school, and then you didn't read it.
And then you were recommended it in college, and then you didn't read it.
And then you were recommended it in grad school, and you still didn't read it.
Well, now I'm recommending it, and you should read it.
Okay?
This edition is particularly good.
It's an edition That is edited by Harvey Mansfield, the brilliant professor over at Harvard, East Coast Straussian, as well as Delba Winthrop.
It is a very, very good edition.
The translation is excellent.
It is well edited.
The introduction is really good.
Alexis de Tocqueville describes well what makes democracy in America different from democracy in other nations.
He talks about localism.
He talks about the prevalence of the social fabric.
He talks about the fact that a democratic republic is not quite a democracy and not quite a republic.
And he talks about the foolish idea that the people will always be a cure.
And then the main message of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in a nutshell is that democracy in America can only work if there's a vibrant social fabric that supports the democracy and the system of checks and balances designed to facilitate democracy not only checks the excesses of the people, but in the end does in fact rely on a good and moral people.
It's a long book.
It'll take you a long time to complete.
But once you do, you'll have a better understanding of what makes America tick and why, for example, the French Republic has not worked in nearly the same way as the American Republic.
OK, other things that I like.
So speaking of books that everyone should read yesterday.
I went to Barnes & Noble with my kids, because this is one of the things we like to do.
My daughter, who is a very smart human, for her age, I always add for her age, because whenever I say a child is smart, people are like, well, you should let her decide her own gender.
It's like, no, that's not, no.
She's smart for a four and a half year old, which means she can read.
In any case, there is a book on the shelf.
Let me first note.
Over at Barnes & Noble, the children's section is basically a propaganda tool.
I say this only because I walk in, and the first display you see is feminism for babies.
There's literally a book called Baby Feminism, and what it is is a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and then it's a board book.
It's made out of thick cardboard, so if your kids chew on it, it doesn't ruin the book.
And it's a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and if you flip it, if you flip the page, it's then a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a baby, because every feminist was once a baby.
Now, it doesn't actually have the punchline, which is, if feminists had their way, many of these babies would never have been born.
But nonetheless, that is one of the books on the shelf.
Also, a Michelle Obama biography is on the shelf.
It is a bunch of left-leaning books.
My favorite, though, was this one.
My mom actually spotted this one.
And let it be known that just as my wife is a doctor, my mom runs companies.
She ran business affairs for major television and film companies in Los Angeles for years.
So my mom actually worked outside the house, and my dad was home with the kids.
My mom is a first-rate, first-wave feminist.
In any case, she spots this book and I see her sit down and start reading it.
And she just starts laughing.
The title of the book is My First Book of Feminism for Boys.
And it is just incredible.
It is just the best.
So she hands it to me to read.
And I will say this book is so informative and so great.
It's by Julie Marburg, illustrated by Michelle Brumer Everett.
The best page is a picture of a girl in a firefighter's uniform who is lugging a hose because she wants to be a firefighter, which is fine.
Although I will say that female upper body strength is not as great as male upper body strength on average.
And if you just had to pick a guy to be a firefighter or a girl to be a firefighter knowing nothing else about them, you have to pick the guy.
Because, obviously, you have to go by the average.
The average is that men have more upper body strength.
Also, I do love the accuracy of one woman carrying a fire hose, which generates like a thousand pounds of pressure and requires at least two or three guys to carry.
In any case, here is... But I'm not going to rip on the accuracy of a children's book.
It's just a children's book.
But here is the caption.
Find a job that you'll love heading off to each day.
Know the women you work with must earn equal pay.
You're supposed to read this like a two and a half year old.
So I sat there and I read it to my two and a half year old and he looked at me very solemnly and he said, this claim does not adjust for job choice, time out of the workforce or hours work.
And I said, my boy, you are just you.
You have been well put on your way, sir.
And that was and that was our actual conversation word for word.
It was really incredible.
I mean, I didn't know that he knew about adjustments for job choice.
I didn't know he knew about statistical regressions and multiple regression linear analysis.
I didn't know he knew about all that stuff.
It turns out not only did he know all this stuff, I let him drive home.
It was really amazing.
So check out that book, my first book of feminism for boys.
I'm buying it for my business partner.
As his Christmas gift, because I think he needs to know more about feminism.
So he should go check that.
OK, final final thing that I like today.
So over the weekend.
So first of all, you should go check out on Friday.
I did a two hour conversation with Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin all about Christianity and Judaism and religion and meaning and purpose.
It's really good stuff.
It's really fun.
Jordan and I are good friends at this point, and there's a lot to delve into.
I think that it's really worthwhile.
And then Jordan and Dave suggested that I stop by Jordan's show, which was fantastic.
He did a show at the L.A.
Orpheum over the weekend.
A couple thousand people.
I got to come out and I got to say hello and as a gesture of solidarity I brought Dave Rubin a cupcake.
The reason being last time I was on Dave's show he asked me whether I would bake a cake for his same-sex wedding and I said no because I'm a religious person and I do not participate in Ceremonies that I think are a sin, even though we are friends, right?
And this is true with regard to intermarriage.
This is true with regard to Sabbath violation.
I mean, this is true for a wide variety of things that as a religious person, I consider sinful.
Now, Dave can do what he likes, right?
I mean, he's married to a guy, right?
I mean, he can do what he wants.
It's a free country, and that's fine.
I'm good friends with Dave.
I'm friends with his husband.
All that's fine, but...
I, as a religious person, am not going to be compelled by a government or anyone else to violate my religious scruples and celebrate something that I believe is personally a sin.
Okay, that's my perspective.
I said that.
People went nuts.
So, to prove that Dave and I are friends, and that also I have no objection to actually baking a cupcake for a gay guy, I baked him a cupcake, I brought it to him on stage, and I pointed out that I'm happy to bake a small cake for a gay man.
So, that is a thing that happened over the weekend.
And then I also pointed out that I had, in fact, brought A cake for Jordan Peterson backstage as well, but it wasn't a physical cake.
It was a mythological cake.
It had lots of layers and it's the layers that made it so bloody important.
You see, I didn't want to bring him an actual physical cake.
A physical cake connotes sweetness and life isn't sweet.
Life is pain and suffering in which your journey is to make order out of chaos.
And that's what you're supposed to learn from the metaphysical mythological cake that has been bubbling up in our biologies and from a deeper place for legitimately Hundreds of thousands of years.
Once you understand the suffering of the mythological cake, then you understand the sweetness, which is far sweeter than any physical cake could be in the hierarchy.
And that's why it's so bloody important.
In any case, it was really a lot of fun.
And I love Jordan.
Jordan's great.
So, it's unfortunately not on tape, but that's my best recreation of what I actually said on stage at the event at the LA Orpheum.
If Jordan's in your town, you should go see his events.
They're really, really cool and really a lot of fun.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
OK, so this weekend began the holiday of Hanukkah.
Hanukkah is a great holiday.
Hanukkah is also an anti-secularist holiday.
So Hanukkah is all about the Jews defeating the Hellenists, a group of members of the Seleucid Empire who are attempting to take over the Jewish temple, transform it into a pagan temple.
And a lot of Jews who are going along with this because better to assimilate than to be part of the Jewish people.
The Maccabees rise up in a religious revolt and they say, no, we are taking back our holy places and we refuse to bow before the Hellenization of our religion.
This is very uncomfortable for a lot of people.
It's particularly uncomfortable for secular Jews who don't actually care all that much about Judaism and for whom Hanukkah is largely a reverse Christmas.
It's basically like Christmas for our kids.
So we're uncomfortable with having a Christmas tree in our house because we don't believe in the Jesus.
But by the same token, it's like, let's get gifts for our kids.
We have to have like Hanukkah Harry and we'll have like a Hanukkah bush and all this kind of stuff.
That is precisely the opposite.
This is precisely the opposite of what actually has been the history of celebrating the holiday.
Now, what's hilarious about this is that there was a secular Jew in the New York Times who recognized the hypocrisy, his own hypocrisy in this.
His name is Michael David Lucas.
And he says, it's the question that Jewish parents instinctively dread.
A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch with my three-year-old daughter watching YouTube videos about animals in space, when out of nowhere, she looked up at me and asked, Dada, can we celebrate Christmas?
We don't celebrate Christmas, I told her, putting on my serious voice.
We celebrate Hanukkah.
Like generations of Jewish parents before me, I did my best to sell her on the relative merits of Hanukkah.
True, Christmas might have sparkly trees, ornaments, and fruitcake, but we have latkes, jelly doughnuts, and eight nights of presents.
Do we have Santa?
She asked hopefully.
No, I said, and her face dropped.
They do.
I tried to reiterate the part about jelly doughnuts and the eight nights of presents, but she wasn't having any of it.
I can't say I blame her.
During the rest of the year, the Jewish holidays we celebrate are like special bonus celebrations we get to have on top of everything else going on in the calendar.
With Hanukkah and Christmas, however, it's a zero-sum game.
Most of the year, it isn't hard for our family to feel both American and Jewish.
But in December, that dual identity becomes more of a question, which is why Hanukkah is a big deal for mostly assimilated Jews like myself.
The only trouble is the actual holiday, not the latkes and dreidels, but the story of Hanukkah, which at its heart is an eight-night-long celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.
I like that they just discovered that the preservation of the Jewish people is based on, you know, Judaism, and also on the preservation of Judaism.
It's amazing.
So watching secular Jews discover that Hanukkah isn't actually just reverse Christmas is really amusing to me.
For people who actually live the Jewish lifestyle and take the Bible seriously and take Judaism seriously and allow Judaism to...
Really permeate their lives?
Hanukkah is just another celebration of the fact that Judaism is a deep-rooted part of our life that will not allow encroachment by Hellenizing forces.
For a bunch of secular Jews who've basically been Hellenized, they suddenly realize, oh wait, we're celebrating something that we totally disagree with.
Real weird.
He says, for most of the past 2,000 years, Hanukkah was an afterthought on the Jewish calendar, a wintertime festival of lights during which people spun tops and ate greasy food to commemorate what has to be one of God's least impressive miracles.
A small container of oil lasted for eight nights.
There's a big argument in even the Talmud about what exactly is being celebrated, whether what's being celebrated is the oil or whether what's actually being celebrated is the victory of the Jews over the Seleucid Empire.
Suffice it to say, I think it's the latter.
More recently, as Jews have become assimilated into American society, the holiday has evolved into a kind of Semitic sidekick for Christmas.
And then he talks about how uncomfortable he is.
He says, the more I thought about all this, the more it disturbed me.
For what am I, if not a Hellenized Jew?
I eat pork every so often.
Before having children, my wife and I agonized over the question of circumcision.
And while I've never offered burn sacrifices to Zeus, I do go to yoga occasionally.
When it comes down to it, it's pretty clear the Maccabees would have hated me.
Yeah.
Yeah, fair.
They would have hated me because I'm assimilated and because I'm the product of intermarriage.
Well, I'm not sure they would have hated you per se, but they would not have liked if you were speaking up on behalf of Judaism.
And while I can't say for certain what the Maccabees would have thought about my fondness for Bernie Sanders or my practice of Reconstructionist Judaism, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have liked those things either.
Yes, that is correct.
And then he says, so why should I do all of this?
The answer, frankly, is that it's not my choice.
With my daughter ready to sign up for Team Santa, we have to celebrate something and I'm not quite Hellenized enough to get a Christmas tree.
And this is secular Judaism in a nutshell in the United States.
Secular Judaism in a nutshell is, I don't want to be known as a Christian because it makes me culturally uncomfortable, but I don't actually give a damn about Jewish things and Jewish things make me uncomfortable.
So instead, I sort of keep the hallmarks without uncomfortably recognizing what it is that Judaism has stood for for so long.
When people ask me, one of the big questions I get, why are Jews so liberal?
The answer is many Jews are liberal because they are this kind of Jew.
They're a Jew who actually doesn't like a lot of the central tenets of Judaism and is Hellenized beyond all measure, but simply does not have the guts to simply say goodbye to the religion as a whole.
Judaism is not for the faint of heart.
And Judaism does have central tenets, just like Christianity is not for the faint of heart.
And it does have central tenets.
And trying to secularize holidays is a huge, huge mistake.
Your kids won't be celebrating.
This guy's worried about his kids.
He won't have to worry about it.
His kids and his grandkids will not be celebrating Hanukkah anytime in the near future, as soon as they are adults, because people instinctively recognize hypocrisy.
And by the way, What's what's what's sad about all of this is that all the folks who think that secularizing and hellenizing is going to protect them from anti-semitism.
Good luck with that.
Historically speaking, that has certainly not been true, which is why in a new survey, 43 percent of Dutch Jews hide their Jewish identity.
OK, so that's not going to work for them either.
And Jews are still going to be Jews.
All righty.
So we will have a lot more to discuss, but we'll be back here tomorrow for all of it.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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