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March 21, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
53:48
The Great Gun-Grab | Ep. 742
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New Zealand's government bans the sale of semi-automatic weapons, the woke scolds come for Jordan Peterson, and President Trump keeps getting in his own way.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
A lot of news coming at you today.
We will get to all of it.
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Alright, so the big breaking news this morning is obviously that New Zealand has now banned semi-automatic weapons.
They're imposing a broadband on guns after this horrific white supremacist terror attack on mosques in Christchurch.
According to the Wall Street Journal, New Zealand moved to ban military-style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles, and high-capacity magazines.
Whenever folks say military-style, they just mean semi-automatic weapons because The only thing that distinguishes a semi-automatic military weapon from any other semi-automatic weapon is presumably caliber size, muzzle velocity maybe, and the look of the gun.
Usually when folks on the left say military style, what they mean is it's black and it has scary grips.
The things that make it look scary, even though it doesn't actually affect the functioning of the gun.
The shooter had held a valid gun license.
They'd actually applied for and gotten a gun license, but the weapons used in the terrorist attack included semi-automatic rifles that had been illegally upgraded with higher capacity magazines to enable 30 bullets or more to be fired without reloading.
His license restricted his magazine capacity to seven bullets.
So obviously, more gun laws will certainly prevent this sort of thing in the future, considering this guy was already violating current gun laws when he went and shot up a bunch of innocent people.
Also violating current murder laws, and assault laws, and all sorts of other laws.
Turns out mass shooters don't really care about violating laws.
This is one of the things about mass shooters.
And this is particularly true when it comes to mass shooters living in quote-unquote gun-restricted societies.
The truth is that if you look statistically at on a per capita basis, which countries have the highest rate of mass shooting deaths, the United States is not in the top 10.
And that includes industrialized countries.
We have a lower rate of mass shooting death than does France.
France has heavy gun restrictions.
This is all bad policy.
It's emotionally driven policy, and it's understandable on an emotional level, but it is bad policy because bad policy is rarely, good policy is rarely taken at a moment's notice on the back of a tragedy.
It's rare that something terrible happens and people immediately snap to the most reasonable makes sense policy.
This is true in your own personal life, and this is true when it comes to government policy as well.
The Prime Minister of New Zealand, whose name is Jacinda Ardern, said that her government would also pay cash to gun owners who surrender their weapons in a nationwide amnesty.
She is proposing jail time or fines for people who refuse to turn over those weapons.
Here is what the Prime Minister of New Zealand had to say.
Today I'm announcing that New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons.
We will also ban all assault rifles.
6.
We will ban all high-capacity magazines.
We will ban all parts with the ability to convert semi-automatic or any other type of firearm into a military-style semi-automatic weapon.
We will ban parts that cause a firearm to generate semi-automatic, automatic, or close to automatic gunfire.
In short.
Every semi-automatic weapon used in the terrorist attack on Friday will be banned in this country.
Okay, this is actually pretty terrible policy.
It really is.
It's pretty bad, ineffective policy.
There are 1.2 million guns in New Zealand.
There's well over 200,000 licensed gun owners in New Zealand.
New Zealand has one of the lowest murder rates anywhere in the world.
According to Stuff.com in New Zealand, the murder rate in New Zealand hit a 40-year low In June 2018.
The number of murders in New Zealand overall in 2017 was 35.
That is a rate of 7 for every million people.
Every million people.
And apparently the majority of those murders did not take place with a gun.
Despite the fact that there are 1.2 million guns in circulation estimated in New Zealand.
Which suggests that the problem here is not guns.
The problem here is that an evil white supremacist violated gun laws and went and shot up a mosque.
Here's the problem with using outlier statistics, like mass shootings, as a rationale for gun policy.
They are, in fact, outlier statistics.
They are statistically rare events.
It is very difficult to create good policy on the back of statistically rare events that don't have an endemic basis to them.
When you talk about events that you can draw, that you can extrapolate from, you have to extrapolate to something that makes sense in correlative fashion.
So for example, if you wanted to say that white supremacist ideology is inherently bad, And therefore, we should crack down on, in non-governmental ways, I don't think the government has a role in restricting free speech, but the government should monitor white supremacist chat boards, for example.
I would agree, because number one, the ideology is itself evil, and second of all, There's a good correlation, or at least some correlation, between violence and evil acts and white supremacy.
That is obviously not the case when it comes to gun ownership in New Zealand, where again, hundreds of thousands of people own guns.
35 murders took place in 2017, and one horrible evil event now means that the New Zealand government is going to criminalize legitimately hundreds of thousands of people?
That's what they're talking about.
They're talking about now making criminals out of hundreds of thousands of people.
And make no mistake, these gun buyback regimes don't actually work.
Australia tried a gun buyback.
One third of the guns were actually turned back in to the government of Australia.
Now, folks say, well, you know, the number of murders went down in Australia after that.
Right, if you actually look at the chart of murders in Australia, they were declining before the gun buyback, they were declining after the gun buyback.
If you look at the chart of murders in the United States, as the number of guns in circulation in the United States continued to rapidly increase from the early 90s to now, the murder rate went down at a rate faster than Australia's murder rate went down.
When folks say, well, there haven't been a mass shooting since 1996 in Australia.
That's when they implemented this mass gun confiscation.
Well, there weren't many before that.
So you're talking about going from a rate of maybe two every 10 years in Australia to a rate of zero in the past 10 years.
That's not statistically significant, obviously.
Making bad policy on the back of tragedy is generally a mistake.
And as I say, this is indeed bad policy.
Now, one of the things that has happened here, and it's amazing to watch, is members of the Democratic Party have of course jumped on this, and they've suggested that this demonstrates that Action can be taken if people want to take it.
Now, I'm old enough to remember when Democrats were saying they did not want to confiscate your guns.
Hillary Clinton used to say this all the time in 2016.
All those crazy Republicans saying, we want to come confiscate your guns.
We don't want to confiscate your guns, guys.
We would never want to do that.
Also, we kind of want to confiscate your guns.
So Bernie Sanders tweeted out because he has no Brain-to-mouth filter.
By the way, his home state of Vermont is one of the least restrictive gun ownership states in the nation.
Also has one of the lowest murder rates.
So very weird that Bernie Sanders would feel this way.
He used to be a lot more pro-gun until he decided to run for president.
He says, this is what real action to stop gun violence looks like.
We must follow New Zealand's lead, take on the NRA, and ban the sale and distribution of assault weapons in the United States.
So he wants to ban the sale and distribution of every semi-automatic rifle in the United States.
Good luck with that, Bernie.
I'd like to see the Democrats run on this one.
Beto has made similar suggestions in the last few days, suggesting that he wants to ban all AR-15s or all semi-automatic rifles.
Here's the truth about murder rates and gun violence.
They are localized.
They are localized.
And they are localized in high crime areas.
You go to an area like Vermont, there are no murders and lots of guns.
You go to an area like New Zealand, no murders, lots of guns.
And you go to New Orleans, lots of guns, lots of murder.
So the suggestion is not that guns and murder are not linked.
They can be, but it depends on the human beings who are holding the guns, obviously.
And it is worth noting here, as I said earlier, that statistics that suggest that America is rampantly filled with mass shootings in a way that other nations are not, is simply not true.
John Lott, who's written extensively about this, writes a piece in the New York Post with Michael Weiser, talking about whether America leads the world in mass shootings.
He says that there was a study that came out and reported that over 47 years, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of the world.
This is according to a study by a fellow named, a criminologist named Adam Lankford, and this received all sorts of coverage.
Lott asked him to release the list, and Lankford refused to release the list.
A new report that was created by John Lott collected cases using the same definition of mass public shootings used by Lankford.
Here's what they say.
We know of no way to discover most of the cases where four people have been shot to death in an incident in Africa or many other parts of the world during the 60s, 70s, 80s or even 1990s.
'70s, '80s, or even 1990s.
And so we looked at the last 15 years, from 1998 to 2012, of the 47 years that were examined by his study.
Even when we used the coding choices most charitable to Lankford, such as excluding any cases of insurgencies or battles over territory, his estimate of the US share of shooters falls from 31% to 1.43%.
from 31% to 1.43%.
It also accounts for 2.1% of burgers and 2.88% of their attacks.
All are much less than the United States' 4.6% share of the population.
Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the United States ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate.
Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Russia all have at least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
Well, one possibility here is that it is not guns that enable mass shooters.
Guns also help deter a lot of this stuff from happening.
It is also possible that low crime areas tend not to have lots of gun crime.
And that is true in New Zealand, as it is true in Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont.
The reason that I bring all this stuff up is because there is this implication from the left that is really gross.
That if you don't agree with them on gun policy, it's because you don't care about dead people.
Maybe I do really care about dead people and the best way I think to protect people from being dead is to arm people outside of, for example, mosques and churches and synagogues.
It's an argument I made in the wake of the Tree of Life shooting.
It's one of the reasons why we have armed guards outside of the synagogue that I attend.
And not only that, I have personal security that comes with me to synagogue.
And one of the reasons for this is because I don't believe that law enforcement can get there in time if somebody decides to do something evil.
It seems like an odd contention that you're going to remove guns from some 230,000 New Zealand citizens who are licensed to carry and licensed to register to own guns.
You're going to remove those guns from those people and somehow New Zealand is going to get safer than the 35 murders committed in 2017?
All because an Australian citizen who violated gun laws decided to do something completely evil?
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so again, here is the reality about violent crime in the United States.
Okay, violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades in the United States, despite the increase in the number of guns in circulation in the United States.
The principal public safety hazard when it comes to guns in the United States is suicide, not mass shootings.
Not even homicides.
Suicides.
America is relatively safe.
This is according to Heritage Foundation, and this is correct.
America is relatively safe, and the trend is toward becoming safer, and this has been true for legitimately years.
There have been minor increases in certain types of violent crimes in large metropolitan areas, but those increases are nowhere near those seen in the 1990s, despite the fact that, again, there are increasing number of people who have guns in the United States on an absolute level, and an increasing number of guns in circulation in the United States on an absolute level.
And as we say, crime is local, and crime is localized.
So, targeting an enormous number of people who are law-abiding citizens in the United States, as the left is now suggesting, is such a mistake.
First of all, you really think it's going to go well?
You think that everybody in Texas is going to turn over their gun to the government for a cash buyback?
The Second Amendment was instituted to protect the Second Amendment, meaning that it was designed so that if people try to take your guns, that you can protect yourself against the people trying to take your guns.
Higher rates of gun ownership internationally are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
Again, and that's true in the United States also.
There are lots of states in the United States where there are high levels of gun ownership and low levels of crime.
Crime is not driven by gun ownership.
The left's celebration of this really goes to their attempted character assassination of everybody who happens to differ with them on gun control.
The suggestion being, if you disagree with us, it's because you don't care about dead people.
And thus, New Zealand is about will, it is not about policy.
Now, it turns out a lot of us have pretty good reasons, politically, why we don't want the government seizing our guns.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
So, let's talk for a second about Australia's gun buyback.
So Australia's gun buyback, as Matt Palumbo writes, Australia's gun buyback reduced homicides, but only at the same rate as the United States.
He writes, firearm homicides did fall post-1996 gun control at exactly the same pace as they were naturally falling before gun control.
Over a similar period, 1993 to 2014, gun homicides in America were cut by more than half.
Keep in mind that guns per capita increased about 50% in America over that period.
And the overall homicide rate fell faster in the United States than it did in Australia.
How about gun suicides?
Well, there was an American Medical Association study that didn't find any statistically significant effect of the National Firearms Act in Australia on gun suicide.
There was a decline in firearm suicides, but non-firearm suicides fell at a faster pace than firearm suicides.
In other words, the suicide rate just fell generally.
The notion that you can simply ban guns and that will fix the problem is really foolish.
It's just as foolish to believe that you can ban books and somehow that this is going to cure the problem.
There's a story out of New Zealand today that is just insane.
I mean, this is legitimately crazy.
This is absolutely crazy.
We've been told that there are firefighters in the media and they rushed to the story.
Where are the firefighters in the media over this?
They've talked about tyranny in the United States and President Trump being a tyrant and a dictator.
Where are they when it comes to folks in the West legitimately banning books?
And not even banning white supremacist books, not even banning Mein Kampf or something.
Mein Kampf is still banned in Germany, for example.
I think that's a bad idea, but at least you can understand that, sort of.
I mean, Mein Kampf is one of the most evil books ever written and did inspire people to join the worst movement in the history of the world.
Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life is now being banned.
It is not for sale from a store called Whitcool's in New Zealand.
Apparently, there are 56 outlets.
It's one of the bigger book outlets in New Zealand.
According to News Hub in New Zealand, the controversial Canadian professor visited Ederia in February, weeks before a gunman killed 50 people and injured dozens more at two mosques in Christchurch.
Although Peterson's book promotes self-help rather than violence or racism, he was photographed in New Zealand embracing a fan, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, I'm a proud Islamophobe, along with a list of various inflammatory accusations about Muslims.
The shirt just says something like, I'm a proud Islamophobe, and then lists off a bunch of terrible things that it distributes to Islamists.
It says, I'm a proud Islamophobe, I'm against pedophilia, rape, wife-beating, misogyny, etc, etc, etc, etc.
I'm for the freedom of the individual.
And Jordan is just standing next to this guy in a picture.
He isn't embracing him.
He's taking pictures the way that Jordan normally takes pictures.
Now, I have something to say about this on a personal level.
This is the dumbest reason to ban somebody of all time.
Jordan Peterson, I am sure.
I mean, he spoke something like a hundred times last year.
And every time he speaks, he's got a couple thousand people there.
And he takes pictures with hundreds of those people.
At this point, Jordan has probably taken legitimately hundreds of thousands of pictures with fans.
I speak a lot of places, too.
I've legitimately taken, I would imagine at this point, 30 to 40 thousand pictures with fans.
I don't remember a single damn shirt anybody was wearing.
And unless somebody walked up to me wearing a full-on swastika or a full-on hammer and sickle shirt for some reason, I'm not examining their shirt.
If it's got a lot of text, I'm not reading the shirt.
Because that's not my job.
Is Jordan supposed to now screen people's shirts for the people he takes pictures with?
How is it?
What?
This is the new public standard.
The new public standard is if you take a picture with a person who is a fan, and you're a public figure, and that fan turns out to be a terrible person, then somehow your book gets banned.
If that's the case, we're going to need to know why it is that the Orlando Pulse shooter's father, you'll recall, showed up at a Democratic rally.
That Democrat was not banned, right?
We didn't say the Democrat was a bad guy.
We said, what association does he have with this person?
If you've ever been to one of these rope lines where you shake the hand of a prominent person, you're in the picture for legitimately about three seconds flat.
And so Whit Cools is banning Jordan Peterson's non-Islamophobic, non-white supremacist book on the basis that a person who wore a shirt that they find offensive took a picture with him?
Whit Cools doesn't specify the exact reason for dumping Peterson's 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos, a book that has sold some 3 million copies.
It's probably the biggest bestseller of the last 15 years in the nonfiction list.
They say that They say this, quote, This is insanity.
"12 Rules for Life is currently unavailable, "which is a decision that Whitcalls has made "in light of some extremely disturbing material "being circulated prior, during, and after "the Christchurch attacks.
"As a business which takes our responsibilities "to our communities very seriously, "we believe it would be wrong to support the author "at this time.
"Apologies that we're not able to sell it to you, "but we appreciate your understanding." This is insanity.
So you're fighting neo-Nazism by banning books.
You're fighting white supremacism by banning books.
Jordan is an active fighter against white supremacism.
I've spent time with Jordan.
We've had discussions on this issue.
This is patently ridiculous.
But when you decide that you're going to quash freedom of speech in favor of supposed safety, and this is not going to guarantee safety in any case, there's no way that banning Jordan Peterson's book from sale in New Zealand is preventing shootings.
It's utter craziness.
By the way, other books that continue to be on sale at Wickles include Mein Kampf, which has to do with white supremacism, guys, and also a book called, it's like, Jordantology by Vox Dei, an outspoken white supremacist, and Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right troll.
That book is still on sale, apparently, at Wickles.
So, just...
Very, very solid stuff here from the left.
So their solutions to a mass shooting are to do, by the way, exactly what the shooter wanted.
The shooter says in his manifesto, and I have not quoted his manifesto at length because I don't wish to give it credibility, but since the left now insists that the manifesto is a rationale to ban books, it seems worthwhile pointing out that the shooter explicitly suggested that this be done.
The shooter explicitly said he was attempting to drive a gun debate in the United States that would cause gun confiscation and therefore violence.
He says this explicitly in the manifesto and so the left immediately falls for it.
Now again, you want to make the case for why guns ought to be confiscated, make the case.
But it has to be a logical case and it can't be based on, you don't care enough if you disagree with me.
That's simple absurdity on a vast scale.
Now speaking of Jordan Peterson, he's also being banned now from Cambridge University.
And this does speak to the left's desire to shut down anybody who is remotely successful on the non-left.
Jordan happens to be a relatively conservative guy, although he doesn't vote in U.S.
elections, because he's Canadian.
But Jordan is now being deplatformed.
They're trying to remove his book in New Zealand.
And now they've removed a fellowship offer at the University of Cambridge.
And so the question becomes, seriously, who on the non-left will the left accept?
Is there anybody on the non-left that the left will accept as part of a rational conversation?
You know, somebody who doesn't just agree with them on everything.
And I mean on a permanent basis.
I don't mean on a temporary basis.
So there's something that happens in right-wing circles, where if you say something that is heterodox with conservatism, for just a moment, you get strange new respect.
Lots of strange new respect.
Lots of offers to come on MSNBC.
And lots of offers to be part of discussions and cocktail hours from people who are very prominent.
And you're treated very nicely.
And if you do that for long enough, then maybe they'll invite you to a few more cocktail parties.
But then if you do something that snaps back into the reality of conservatism, if you say anything conservative, then they come after you.
So David Frum, who has mirrored a lot of the left's preferences on policy as well as on President Trump, David Frum was welcome in left circles until he wrote a column at the Atlantic on immigration and then all of a sudden it turned into that typical right-wing racist, David Frum.
And it's the same thing with anybody who is prominent.
The left, they've shrunk the Overton window to the point where no one is inside the Overton window except people with whom they agree.
I challenge the left to name somebody on the right who they actually respect or think is not a bigot.
You're gonna have to name some people.
Really, name them.
People were calling David French an Islamophobe the other day.
David French of National Review.
David French is a member of the U.S.
Army.
He serves in the Army, in Iraq, fighting to save the lives of Muslims from radicals.
But he's an Islamophobe.
I mean, the left will legitimately throw anyone out once they realize that the person is conservative.
If they want to have honest conversations, this is not the way to do it.
I saw this over the last 24 or 48 hours with regard to Andrew Yang.
So Andrew Yang is a Democratic presidential candidate.
And I'd said on my show yesterday that Andrew Yang, I found sort of interesting.
At least the guy has ideas.
I don't agree with a lot of his ideas, but I'd love to have him on the Sunday special and we can discuss.
So immediately the internet picks this up.
They're going to have a debate.
We're not having a debate.
We're having a discussion, which is what rational people do.
Unless it is a set-up debate that is designed to be a debate, we like to call this thing discussion.
And if you watch my Sunday specials, which come out on Sundays, I've had many people who disagree with me on a variety of subjects, from Michael Shormer to Sam Harris, on the Sunday special.
It happens a lot.
And that would be true if Andrew Yang comes on.
So Andrew Yang expressed interest in coming on the podcast, and I said, well, that'll be great.
Immediately, he was hit with a wave of, how dare you even sit down with Shapiro?
How dare you even have a conversation with Shapiro?
It was the same thing with my friend Michael Shermer.
Michael and I disagree radically when it comes to religion.
Michael had me on his podcast to discuss my new book, The Right Side of History, which, for the record, is now number one on Amazon, the number one best-selling book on planet Earth.
He was hit with a wave of vitriol.
How dare you legitimize Shapiro?
Okay, name me the right-winger you would legitimize.
Really, if you're on the left.
So Jordan Peterson is out.
I'm out.
People like Dave Rubin, who's not even truly conservative.
Dave considers himself a classical liberal, more on the libertarian scale.
He's out.
Even folks who are momentarily beloved like David Frum.
If they put their head above the waterline, they get clubbed.
Kevin Williamson is out.
David French is out.
Who's left, guys?
Really, and the answer is nobody's left.
And that's how many people on the radical left, and increasingly on the mainstream left, want it.
Here's the story about Jordan.
He said that he would be a visiting fellow.
He announced he would be a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge Divinity School, which makes perfect sense.
He's one of the world's leading authorities and one of the most popular speakers when it comes to biblical meaning on planet Earth.
He has a series on biblical meaning that has 10 million views on YouTube.
That's better than any of the other professors over at Cambridge University.
On Wednesday, Cambridge's administration announced they had rescinded the invitation following a public outcry from students and professors.
A Cambridge spokesperson told the UK Guardian, quote, Cambridge is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles.
There is no place here for anyone who cannot.
So what principles did Jordan violate?
Well, he violated the principle that you should be forced by the government to use a transgender person's preferred pronouns.
So if you disagree with the basic idea that we should falsify pronouns, then you are no longer welcome to teach at University of Cambridge.
And also, they say that he is not sufficiently woke when it comes to feminism.
This is the case that they are making.
So they renounced their initial offer and deplatformed Jordan.
They removed the offer after realizing that he is who he has always been.
I'm against this even when it happens on the left.
I controversially argued that James Gunn should not be removed from the Guardians of the Galaxy series for a series of bad old tweets, jokes about pedophilia and such.
Because everybody knew about those tweets when he was hired, so why are you firing him?
I said the same exact thing about Sarah Jean.
She had a bunch of racist tweets.
She was hired by the New York Times.
They knew about all the racist tweets.
And then there's a big outcry, and I said she shouldn't be fired.
They knew who she was when they hired her.
Well, Jordan doesn't keep his views a secret.
Everybody knows this stuff.
Everybody knows that Jordan holds these views on transgender pronouns.
It's one of the reasons he is very, very famous.
Jordan put out a statement about all of this.
He says that he began discussions with Cambridge in November.
He enjoyed his conversations, and he was looking forward to giving speeches to students about the nature and meaning of the Bible.
He says, it's not going to make much difference to my future in some sense.
I have more opportunities at the moment than I can keep track of, let alone, let's say, capitalize on.
It's a complex and surreally fortunate position to occupy, and I'm not taking it for granted, but it happens to be true.
In the fall, therefore, I will produce the lectures I plan to produce on Exodus, regardless of whether they occur in the UK or in Canada or elsewhere, and they will attract whatever audience remains interested.
But I think it is deeply unfortunate that the authorities at the Divinity School in Cambridge decided that kowtowing to an ill-informed, ignorant, and ideologically addled mob trumped participating in an extensive online experiment in mass Christian and psychological education.
Given the continuing decline of church attendance, the rise in atheistic or agnostic sentiment, the increasing irrelevance of theological education, and the collapse in interest in such matters among young people, wiser and more profound decisions might have been made.
He says, he adds that, he says, I wish them the continued decline in relevance over the next few decades that they deeply and profoundly and diligently work toward and deserve.
Which is exactly right.
The Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope of University of Cambridge gave a statement, and here's what Jordan quoted from it.
One very specific aspect of openness is being inclusive and open to diversity in all its forms, diversity of interests and beliefs, of gender, of religion, of sexual identity, of ethnicity, and of physical ability.
Yet obviously the left does not believe in such diversity.
The only diversity they care about is racial and ethnic diversity, and maybe the diversity of the intersectionally woke.
It's, it's really pathetic.
And using a shooting in Christchurch that had nothing to do with New Zealand to de-platform, that had nothing to do with Jordan Peterson, to de-platform Jordan Peterson, is truly astonishingly ridiculous.
This is the, I mean, we often say this sort of stuff, this is the world the left wants.
If this is the world the left wants, it's a really ugly world.
A world where books are banned, and you don't have a gun to protect yourself.
Some pretty nasty stuff.
Okay, meanwhile, in the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden is eyeing a couple of strategies that are designed to help assuage fears about his age and lack of woke credentials.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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This week's Sunday Special features Stephen Meyer, an intelligent design advocate, and we ask some tough questions about evolution and the presence of God in science and all of the rest of this stuff.
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See, this is what we like here at the Ben Shapiro Show and at the Daily Wire, a diversity of viewpoints.
On the Sunday Special, I've had Michael Shermer, an advocate of Darwinian evolution, and then I have Stephen Meyer, who believes that there are gaps in Darwinian evolution, even though he believes in microevolution.
Lots of diversity of opinion.
It's wonderful.
It's a good thing.
We sort of like that.
You'll see in the things that I like today, I'm going to recommend more diversity of opinion about my own book.
This is something that we tend to embrace.
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Also, make sure that you pick up a copy of The Right Side of History, which is available everywhere, including at amazon.com.
Now, I've been informed by the publisher that in the next 24 hours, there may be some slight shipping delays.
Very slight.
So, all that means is that it's going to say that it's going to arrive in one to two weeks.
That's not true.
It'll still arrive within three to four days, but Amazon is going to update it To reflect that they've run out of stock.
It'll be replenished in stock within legitimately hours.
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It is the number one best-selling book on planet Earth at the moment.
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So go check out The Right Side of History right now.
It's really funny.
Speaking of The Right Side of History, just a brief note.
There's a couple of reviews that are out, one from the Washington Times, somebody who actually read the book, and there's one from some lefty outlet, somebody who clearly has not read the book, and says the book is anti-Enlightenment, which is obviously untrue.
I praise fulsomely the Enlightenment, the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment.
I praise the Scottish-British-American Enlightenment.
I think the French Enlightenment was a mistake, but the person didn't read the book.
And then they also suggest That the book is somehow not standing up for racial diversity, which is absurd.
Like, an entire chapter at the end of the book is all about how white supremacy is garbage.
But whatever, man.
If you're on the left, I guess you don't even have to take account of people's actual views, as Jordan is learning.
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All righty, so on to the 2020 presidential race.
Former VP Joe Biden is still thinking about jumping into the race, but he's got a couple of strategies he has to consider.
It is a circus.
And if you look at how he's rolling out his campaign, he keeps delaying it and delaying it and delaying it in the hopes that if he delays it long enough, then he'll be handed the nomination by acclamation.
But here's the thing about Joe Biden.
Dude is not competent.
He's run for president 1,000 times at this point.
He's been a giant fail every time.
You'll remember that when he ran for president in 2008 against Barack Obama, who would eventually choose him as VP, Joe Biden said that Barack Obama was clean and articulate.
And people were like, dude, that's pretty racially coded language.
That is not really great.
That's Joe Biden, right?
Joe Biden is the guy who went to a 7-Eleven and talked about how everyone who worked at 7-Eleven was Indian because he watches too many episodes of The Simpsons.
And Joe Biden is a dolt.
Well, now Joe Biden is apparently considering a couple of doltish strategies that do say something about the nature of the Democratic Party.
According to the New York Times, former VP Joe Biden, aware that concerns about his age could weigh on his candidacy if he runs for the White House, has discussed two steps that could reassure voters about electing a 78-year-old president next year.
Mr. Biden and his top advisors are considering nodding to the rising next generation in democratic politics and elevating an heir by announcing a running mate early, well before the nomination is sealed.
Okay, so that, number one, would be a stupid idea.
It was seen as a desperation move when Ted Cruz picked Carly Fiorina in an attempt to win more female votes in the Republican primaries.
It would look like a desperation move now if Biden were to pick a VP candidate before he is even in the race.
Normally, it's seen as a sign of strength to wait because you have leverage and then you can get who you want.
Plus, it could be another one of the candidates, right?
If Biden wins the nomination, he could turn to Kamala Harris.
If he does it now, it can't be anybody else who's running against him.
Also under discussion is a possible pledge to serve only one term, and framing Biden's 2020 campaign as a one-time rescue mission for a beleaguered country, according to multiple party officials.
But that, of course, is going to raise the question of age.
Trump is slightly younger than Biden, and this will be Trump's last term no matter what.
He's termed out after his second term.
So Joe Biden's saying, I'm going to run for one term.
Trump can look at him and say, right, you have to assure people of that because they're afraid you're going to keel over, my friend.
It's just dumb politics.
Such moves would amount to a big play that would send a signal about the seriousness of the election and could potentially appeal to both liberal activists and general election voters who are eager to chart the safest route toward defeating President Trump.
If Biden is not sold on either approach, both carry significant risks, chiefly that they could call further attention to the age of a candidate who would turn 80 in the White House.
Here's the reality.
Donald Trump is how old right now?
Trump is 75... 72 years old.
So that means that he would presumably turn 78 while he's in the White House if he wins a second term.
So everybody who's running right now is old.
Bernie Sanders will turn 1,000 years old if he is elected.
There's also the risk that Biden could appear presumptuous, even imperious, by choosing a running mate before the electorate has a chance to sift the field of candidates.
But here's the real issue.
The real issue is that what he is discussing is picking Stacey Abrams as his VP candidate.
You know, as in the failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate who still declares herself the governor of Georgia.
Now, Stacey Abrams is charismatic.
She's a very good speaker.
Well, she's apparently considered a presidential run herself.
Biden may be telling her that he will run with her.
She's served, like, one term in the House of Representatives, no?
I mean, Stacey Abrams is not exactly... This is about the same as picking Sarah Palin for your VP running mate, because you're obviously attempting to get female votes.
It's basically the same thing.
She, her background is that she was minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives.
So she was not even, she's never been elected in a federal election.
And he'd pick her as his vice presidential candidate after losing an election in Georgia and then refusing to acknowledge that she lost an election in Georgia.
I mean, I guess the bad news for her is she's going to have to give up the fake governorship of Georgia since she says she never lost.
But it's pretty obvious that this is the forced, the forced long march through the intersectionally woke battlefield of the 2020 Democratic primaries.
Joe Biden isn't picking Stacey Abrams because he thinks that she is the best VP candidate.
If you were really waiting for the best VP candidate, you would assume that he'd go through the primaries and then he would choose whomever he thought was the best VP candidate.
Doing it now and picking a woman who is minority in an obvious appeal to try and break into the intersectional base of people like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker?
It's pretty obvious what he's doing at this point.
He's not doing it because he thinks Abrams is the most qualified.
He's doing it early because this is a political ploy.
Of course.
And anybody who suggests differently is just not being cynical enough about politics.
If you think Joe Biden is looking at America and he's like, oh, yeah, Stacey Abrams, she'll be the best president if something should happen to me.
Sure, I'm sure it's that and not him trying to win black votes in the South in Democratic primaries by picking up a popular black figure.
Biden's position apparently couldn't be learned.
Axios was told about this by Biden's advisors.
Biden's office has declined to comment.
It does so show some lack of confidence among the Biden team about how they are out of touch with the intersectionally woke base.
This would be a foolish move by Joe Biden, but then again, Joe Biden is used to making foolish moves.
All right, meanwhile, The Trump show continues.
If you're Donald Trump, as I've been saying for legitimately months at this point, if you are President Trump, then what you ought to be focused on right now is keeping your mouth shut and pointing at the Democrats.
Your entire campaign should just be that gif of Donald Sutherland making a face in Invasion of the Body Snatchers as he points at the other side, as he just points.
Just this.
That should be Trump's campaign.
Look at those guys.
Look how crazy they are.
They want to ban your guns and they are thinking about cracking down on free speech.
I mean, there are a lot of reasons not to vote Democrat.
Instead, President Trump has decided that it would be a good idea for him to attack John McCain.
Now, again, I was not a John McCain fan when he was a senator.
I thought that John McCain was wrong on immigration.
I thought that John McCain was deeply wrong on Obamacare.
I thought that McCain's whole sense of the Senate, oh, what a magisterial body nonsense, was just that.
I thought it was nonsense.
I also think that John McCain was an American war hero, which he was.
I think John McCain was a patriot, which he was.
All of those things can be true at once.
I can be highly critical of John McCain's record in the Senate and also acknowledge that John McCain was a good American and a great American in many ways.
Well, President Trump had a long going feud with John McCain going all the way back to 2015.
And people are saying, well, you know, President Trump, he has the right to fight back against John McCain.
John McCain has been dead for six months.
I'm not sure what you're fighting back against at this point.
And this isn't in defense of everything John McCain ever did.
But it is pretty indecent to start going after John McCain, a dead man, for how you operated at his funeral.
And that's what President Trump did yesterday.
It is this sense that Trump is engaging in unstable behavior that is going to help his opponents.
What you want in the White House is somebody who you know what he's going to do on a daily basis.
The wild vacillations allow a candidate like Joe Biden, who is indeed a dolt, to play at being the rock of stability in a time of chaos.
That's nonsense.
But Trump ain't helping his case when he starts going off on a dead guy six months after his death.
We're in a war in the Middle East that McCain pushed so hard.
Thousands and thousands of our people have been killed, millions of people overall.
And frankly, we're straightening it out now, but it's been a disaster for our country.
We've spent tremendous wealth.
Sir John McCain loved it.
I endorsed him at his request, and I gave him the kind of funeral that he wanted, which as president, I had to approve.
I don't care about this.
I didn't get thank you.
That's okay.
We sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain.
Um, we sent him on the way, but I wasn't a fan of John McCain.
I didn't get a thank you.
I assume he means from his family.
I assume he doesn't mean I didn't go to his funeral at his family's request, and then the dead guy didn't thank me.
I understand the old Yogi Berra-ism, that you should go to everybody else's funeral so they come to yours.
But, um...
This is a weird line of attack.
And I don't understand the strategy behind it.
It's funny, I got a lot of mail because I said some similar stuff yesterday.
And people who are big Trump fans are like, are you saying that Trump shouldn't be able to attack John McCain's policy?
No, I'm saying don't attack the dead guy's funeral.
Like, what the hell?
How is this decent?
How is this good?
How does this make people even believe that Trump is a moral human being?
I don't understand it.
And the same thing holds true of his attacks on George Conway.
Now, George Conway is a self-aggrandizing narcissist on Twitter.
There's just no way, two ways about it.
He spends all of his time sniping at President Trump.
And Trump, as a human being, has every right to snipe right back at George Conway.
But Kellyanne, George's wife, works for the White House.
So you would assume that if you're going to fight back against George Conway, you would say something like, you're speaking completely out of turn, you're completely unqualified for discussing my psychological state, you consider taking a position in my administration, and now you're bitter, right?
All of that is legit.
Now, is it smart strategy?
No, it's not, because now you are engaging in what is called the Streisand effect.
The Streisand effect is named after Barbara Streisand.
Barbara Streisand, the famous singer, Many years ago, there was a photographer who took a picture of her house.
Aerially, it was a picture of the entire area and included her house.
Nobody had ever seen this picture.
It was in some sort of a website that was dedicated to the environment of the coastline where she lives.
And this person posted the picture online.
She sued the photographer for several million dollars.
Well, this created what was called the Streisand effect, where every person on planet Earth now went and saw that photo.
So nobody would have seen her house, except she made a big fuss out of it.
Well, George Conway has been sniping at Trump for a long time, and nobody really cares.
And then Trump decided to go back at him, so now more people care what George Conway thinks.
It's really dumb.
In the same way that it's pretty dumb that Devin Nunes decided to sue a Twitter account called Devin Nunes' Cow.
Nobody cared about Devin Nunes' Cow, the Twitter account, until five minutes ago, when Devin Nunes decided, you know what would be a great idea?
To sue an account on Twitter called Devin Nunes' Cow.
And believe me, I get a lot of crap.
I've never thought about suing the people who give me crap online.
It's a bizarre, it's just a bizarre notion.
In any case, President Trump goes after George Conway, and as I say, even if he's going to do that, a bad strategic decision, but even if he's going to do that, there's a moral way to go about this and an immoral way to go about this.
You know what's not a really moral thing to do?
Calling him a quote-unquote, husband from hell.
His wife works for you.
His wife works for you.
How is that a remotely good thing?
I mean, listen, this should be between Kellyanne Conway and George.
I mean, Trump should say, listen, whatever issues Kellyanne and George have, they've got four kids, by the way.
I'm not sure how this plays out for their kids.
I just, I do not understand how a couple can go through this sort of stuff publicly and allow, I mean, Kellyanne then responded by siding with Trump.
She said, quote, But you think he shouldn't respond when somebody, a non-medical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder?
You think he should just take that sitting down?
But that isn't the part of the tweet that is really messed up, right?
I mean, the part of the tweet that's messed up is calling him a husband from hell.
Hey, Kellyanne, that is one loyal employee, I'll give him that.
None of this is positive for President Trump.
It's a waste of time, it's a waste of energy, and it's simply foolish.
It just doesn't make any sense strategically, and it's immoral.
So immoral and foolish is a hell of a combination.
Alrighty, let's do some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like today.
Let's talk about a couple of things.
One, today is Purim.
Purim is a great holiday.
If you've never read the Jewish Megillah, you should.
You know, the phrase, the whole Megillah, it comes from the actual Megillah, the actual Megillat Esther, which is the book of Esther, which is a fascinating religious book.
It never mentions God anywhere in the book because there's this belief that God influences the world through natural channels in the Maimonidean and Thomistic view.
And that is really evident in this particular biblical story.
The story, for those who don't know, the quick story of Purim, is that there is a king whose name is Ahasuerus, as transliterated into English.
He's the king of Persia, and he has an advisor named Haman, and Haman decides that he wants to take out all the Jews, and Ahasuerus goes along with it.
And meanwhile, Ahasuerus has executed his wife Vashti, and needs a new wife, and so he decides to have basically a beauty contest.
And in the beauty contest, a Jewish girl wins, Esther.
She does not want to be married to Ahasuerus, but she's essentially forced to do so, because this is ancient Persia.
And she marries him, and then she uses her influence to...
Awaken the king to the error of Haman's ways and Haman is executed.
That's the essential story.
And then the Jews are allowed to fight back.
So it's a good story about why people should be armed in defiance of tyranny because one of the ways, the way that Haman wants the Jews to be wiped out is an edict from the king saying that the Jews are not allowed to defend themselves against mass pogroms.
And then the king revises that and he sends out a second emissary who says the Jews are now allowed to defend themselves and the Jews defend themselves and win.
That's the basic story of Purim.
It's really worth reading.
So if you have time today, go read the Jewish Megillah.
And if you see Orthodox Jews and some non-Orthodox Jews walking around today wearing costumes, people think it's the Jewish Halloween.
I mean, not conceptually.
But yeah, we wear funny costumes.
There are several commandments that are associated with Purim, for a little bit of your Jewish educational edification.
There are a few commandments that are associated with Purim.
One of them is that we are supposed to have a big meal, which we do later today.
We have a suda.
And then we are supposed to also give matanot le'ev yonim, which means we are supposed to give gifts to the poor.
So a lot of us gave charity last night and today.
And then we are also supposed to give mishlo achmanot, so we give gifts So, there.
Now you know a little bit more about Jewish culture than you did before.
Purim's fantastic.
put together.
Mine's always a parody gift basket.
I put together some sort of funny letter about politics and we send it out to all of our friends.
And then you're supposed to read the Magilla twice.
So we went last night and did one last night and you're supposed to do it once today, which I will be doing directly after the show.
So it's a really fun holiday and it's fantastic for kids.
So there, now you know a little bit more about Jewish culture than you did before.
Purim's fantastic.
Okay, other things that I like.
So my friend Michael Shermer, a man with whom I disagree greatly on religion and the impact of Judeo-Christian ethics and all of this.
He had me on his podcast to talk about my new book, The Right Side of History.
And And last night, he tweeted out a couple of sections from his book, The Moral Arc, How Science Makes Us Better People.
Now, make no mistake, I really disagree with Michael Shermer that you can derive values simply from science and reason alone.
My book is largely About the idea that divorcing reason from baseline assumptions embedded in the Judeo-Christian culture is a huge mistake.
With that said, I think you should totally read his book.
I think it's a really well-written book and a well-argued book.
The book is The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer.
Read both and then make up your mind.
But the good news is that we are all trying to work within a certain Enlightenment tradition.
I think that tradition springs all the way back to Sinai.
He thinks that that tradition sort of comes into being Almost spontaneously, at the end of the 18th century, that's really where our argument lies, and that has implications for how we should teach people today.
Do we teach them secular humanism, in the hopes that this will make them better people?
Or do we teach them about Judeo-Christian roots, in combination with secular reason?
That's the main argument between Michael and me.
The nice thing is that I think we are all fighting for an evidence-based discussion system.
So, go read his book, The Moral Arc, How Science Makes Us Better.
People, go pick that up at Amazon as well.
Well, you're picking up my book, The Right Side of History, which continues to be the number one book on planet Earth as of the moment.
Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
Okay, so things that I hate today.
John Hickenlooper is a dude.
Like, that guy is a human.
And John Hickenlooper is the governor of Colorado.
He is running for president.
Nobody knows about him because why in the world would you?
He's been on CNN a lot, and he thinks that qualifies him to be president of the United States.
Very weird moment in the middle of his town hall last night on CNN, in which he was asked why he saw an X-rated movie with his mother.
Which is a pretty good question.
Here is John Hickenlooper explaining in completely non-weird fashion why he went and saw a movie that is X-rated pornography with his mom.
I came home, and my mother hated to cook.
I mean, she was just a strong, powerful woman who got stuff done in her own right.
And I got home, and she had this huge dinner laid out.
And I said, I promised, you know, I promised Jed that we'd go to the movie theater and see this new movie, You Wanna Come?
And I, it's an ex-movie, I don't know, you know, I just, and I was sure that she wouldn't say no.
I made a mistake.
And she said, I'd love to go, because she didn't want to be left alone in the house again.
It was a pretty famous movie, too.
So I took my mother to see Deep Throat.
Well, that's the thing that happened, I guess.
We got Beto O'Rourke eating dirt, and John Hickenlooper taking his mom to X-rated movies.
I mean, I guess his... I don't want to get into dirty puns and slogans about what he should run on in 2020.
We'll just leave it at that, because whoa.
And meanwhile, other things that I hate.
So there's this story today that is absolutely insane out of the UK.
Here is the story.
Parents of a teenage son who has Asperger's and autism were threatened by authorities to have their child placed in foster care after they refused to help facilitate a so-called sex change of the boy.
Recalling the horrifying ordeal to the Daily Mail, the couple, who wish to remain anonymous, claimed an NHS clinic in the UK said their then 14-year-old boy should be put on hormone blockers since he told them he thought he was a girl.
This is according to Amanda Prestigiacomo at Daily Wire.
The parents, believing their child's autism played a role in the declaration of gender confusion, refused to cooperate with the transition, particularly since the blockers can cause irrevocable harm.
After mom and dad pulled their son from the gender clinic, school officials reported that the parents, they reported the parents to child services for emotional abuse due to their objections to the sex change.
So, parents who have raised their kid from the time the kid was born, and object to permanent body changes to their child, hormone blockers in teenage years for their child, because the kid has autism, and they think that that may be related to the kid's gender confusion, That kid was nearly removed from the home.
The couple was visited by local authorities concerning the complaint.
Desperate to keep their child out of foster care, they allowed the boy to live with a family friend.
He was placed on a so-called child protection plan.
Which is a plan drawn up by the local authority.
It sets out how the child can be kept safe, how things can be made better for the family, and what support they will need.
The boy's mother told the Daily Mail, I'm absolutely devastated.
When I saw the report that social services wrote about us and saw the words emotional abuse, I just broke down.
All we were doing was trying to get him to pause and think about his actions.
My biggest worry as a mom is my child gets pushed down this route, becomes a woman, goes through surgery, then gets to 25 and says, I've made a mistake.
The mother noted that she and her husband read these blockers might not be reversible and there might be long-term effects for brain development.
The family has been placed back together temporarily, but the mother fears that more parents will be subjected to such a horrendous ordeal with their own kids.
And this, of course, is true.
It is also true that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a thing, and that there have been reports in Britain that huge levels of kids who are reporting gender dysphoria are also autistic.
And so there may, in fact, be a relationship between one certain type of condition and gender dysphoria.
This is full-scale insanity that has nothing to do with good parenting or decency.
And yet this is, I guess, something that we are interested in pursuing.
All right, well, if you want to come back and have two more hours of the show a little bit later today, all you have to do is subscribe over at dailywire.com for $9.99 a month or $99 a year.
And I remind you once again, my new book, The Right Side of History, is on sale at Amazon and everywhere at bookstores.
Still, until New Zealand tries to ban it for some odd reason.
Go check it out right now.
We really appreciate your help.
And we'll see you a little bit later.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
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Edited by Adam Sajovic.
Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
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