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March 21, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:04
The Conversation Ep. 19: Ben Shapiro LIVE BOOK SIGNING
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Time Text
Let's do it live.
You wrote it, because you wrote this book here in front of us, but we are doing it live.
Hello, everyone.
This is the newest episode of The Conversation.
I am your host, Elisha Krause, and with me is the one and only Ben Shapiro, who will be taking your questions live for an entire hour.
So, usually at this point, I lecture you guys about how you should become Daily Wire subscribers and only subscribers get to ask the questions.
Well, this time, we want to kick things off by announcing that this is a very special episode of The Conversation because we're actually doing a live signing of Ben's new book, The Right Side of History.
And so for this episode, you don't have to be a subscriber to ask a question, because when you purchase a copy of Ben's book, you can write in a question for him to answer live on the air as he's over here signing your book and getting cramped hands.
We're going to give you arthritis today.
We've got so many questions and so many books to sign.
So head on over to premiercollectibles.com slash Ben Shapiro and get your signed copy now.
And don't worry, because if your question isn't answered, you will still get a signed copy of the book.
That's premiercollectibles.com slash Ben Shapiro.
And can't wait to get started.
You have so many over here.
You're like, no, let's just go for it.
Let's go.
You got to flap it and open it up to the right page.
Exactly.
Where do you like to sign?
So now they've got the sticker here.
So normally, I sign on this here page.
So you're not supposed to sign on that here page.
I don't know, that's what they did at the Reagan Library yesterday.
How did that event go?
It went great.
It was a blast.
I mean, first of all, you're speaking at the Reagan Library, which is super awesome.
Yeah.
So this question is from Kelly.
So this book is going to be for Kelly, which is super fun.
And she asks, She, so she asks about when abortion is outlawed and even prior to this happening, what are your solutions to help women and their babies who are faced with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy, specifically unwed and young mothers?
I mean this is where the social fabric comes in.
What I talk about, I do talk about a lot in this book, the fact that You can't have a free society where we're not compelling people to help each other unless people are voluntarily helping each other.
In our community, in our Jewish community, when people have problems, then the first place you go is to your family, and then more largely to your religious community, and then after that maybe you go to local government, then state government, then federal.
The problem is we've reversed that process.
So, one of the rips on folks on the right when they say they're pro-life is, well, you don't care about the kids after they're born.
Absolutely false, which is why people on the right tend to give per capita a lot more charity than people on the left.
I mean, in my family, we personally help out a lot of folks in our community who are in need.
In fact, today is a fast day, but tonight is Purim.
And on that holiday, one of the commandments is matanot le'ev yanim, which is to give gifts to the poor.
So, I mean, this is something that religious people, of course, have long been famous for.
All right.
Do you give the gift baskets?
Yeah, that's another one.
And you guys dress up?
Yep.
This year, my kids are going as the dragons from How to Train Your Dragon.
My daughter's going as the female dragon.
Oh, the one that's invisible?
Or does she disappear?
My son is the black one, my daughter is the white one.
Yeah.
I haven't seen the new one yet, but this one was so cute.
Nor have I.
It's out in theaters though, you should go take the kiddies to see it.
Alright, this next question and this next book are for Zachary.
He says, Hi Ben, I'm a middle school math teacher in an extremely impoverished and rural region.
The average income in my county is less than $17,000 per capita.
I've noticed a complete lack of values in my area, and many do not graduate high school due to simply being passed on by the school system without ever having to do work in school.
To give you an idea, my 8th grade math classroom had less than 20% proficiency coming into the year, with many on a 4th to 5th grade math level.
I have students who refuse to do a lick of work because at the end of the day, it is my tail on the line being held fully responsible for their failure even when no effort is put forth.
What can you tell me about an area would you come to this?
Yeah.
And what do you think it would take to turn this situation around?
I mean, the truth is that when it comes to the educational system generally, there's a lot of pressure put on teachers.
But the vast majority of education and educational values start with parents.
And that's why you're seeing in New York City right now a lot of pressure on the elite high schools, divest in high school, because they're not admitting enough black and Hispanic students.
And the complaint is that somehow this is racist.
Well, the vast majority of students who go to that school who are impoverished are Asian students.
There is a difference in cultures of poverty and non-cultures of poverty.
That's not racially broken down.
There are black cultures in which, in the United States, in which education is highly valued.
There are black cultures in which it is not.
There are white cultures in which it is highly valued.
There are white cultures in which it is not.
It all starts at home, obviously, with parents, and then the teacher just has to do what the teacher can do.
But if you're not in charge of that, all you can do is do your best for the students.
The only way to inculcate the value of education is to recognize from an early age that it's the parent's job to make sure that their kids are educated, which is why When my ancestors got here, when my great-great-grandparents got to the United States about 1907, they didn't know English, they didn't have any money.
The first thing they made sure is that their kids spoke English and that their kids were interested in being well-educated.
This has been true in the Jewish community for a very long time, for example.
Alright, Joshua has the next question.
What do you believe is the best way we can fight to protect the life of the unborn?
Politician after politician says they will get right against it, and then they get in and do absolutely nothing.
Have we already lost the battle?
Well, we haven't lost the cultural battle, and that's why you're seeing a year on your decrease in the number of abortions in the United States, and the abortion rate has been going down consistently for years.
You're also seeing the rate of people who are pro-life rising continuously because there are so many people who are seeing ultrasound pictures and understanding that these are, in fact, actual children in the womb.
As far as legislation, I think that you are seeing a gradual pushing back of the dates at which you can perform an abortion.
In some states, they've gone so far as to actually do heartbeat bills, where they say once the baby's heart is beating, which is 22 days, that at that point, you can't have an abortion.
So you are seeing those restrictions being broadened.
The question is how far the Supreme Court is going to allow those restrictions to be broadened.
I think it's probably going to be a gradual process.
On a federal level, the fact that the Republicans in Congress did not shut down the government to defund Planned Parenthood, but did shut down the government for the border wall, I think tells you something about their priorities, and I think that thing I'm for the border wall.
I still think that prioritization is incorrect.
It's really sad when you see that happen.
Oh, yeah.
Also, what year are you running again?
What did the Daily Wire t-shirt say?
Oh, the t-shirt says 2024.
The real answer is never, but... Come on!
I want to be your Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Really?
Yeah!
That's your aspiration?
I think I'm pretty good at that.
Well, not totally.
Yeah, I mean, come on.
But, I mean, I could be the Sarah Huckabee Sanders of the Shapiro White House.
Also, if I do that, everyone in a 500-foot radius of where I sit loses their job if I do that.
So, I think that I'm going to go with no on that.
No, they wouldn't.
They wouldn't?
What, they wouldn't for the campaign?
We're planning this too far in advance.
Okay.
You can raise more than beta.
Well, I can't even remember the question.
What was the question?
So what would your top priority be if you were president?
My top priority would be cutting the size of the executive branch.
So I think the president has two jobs.
One is to implement policy.
The other is to educate the public.
I like to educate the public.
I mean, that's what I'm interested in doing, what I'm doing with the book.
And then on the other side, what you're trying to do is implement policy.
My view is that the executive branch is far too large.
The one thing I can do without congressional approval is simply slice the executive branch to ribbons.
That's what I would do.
I would fire nearly everyone in the executive branch, and I would get it back to enforcing the laws that are on the books, and pretty much that's it.
Looking to eliminate full departments, including the Department of Education.
There are two million people who work for the executive branch of the government.
That's insane.
That's insane.
Zachary wants to know, are there any Republicans you could feel could currently primary against Trump in 2020?
And be successful?
The answer is no.
And that's because President Trump has 70 to, depending on the polls, 70 to 90% approval rating inside the Republican Party.
I also think that it would be counterproductive, because I think the media would then try and suggest that there is a dichotomy in the Republican Party between the true conservatives who vote for John Kasich or something.
And the people who vote for Trump.
And that, of course, is not the real story.
A lot of people will vote for Trump.
They feel he has the best chance to win.
A lot of them will vote for him because they don't like John Kasich.
That's not a divide between conservatives and non-conservatives.
And then anybody who votes against Trump will be seen as some sort of traitor, a heretic who has to be cast out.
It creates divisions in the service of pretty much nothing because Trump's going to win the nomination anyway.
Alright, Brittany wants to know, by the way, I love all these questions from females.
I didn't even notice that, but sure.
I didn't notice that.
I don't see, I don't see.
You don't see gender?
No, that's not my thing.
Do you identify as a pregnant blonde lady today?
Would you like to swap?
Not at all.
It's real uncomfortable.
But it's wonderful.
Brittany wants to know, what do you think would be the first thing we should change to make America the land of opportunity again?
Well, I think the first thing that we have to change, honestly, is our own mentality about America.
Because America is a land of opportunity.
And right now, I think there are politicians on both sides of the aisles and political figures on both sides of the aisle who are maintaining that you're a victim of circumstance if you live in the United States.
You see this from the populist right.
Well, we should shut down automatic driving.
We should worry about trade.
We should worry about Mexico.
And China, instead of saying, listen, there are 7 million unfilled jobs.
Go out there and adventure.
You're not guaranteed anything in this life, and certainly in the United States, except for that adventure.
So make the decisions that are most likely to bring you success.
If you actually want to have opportunity, you have to seize opportunity.
And opportunity is knocking every day that you live in the freest country that's ever been created.
All right, Alicia has an interesting question.
She wants to know, if you ever had to leave America, would you consider moving to Japan?
To Japan.
I've never even visited Japan, so I hesitate to say I would move to a place I've never visited.
I want to visit Japan though, apparently it's pretty amazing.
I've heard there's some good food, there's some beautiful scenery.
I doubt lots of kosher restaurants, so that might be a problem.
But also it's really cold there.
Yeah, people don't realize that but it's quite cold there because I've had some friends that are based in the military that over there Dino wants to know you have mentioned having more children before how many kids are you planning to have and can you speak about large?
Families versus small families.
Thank you for your honest commentary for for your information I'm a married father of four and an NYPD lieutenant with 26 years on the job First of all, thanks for what you do, because you're out there in the line of duty doing stuff to protect us every day.
We are aiming for, I hope, God willing, at least four kids.
That's what we'd like to do.
Maybe we end up with fewer, maybe we end up with more.
But four, my wife has four in her family, I have four in my family, four seems like a nice number.
The social studies tend to show, interestingly enough, that parents are happiest, that couples are happiest when they either have no kids or lots of kids.
When you have one or two kids, you put so much stake in the one or two kids that you invest all your time and energy in the perfect life.
And then as you have more kids, you notice this between kid one and kid two.
I mean, you have a couple of kids now and you notice this.
With kid one, you're like, I'm going to be so meticulous about every little thing.
And by kid two, you're like, fine, eat off the floor.
I don't even care anymore.
Just do what you need to do.
Because this is the real world, man.
Learn to survive.
And by the time you hit kid four, kid one is taking care of kid four.
So it really does create A sense of camaraderie, and there's a constant fun going on.
I loved having three younger siblings, and I think that as a parent, having more kids as opposed to fewer kids, I think is a pretty wonderful thing.
I mean, the religious Jewish community, of course, is famous for having lots of kids.
It's so funny, when my parents would go out in public in the secular community, everybody would look at them like, what the hell did you do?
There are four of them.
And then they'd go in the religious community, and somebody would be like, knew what happened?
Where are the rest?
I was at Ralph's the other day, and some man who does not deserve to be called a gentleman was like, oh my god, why would you have three?
Because there are three girls in tow.
And I was like, four!
I got so pissed at him.
I was like, who does that?
Well, you should have said to him, you know what, I'm having the kids, so you don't have to.
Yeah.
Just, you don't.
This is my plan for conservatism to take over, is we're just going to be for the whole time.
The demographic argument for conservatism remains pretty strong.
I mean, I'm just saying.
Elijah wants to know, hey Ben, how do you justify religiously based political views to adamantly non-religious people?
So I don't justify religiously based political views.
I justify reasonably based political views.
I believe that every public policy has to have a secular rationale, otherwise we can't have a common conversation.
Now with that said, religious values can back that rationale.
So what I mean by that is To take an example, this entire book is about how secular values that we all hold dear, things like freedom of speech and free markets, are actually rooted in Judeo-Christian values about the fact that we are all made in God's image, that we are individuals with creative capacity, that the universe is an understandable place where we ought to be able to use reason.
These are religious assumptions.
These are not assumptions you can make if you are a scientific materialist.
Those are religiously based.
But making those assumptions, now you have to make a secular argument for why public policy ought to prevail along some lines or other lines.
But the assumptions that you make from the outset are very rarely based in simple evidence.
Assumptions that you make politically or values-wise are generally based in a religious underpinning, which is why, when I debated Sam Harrison, I asked him, you know, why do you think our values are so similar, even though you're a militant atheist and I'm an orthodox Jew?
The answer is because we grew up in a Judeo-Christian society with 3,000 years of common history 10 miles from each other.
Do you think that he's read this book?
Not yet.
I hope he does.
I mean, I do mention him in it.
Really?
Yeah, I talk about him.
Michael Shermer has interviewed me about the book.
I mentioned Michael in here.
I mean, these are all people, I think, who are trying to do something good, which is restore enlightenment values.
But they're doing so on the basis of a secular materialism that I think is insufficient to support the superstructure of enlightenment values.
Enlightenment was not purely secular.
It was based on a long history of religious values.
There was an interesting conversation I saw on a Twitter thread earlier.
Yes, interesting things do still happen on Twitter, guys, but stay away.
And someone said he wondered how many people would convert to Judaism after reading this.
And then somebody else was like, oh, I actually wrote a thought piece about how I actually think people would convert to Christianity after reading this.
Yeah, somebody did a review of the book.
It's actually a really good review of the book by a Catholic person who was reading it and saying, you know, what you really need is more Jesus in the book.
And OK, I mean, if you're Catholic, fine, sure.
Yeah, more Jesus.
Also, we get to eat bacon, so there's that.
I mean, I'm starving today.
I'm sorry.
Eating anything would be good.
I feel like I don't even want to take a sip of my water in front of you right now.
I feel really bad.
You can.
You're pregnant.
You're allowed.
By the way, pregnant women don't have to fast, even in Judaism, if it endangers the kid.
And I ain't Jewish, so... Yeah, so double whammy.
You don't have to worry about it under any... If I converted you right now, you still would not have to worry about it.
Great.
Sarah says, what books would you recommend for a young man who's 12 years old and is interested in being a wise leader?
Well, there are...
If you're interested in leadership qualities and being a valuable human being, there's this series that my dad grew up on and then passed on to me.
It's an older series.
They've done a rewrite of the series to make it more Christian in orientation, but it was originally a non-religious series at all.
It's called the Chip Hilton series.
It's a series of sports books.
If you're a 12-year-old boy, it's just fantastic stuff.
It dates back to the 1950s.
replete with just good values.
It is racially diverse and all of that.
It's really, these books are really fantastic.
They're very hard to find.
The full series of the Chip Hilton books is worth thousands of dollars, but they've brought out reissues that have some Christian themes in them, and they made people more openly religious.
And so, I'm sure those are quite good as well.
I obviously prefer the older versions because they're the original. - I would also have to add, I don't know how much they've changed, but the original Boy Scout Code of Conduct.
It's like a great place to start for a young man.
Yeah.
The only problem is that the state of California threatened to revoke their 501c3 exemption if they actually held to it.
Of course.
Toby wants to know, do you believe the Cuban people will ever rise up against their government similar to the Venezuelan people?
Well, it depends.
I mean, I think that the army is being paid off by the, in the same way as in Venezuela, the army is being paid off by the administration in Cuba.
It's one of the reasons why I'm not largely in favor of the quote-unquote opening of Cuba, absent other measures of pressure that we can bring to bear.
I think that tends to re-enshrine the people who are in power.
It doesn't really tend to help the people who are at the bottom of the ladder, who are going to have their wealth seized, and then the people in power just take the money and then redistribute it to all their friends.
Honestly, I don't know the answer to that.
I'm not, I'm not, Knowledgeable enough about the internal politics of Cuba right now.
I mean, obviously you hope, right?
You hope that the people in Iran rise up.
You hope that the people in Cuba rise up.
You hope that Venezuela's revolution is successful as well.
All right, Cherie wants to know, why do you think some people are so easily led to believe non-scientific things like boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that a 40-week-old fetus is not an actual baby?
I think because we have chosen to do away with... I talk about exactly this stuff in this book.
I think that we have chosen to do away with the notion of objective facts and scientific rationales, because we're finding more meaning in our feelings.
We're finding more meaning in subjectivism.
Objective reality?
It's harsh.
I mean, you don't get everything you want.
Reality is what it is.
And sometimes that doesn't meet your expectations of what you think reality should be.
And in an era where we have decided that we're going to find our happiness in self-esteem, we're going to find our happiness in how we feel today, if reality doesn't meet our self-esteem, then we seek to change the reality around us.
Now we're going so far as to change the actual biological reality of sex and suggest that your subjective perception of your own sex somehow is more important To society at large and to yourself than is your actual sexual biology.
That's a pretty radical statement that we've made about the non-value of science.
And it's why, again, I think that the attempt to crack down on this stuff via the use of government is the highest form of tyranny.
I mean, there's a case in the last couple of days in which a woman in Britain is now being investigated by the police for, quote unquote, misgendering somebody.
So, terming somebody by their biological pronoun is now considered a crime in parts of Britain.
I mean, that's an insane contention and obviously a rejection of both Judeo-Christian values and Enlightenment values, which are based on the same belief, that there is an objective reality and you can understand it.
There was even that recent case in Canada where the parents were told by the court that they could not refer to their daughter as her birth name that was on her certificate, or they could face jail time.
It's madness.
And it's scary, I mean, but it is the slippery slope of when is it going to come here?
You can see it coming to California.
I mean, the only thing that's preventing this, presumably, is the First Amendment, but we'll find out.
Trina wants to know, if you could choose to be remembered for a single thing, what would you choose?
I think Lewis Howes asked you a similar question, like at the end of your life.
Yeah.
When you're gone, how do you want to be remembered?
You know, so there's something that occurred to me after George H.W.
Bush passed away, which is that George H.W.
Bush was, he was a good man, but he was not a great man.
What I mean by that is that great men are the people you think of, they're in historic conflict situations, and now they step forward.
The Winston Churchill's, the Ronald Reagan's.
And part of that is just having fate thrust on you certain responsibilities, and then you rise to the occasion.
Being a good man is, to a certain extent, being more anonymous.
It's doing the little things every day that make civilization work.
I mean, the stuff that makes civilization work, yes, you need the guy who is there standing in the breach when something terrible happens, but you also need people who are out there building that social fabric, and that's the stuff that goes non-celebrated.
So, listen, we all want to be remembered because we think that that somehow gives us eternal life, is in the memory of other people.
And if I'm talking about what I want my intellectual legacy to be, I think that this book is a very good place to start.
I think it really does encompass a lot of my philosophy.
But if you're talking about what is the stuff at the end of my life that I'm going to value the most, it's the same stuff that I think most people are going to value the most.
My relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kids, my relationship with God.
And that's not the stuff that will be remembered.
That's just the stuff that mattered.
All righty.
This next question comes from Connor.
He wants to know, are there aspects of Eastern philosophies and religions that have helped out the West?
Sure.
I mean, I think that if you take a look at some of the ideas in Buddhism about how to deal with reality, that the essential notion, which is that it is your choice how to react to the reality around you.
I mean, there are lots of good concepts there.
Obviously, cultural appropriation is a very good thing.
It's one thing that the West is actually unique in pursuing, is taking the best of other cultures and then trying to integrate them into our own culture.
That's why when people rip on cultural appropriation, I think to myself, why?
Why?
And if you're talking about You know, discoveries of the East, obviously mathematics being discovered in India, the discovery of gunpowder.
I mean, there are all sorts of great inventions that happened outside the West.
The point of the book is that the vast expansion, the almost big bang of human development in terms of wealth, in terms of freedom, that did happen in the West.
So why did it happen in the West and not there?
Alright, this question comes from John.
Why, I'm sorry, who are your favorite and least favorite Supreme Court Justices?
So, currently, my favorite Supreme Court Justice is Clarence Thomas.
It has been, I mean, just a lot, even when Scalia was alive, Thomas was my favorite Supreme Court Justice because Scalia has views of stare decisis that I don't think are correct.
He was always talking about which precedent he would obey and which he wouldn't.
And Thomas' basic take was, I'm not going to obey a precedent if it's wrong, which I think is correct.
So he is my favorite Supreme Court justice, and he's a very underrated writer as well.
Least favorite Supreme Court justice.
Notorious RBG is quite terrible.
I mean, she really is.
Her opinions have nothing to do with the Constitution.
They're obvious political polemics.
They're really radical.
So she is really, really awful.
Historically, we're Supreme Court justices.
Obviously, you have to go with Roger Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision.
And if you're talking historically, great Supreme Court justices, then you would have to pick, presumably, maybe John Marshall at the outside of the court, though I disagree with Marbury versus Madison.
And then you would have to, honestly, I think Thomas is an all-timer.
I think he's that good.
That's awesome.
So John wants to know, what point should government intervention be used for the environment?
This conversation came up a lot recently, I think, with the The Green New Deal?
Yeah.
I mean, the answer is when externalities prevail, then you have to have government intervene.
So the general rule of politics, John Stuart Mill says this, and I generally agree with this, is that I get to wave my fist around until I hit you in the face.
At that point, I violated your rights.
Well, the same thing is true environmentally.
I don't get to pump sludge onto your land.
If I do that, I'm violating your rights.
Well, if I'm pumping materials into the air that are doing damage, air pollution, then the government has to regulate that, and they have to regulate that so that the commons don't become Overrun with garbage.
And it's not just you pumping sludge onto my property.
If there's a public park and we all own it in common and you decide to pollute that, then you have taken advantage and you've created externalities.
The problem I see with a lot of environmental policy these days is that the environmental policy should, in fact, be decided at the legislative level, not at the regulative level.
And then beyond that, the left is attempting to regulate The environment in a way that is not actually going to even be useful.
So, the Green New Deal is counterproductive.
I've said before, I'm fully willing to accept and I do accept the mathematics of the IPCC.
Orrin Kass makes this argument, I agree with him.
The IPCC argument that we are going to warm perhaps three degrees Celsius by the end of the century, I'll assume that that's true.
They know the math better than I do.
I'm not a scientist, so I'll take their word for it.
I will also take their word for it when they say that none of the solutions that are currently on the table come close to working.
And that when AOC talks about the Green New Deal, if we brought the United States' emissions to zero today, that would lower the total amount, the total amount of global warming by the end of the century by 0.173 degrees Celsius out of three degrees Celsius.
So in other words, if we completely destroy the American economy, that's what we achieve.
That does not seem like a solution to me.
What do you think about the kind of outrage that Beto and AOC and others are creating about this 12-year deadline?
Well, I mean, this is being exaggerated because they're assuming that if we hit the end of that 12 years, then we just sort of fall off a cliff.
But the fact is that if we blow past that 12 years, human beings have an innate capacity to adapt.
How do they think that human beings got to the United States?
How do you think people got to America?
This entire continental shelf was not populated originally by human beings.
I mean, human beings originated in Africa.
According to most theories, and then spread out all over the various continents.
Well, that was human migration.
Human migration has always been a part of what we do in response to climate.
All right, Miranda wants to know, what do you think our founding fathers would say about the great divide between Democrats and Republicans in America today?
I think our founding fathers would be utterly bewildered by both parties.
I think that we have moved so far from the vision of the founders in terms of what the state government was supposed to do versus what the federal government was supposed to do, what the social fabric was supposed to do versus what the government was supposed to do.
They would look at the Republican Party, they'd say, okay, you guys are going to spend Trillions of dollars this year.
You're going to set up a trillion dollar deficit this year.
What are you even talking about?
And then they look at the Democrats and they'd say, I legitimately have no idea what you're talking about.
Like, I don't know what any of the terms you're using mean.
I don't know what you are talking about when you suggest getting rid not only of key institutions, but of key concepts like biology.
Like, what are you, what now?
So I think that they would be incredibly confused by everything that both parties, virtually everything that both parties are doing.
It'd be kind of fun to have a time machine.
John Adams would be, I mean, can you imagine?
If you're going to go through historic figures on Twitter, who would be just phenomenal on Twitter.
Oh, man.
Adams would have been amazing on Twitter.
And Trumpian on Twitter, right?
From the Oval Office, that dude would have been tweeting everything that came through his head because he was incessantly writing.
Alexander Hamilton would have been vicious on Twitter because he was vicious in writing.
Do you think he would have rapped, though?
No.
No, Elisha.
He would not have.
Sorry.
Ryan wants to know, who do you admire the most in the political world?
I feel like that's like, because it's like somebody that you admired two years ago you cannot admire anymore.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, like it happens so much in politics.
So, I mean, I know a lot of the politicians and never meet the people you admire is the general rule.
That's particularly true in politics.
They have a different job than I do.
It's hard.
You know, I have an easier job than they do.
I get to sit here and tell you about the purity of my ideas and that's a wonderful thing.
And then they have to go and try and implement those ideas.
And that's difficult.
So you see people failing to do that in a variety of ways, but people who I like and I think are trying to do their best.
I mean, I've had many of them on the show.
Dan Crenshaw, I think, is trying to do his best in the House, even though we disagree on some things.
Mike Lee, Senator Lee, he is certainly an honest man who's trying to do his best in the Senate, even though we disagree on some things for sure.
I think Ben Sasse has the right things in his heart, although I don't know why he voted in favor of the National Emergency Declaration other than pure politics.
That's exactly what I was thinking of when I asked that question because there's so many people that the day before would have said Ben Sasse forever.
And then the next day were very disappointed.
Right, but this is just true generally of politics is that you either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain because sooner or later the political stars are going to align such that you're going to have to compromise your own principles.
The question is whether you are honest enough to say, I'm compromising my own principles, or whether you maintain that you're standing up for principle when you really are not.
I'm really excited about this next question from Andy, who wants to know, what are the top five things schools should be doing in America right now that are different?
OK, so the first thing they should be doing is they need to set teacher standards, meaning that Michelle Reid did this in Washington, D.C.
She tied teacher performance to teacher pay, and then the lower performing teachers were fired.
So that needs to be done immediately.
Also, we should be paying teachers more to teach in downtrodden communities as opposed to upscale communities.
We have precisely the reverse.
If you live in Los Angeles and you're a teacher, if you are senior in the American Federation of Teachers, you'll be teaching at Beverly Hills High.
If you're not senior, you'll be teaching in South Central.
It should be precisely the reverse.
We need better teachers who are more experienced and paid more to do a harder job.
We also have to change the curriculum and we have to get back to teaching Simple basics as opposed to whatever politically correct garbage people decide to shovel into the public education system today through social studies classes.
And that means how about we read and write and learn about the value of the American Constitution and the American Declaration and the ancients.
Like this book, honestly, you know, The Right Side of History, the new book.
This book, if people had read it in like 1900, this would have been a high school textbook.
Maybe.
It might have been a junior high textbook, honestly.
And now it's, you know, a post-college textbook because people don't know any of this stuff.
So those are a few things.
Also, more local control of education.
It's not the job of the federal government to teach parents how to educate their children.
Also, we have to have vouchers.
We have to have parents moving their kids from school to school.
The money should follow the kid.
It should not follow the teachers.
And finally, you know, that's four.
So the fifth is that you actually do have to break the teachers' unions.
The teachers' unions should not be legal.
Public sector unions generally should not be legal.
Teachers' unions.
Unionizing against the taxpayer is not an actual union, especially when the government is forcing people to work for the union in order to gain employment.
We saw this with the Janus decision, though.
And even in states like California, though, the unions are still making it so difficult for teachers to no longer be in the union.
Right, to opt out.
Yeah, to opt out.
Exactly.
I like this question because it's actually been kind of a question in pop culture recently because of a favorite of ours.
Chris Pratt has been hit by people for the church that he goes to for, you know, believing the Bible.
Right.
And teaching the Bible.
So Adrienne says that she recently converted to Christianity and her friend Who's a homosexual, says that Christians, by default, hate gay people because Christians want gay people to sacrifice love and happiness simply because of how they are born.
How would you respond to this?
Okay, so everybody is born, obviously, with different challenges in their life.
I'm going to give the religious perspective here, because this has nothing to do with secular policy.
This is just the religious perspective.
So, in Judaism, the Orthodox believe, and the Bible suggests, that homosexual activity is a sin.
Okay, so this is common to the Judeo-Christian value system.
That does not mean that people should be prosecuted on the secular level for any of this activity.
I don't think that's right.
In fact, I'm libertarian on marriage because I think the government should be completely out of all of this.
So, putting aside secular policy and defending religion against this charge.
It is obviously a lie.
The fact is that Christians, Jews, people who are religious, are constantly living alongside other people who they believe are committing sins.
And we ourself believe that we are committing sins on a fairly regular basis.
This idea that we see somebody who is committing a sin and that we hate you because you're committing a sin, something we consider to be a sin, is absolutely asinine.
If that were the case, we'd all hate ourselves.
We all understand that we sin and that we are not perfect.
This is a basic religious principle.
Hating the sin, but loving the sinner.
You know, people try to brush that off, but that's the reality.
If the question is, your standard requires sacrifice of me, then yes, if you were to live up to my standard, it requires sacrifice of you.
That is absolutely true, and that is true of any religious standard.
It is true across a wide variety of human interactions.
Is that sacrifice enormously large when you're talking about people who are biologically attracted to people of the same sex?
Of course that sacrifice is enormously large.
It's an incredible challenge to be a religious person who's abiding by those religious scriptures.
And that's why I think religious people try to treat folks who are gay with tremendous amounts of sympathy, or at least they should, because from a religious perspective, Even if you believe people are committing a sin, you understand that people have biological drives to do things.
In the religious perspective, however, and this is an important point, in the religious perspective, a biological drive to do a thing is not, in fact, a moral excuse to do a thing.
And that is a key component of building Now, maybe you don't want to live up to that standard.
Maybe you feel that the standard is ill-based.
That's fine.
That's your prerogative.
It's a free country.
You can do what you want.
But the original question was, do Christians hate people who are gay?
And the answer, of course, is no, in the same way that I, a Jew, do not hate Jews who violate the Sabbath.
It's an absurdity.
And it's a slander.
And that's why it's so bizarre when you see people who are tweeting out photos of Mike Pence.
Oh, he's next to a gay guy.
So the hell what?
Who was that?
The Irish Prime Minister?
They were so excited.
Right, the Irish Prime Minister and his husband.
It's like, you think Mike Pence gives a damn?
Like, you think Mike Pence is just in the other room quivering in fear or hatred?
My favorite is when people on the left suggest, well, Mike Pence really holds these views because he's a latent homosexual.
He can't actually hold the views.
First of all, why would you possibly, if the idea is to hit Mike Pence and say that he's doing something bad, That's not an insult.
I mean, from your perspective, that's not an insult in any way at all.
I don't think it is an insult, period.
But the whole logic of it is bizarre, and it's designed to make a character attack on you that you know is not true.
Your friend knows you don't hate gay people.
You just converted to Christianity.
Your friend is gay.
They are your friend.
They should know that you do not hate gay people.
If they are bigoted enough that they believe that your worship of Christ somehow now means that you hate them, Then that means that they're thrusting a character description on you that is simply not apt.
Alright, we want everyone to remember that this is a very special episode of our conversation, because not only Daily Wire subscribers get to ask the questions, if you have bought a copy of Ben's book that he's signing today, this is a live signing for that book, The Right Side of History, and you can get your signed copy and ask Ben a question over at PremierCollectibles.com The next question in this next book is from James.
He wants to know, would you agree that our nation, if we don't stay the course with conservative presidents like President Trump, we could possibly end up with an America such as the one in Orwell's 1984 or Rand's Atlas Shrugged?
to get your copy now and submit your question for Ben.
The next question in this next book is from James.
He wants to know, would you agree that our nation, if we don't stay the course with conservative presidents like President Trump, we could possibly end up with an America such as the one in Orwell's 1984 or Rand's Atlas Shrugged?
If not, why?
Yeah, I mean, of course we can always end up in a dystopia.
I mean, it was Reagan who said that freedom is always one generation away from extinction.
So, absolutely.
I don't know that political figures alone are going to be enough to stop that transition.
I think that in the end, we do live in a republic, which means that if we go that direction, it's because the voters of America don't know what they're doing or they've made a poor moral decision.
It's why our job is not just to vote.
Our job is to also tell everybody around us and teach our children the values that we would like to see America preserve.
Jason says, what are your thoughts on the Green New Deal?
Obviously, it would be nice at some time to transition to renewables.
What would your plan be, or what would you continue to do with the progress that we have going towards fossil fuels?
I mean, the fact is that there are a couple of things that I would obviously do.
One is that we need to actually Lower taxes so that people have more capacity to invest in the new energy that is going to help us.
In fact, the United States has radically reduced its carbon emissions.
We're the number one emissions-reducing country on planet Earth over the last several years, specifically because of fracking, which the left hates.
Also, nuclear power.
What the hell?
If you guys are going to proclaim that we need to get rid of carbon-based fuels, then why would you rule out, in the Green New Deal itself, the building of new nuclear factories?
Are you insane?
There is no reality to this notion that you can get to net carbon emissions of zero without understanding that the single most powerful method of generating energy ever devised by man must be utilized.
You know how many windmills it would take to simply compensate for the amount of fossil fuels for the energy grids around the United States?
How many windmills?
The entire area of the state of California would have to be covered in windmills.
It's not a thing that's going to happen.
Although I'm sure some conservatives would be fine with that if it meant California falling off the face of the planet.
Solar power, wind power, these do not represent a significant percentage of the amount of power that is generated in the United States.
What you need is fracking replacing coal generation if you're worried about carbon emissions, and you need nuclear power replacing a lot of this stuff if you want to worry about carbon emissions.
Alright, AJ says, what are the most important values that should be shared between spouses regardless of politics?
So I will say that I think that politics are a good indicator of values.
So whenever I hear people say, well, I'm a Republican, I'm dating a Democrat, I think, OK, well, then either one of you doesn't understand your own political viewpoint or you have wildly differing value systems, because the Democratic and Republican parties do represent differing value systems.
Conservatives still believe that the messages of the past, the values of the past, the Judeo-Christian values have something to say to us and teach us.
And the left believes that we are living in a world-changing scenario where human beings are innately malleable if we can simply change the system under which we live.
These are radically different views of human nature, and it's difficult to see how they live together.
As far as values you have to share, think about raising a kid.
What are the values you want to actually Teach your children.
If you differ on those values, it's going to be difficult for you to have a solid marriage.
The truth is, you can have a marriage in which you disagree on values, so long as you don't talk politics, as long as your goal is simply to have fun with the person.
You can have fun with pretty much anybody.
I can have fun with lots of people with whom I disagree.
But when the goal is raising a child, when the goal is forming a life together, then your common goal has to be met with the same means and the same ends.
And the only way to do that is to look at those things.
So in the book I talk about what my wife and I are looking to teach to our children, the belief that you're not a victim in the freest society in human history, that Judeo-Christian values mean something, that you are You didn't build the building upon which you are sitting, right?
You're sitting on the top of a building.
You didn't build that building, so you need to know about everything that is underneath that.
These ideas didn't come to you.
The world didn't start spinning when you were born.
You actually need to engage with the ideas of the past in order to understand what makes your life so great now.
That you have a responsibility to see the people around you as made in God's image, and that you have a responsibility on an individual level to care for them, not on a governmental level to force you To do something, but on an individual level, it is your job to take care of your neighbors and build social fabric.
And your life has meaning.
And for your life to have meaning, that means that you have to, to a certain extent, believe that there is a broader, something broader in the universe to which you are subject.
These are values I think you have to hold in common.
So, as easy proxies, you have to hold religious values in, you have to hold in common religious values.
And you also have to hold in common basic modes of how you address issues.
I think you use reasons, you use evidence.
It's very difficult to deal with people.
If you are a reason-based person and your spouse is a deeply emotion-based person, you're going to have a real gap in how you communicate.
So I was just totally distracted by the Barack Obama lingo that you were using over there.
First, the book is right side of history.
You just said you didn't build that.
Right, well, I may as well address the right side of history thing right now.
So a bunch of idiots online, and they're pointing out a tweet that I wrote when Obama was president about the right side of history being a stupid phrase.
Right, when you use it to say that my view on same-sex marriage Is going to be justified by history and therefore you are on the wrong side of history.
History hasn't decided yet.
OK, OK, history doesn't have a side.
If there is a right side of history, first of all, to play on the idea, you know, like the right side of history as opposed to the left side of history.
But if you are going to talk about history having a right side, you have to look at the things that are good right now and say, where did they come from?
You can't just say, here is my opinion on something.
And if you disagree with me, you're on the wrong side of history.
You know how I can tell that the United States is on the right side of history?
Because the United States is freaking unbelievably awesome.
That's how I can tell.
I can't tell you, however, if my tax policy is on the right side of history because I don't have future spectacles.
All righty.
Dustin wants to know, in your opinion, who is the most logical choice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
Amy Coney Barrett.
Shortest answer ever.
There you go.
I mean, I didn't even have Stephen's book ready and you were already done with Dustin's book.
Honestly, it should have been the replacement for Justice Kennedy.
I'm still bewildered as to why Brett Kavanaugh was chosen.
I mean, that ended up being an interesting fight, though.
Listen, once he was in it, he had to be confirmed because that was absurd and disgusting.
But I was always ambivalent about whether Brett Kavanaugh would be an actual originalist or whether he would form a new swing center with John Roberts.
I opposed Roberts' nomination.
I was very torn on Kavanaugh.
I expressed my ambivalence about it.
And so far, not to say I'm always right about Supreme Court justices, but I'm kind of always right about Supreme Court justices.
Stephen says, what do you believe would be the best solution for there to be peace in Israel?
I understand it's a hard question, but as I am a Jew and a dual citizen of both America and Israel, I wonder your opinion in the matter.
So there will be no peace in Israel until the Palestinians decide that they no longer wish to kill Jews simply for the sake of being Jews and to liberate Israel from the river to the sea.
And it's very simple.
They've elected three governments.
All three are terrorist governments.
The Palestinian Authority, Islamic Jihad, Hamas are all terrorist groups.
Now, maybe the Palestinian people are starting to wake up to this, which would be a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Now, years ago, obviously, they were not awake to this when they elected Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2005 after Israel voluntarily vacated the place.
They burned down all the Jewish greenhouses and then elected a terrorist group.
But if you're going to talk about Palestinians rising up in the same way we've talked about Cubans rising up or Venezuelans rising up, that would be a wonderful thing.
You think Israelis don't want to be left alone?
You think Israelis really want to be drafted at age 18 and then do years in the military because there are threats on every border?
The thing Israelis want most is to be left alone.
Seriously.
And Dennis Prager uses this argument all the time and it's exactly correct.
If all the Israelis were to put down their guns today, tomorrow there would be no more Israel.
If all the Palestinians were to put down their guns today, tomorrow there would be peace.
All right.
Shane wants to know, Ben, I'm an atheist, but respect and appreciate the values in society Judeo-Christian values have created and cultivate.
I can't bring myself to have faith in a deity, but I think raising a child with religious values and church attendance would be an overall positive influence on their life.
How do you recommend reconciling these two conflicting points?
I don't want to lie to my child and say that I am religious, but I also don't want to try to explain to them why I don't believe while they should.
Thanks for your dedication to the American way of life.
I mean, this is a great question, and I really do think that you should engage your child in religious education, even if you don't believe.
And when your kid is old enough to have these discussions, you can have these conversations.
What I would suggest is that there are a lot of people who don't believe that they are deistic, who actually are deistic.
So if you believe in the concept of personal responsibility and free will, it's very difficult to argue that on the basis of pure atheism.
Maybe on agnosticism, maybe you can just make the assumption, but to believe that you have the ability to make decisions outside of your biology, or at least to overcome your own biological drives, that you have the ability to change and plan and do these things, requires you to believe in something beyond the purely physical.
The purely physical suggests you're just a ball of meat wandering through the universe without any will of your own.
If you believe that the universe is a place where objective truth is possible, where you can understand the things in the universe, not just things that are useful.
Darwinism suggests that our understanding should allow us to find the most useful solutions to problems, but not necessarily the true solution to problems.
If you believe there is such a thing as objective truth, then you have to believe there is something outside of the materialist system that is larger than we are and that has built the system, that there is an order to the universe.
The arguments in favor of God are not simply God gave a bunch of words on a mountain, or God was walking around in the Galilee one day, and it's an actual argument for the logic and rigor of the universe, for your ability to act independently within that universe.
That's how you can come to God.
That doesn't necessarily mean that you come to Scripture the same way.
But I think that coming to a realization about the nature of God was certainly not foreign to the Greeks.
I mean, Aristotle believed in the idea of the unmoved mover.
All right, Aaron wants to know, should common ground be something always worthy of striving for, as it is something that is commonly seen as the goal by many of our modern debates and dialogues?
No, I think that the first thing, look, the end goal is to define positions.
And then if you can find common ground, great.
But in order to have a rational discussion with somebody, you first have to define the ground upon which you are standing.
One of the big problems I see in a lot of the debates I do and the discussions I do is failure to define terms.
So people will say things like, are you in favor of immigration reform?
And they're not defining the term immigration reform.
I mean, I don't know.
You have to tell me what immigration reform means.
What are you talking about?
People will suggest that it is not compassionate for me not to believe in a certain policy.
And I'll need the policy defined, and also I need you to define compassion.
If by compassion you mean that I get to leverage government to do what I want, I disagree with your definition of compassion.
If by equality you mean equality of outcome rather than equality of rights, then I disagree with your terminology.
In order for us to have useful conversations, you first have to define terms.
And then you can, from there, Decide where you disagree.
And maybe through that clarity, you find agreement.
Maybe you clarify each other's positions.
You find that you agree more than you thought you did.
Or maybe you find that you don't agree at all.
And that's fine, too.
But Dennis Prager is right about this, too.
Clarity before agreement, I think, is correct.
But discussion before all is also correct.
All right.
Aaron says, Hey Ben, I'm a huge fan.
Are you excited for opening day and what two teams will be in the World Series come October?
So I am a huge baseball fan as well.
I am excited for opening day despite the fact that my team is not slated to be very good this year.
Chicago White Sox missed out on Manny Machado, which I think is a good thing, actually.
But with that said, the rest of the roster is lacking.
They're probably three years away from being truly good.
Maybe they'll surprise me.
If I have to pick the teams in advance, you've got to take the Yankees in the American League.
They've spent a boatload of money.
I think that you may see a slight regression to the mean from the Boston Red Sox.
And then in the National League, I know that the trendy pick is a little bit the Phillies, but I'm gonna, I'll stick with the Dodgers.
I think it'll be a Yankees-Dodgers World Series.
That could be fun.
That'd be a blast.
It's a throwback World Series.
I don't even pay attention to, I don't even know what that meant.
But I do hope to win the March Madness bracket again here at the Daily Mail.
No, you're not allowed to win.
So Elisha won last year based on sheer, unbelievable ignorance.
She picked an underdog team from Oklahoma to win a couple of games.
No, I picked Oklahoma, Boomer Sooner, to win it all.
And they lost their first game.
And I'm going to frame the tweet from this author of The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro.
I said there's no way she could possibly win, so I was on the wrong side of history.
And I won, guys.
She did win, but that was because- Apparently it was such an upset year, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
People just had their brackets wrecked.
And then, of course, there was Jared in our office who cheated.
So we have a prize for the winner and the loser.
So shout out to Jared right now if you're watching.
Jared, up in the office, let me tell you something.
None of this crap where you win the March Madness bracket For worst bracket by picking all the 16 seeds.
That's garbage.
You're not allowed to throw the thing, man.
It's just a douche move.
Oh, maybe I should do that this year.
I mean, I kind of want to go out as reigning champ, though.
I'm doing a whole book about values and decency, and you're talking about how you can cheat at the March Madness brackets.
It's not cheating if it's an option.
What are you going to teach this child in your belly, Alicia Krauss?
Come on.
How not to work here.
That book is for Angel, and she wants to know, what are the steps that you took to prepare for college, and did your mentor help you?
Well, honestly, I felt like I was pretty well prepared for college just because I was always reading.
And that really is the key.
You have to have good work ethic.
Thank God.
I've always had really strong work ethic, and I'm somebody who likes to get ahead of the game, so I always like to study early.
My wife is precisely the opposite.
She's a massive procrastinator, and it drives me up a wall.
I love it.
A doctor, right?
Indeed.
Okay.
Indeed.
But she will always wait till the last minute, so whenever there's a test date that she has to schedule, there's, you know, an open period.
She can take it near the beginning or the end.
I always just say to her, do it on the last day.
I know you're gonna schedule it at the beginning, and then you'll push it off all the way till the end.
But, you know, it really is about work ethic and willingness to do outside reading.
And that's what gets you through college while still being a sane human being.
All right.
Brian says, Why do you think certain ideologies dominate particular industries?
I work in tech, but not for much longer as I plan to leave partly because of the environment.
That's really sad.
Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of it has to do with location.
So Silicon Valley was founded in Silicon Valley.
I mean, it's in California, in San Francisco.
It tends to draw a lot of local people right from the very outset.
It's also true that people who are well-educated and white-collar tend toward the left, politically speaking, because smart people have a real tendency to think that they can control other people.
When I was at Harvard Law School, one of the first things that happened, the very first day, is Elena Kagan, now justice on the Supreme Court, and in my opinion, not a very good one, she was the dean of the law school, and we were all sitting there in Memorial Hall, beautiful hall, and she walks out on the stage and she says, listen, the competition is over.
You're here.
You won.
You all have jobs.
So here's how many senators we have.
Here's how many congresspeople we have.
Here's how many Supreme Court justices we have.
You're going to be the rulers of the universe.
And I remember thinking to myself, why?
Like, because we're smart?
I know a lot of smart people and they're kind of dumb.
Like smart people, it's great to be smart, but that doesn't mean I know anything about your life or about how to control your family or how you should raise your kids.
You know, that's your job.
I think there are basic values that over time have been proved worthy.
And that's what I talk about in the book.
I mean, there's nothing new in the book.
It's a lot of old stuff.
But I think that there's something to be said for that.
Basically, a lot of the high IQ industries tend to go toward the left because people want to control other people's lives.
You see this particularly in tech where you're seeing Facebook and Twitter say, we're here to make the world a better place.
How about you're here to provide a platform so that we can talk with each other?
And then you leave us alone.
How about that?
And not spying us.
How about spare us?
How about do the Bill Gates thing?
How about spare us the I'm making the world a better place stuff with Microsoft?
Just give us a good product.
And then you want to make the world a better place.
Go do it on your own time.
Give a bunch of money to charity.
All right.
This question comes from Christopher Hennig.
How can you defeat abusive, delusional, and violent people with words and passivity?
I mean, you can't, is the answer.
I mean, passive resistance... I'm assuming he's talking about, like, Antifa versus... I mean, you can't, but this is why we have law enforcement.
So I think it's also a mistake to give Antifa what they want by getting in fights with them, because then they get to claim that you're just as violent as they are, and they get to claim that they're actually the aggressors against fascism and all this kind of stuff.
This is why I've always said at all of my events, you know, people have said, can we come to your events and defend you against Antifa?
I'm like, that's what the police are for.
I pay lots of taxes in this state.
It is their job to do that.
All right.
This question comes from Daniel.
Oh, God.
Do you think Michael Knowles had more difficulties writing his book than you writing this book?
I think I had more difficulty writing more words in Michael Knowles' book than he had in writing his book.
How Michael Knowles made hundreds of thousands of dollars from a book that sold because I wrote the word thorough on the cover is beyond me.
And the fact that he still has a job here is a testament to his friendship with Jeremy Boring.
I can't believe, I really thought as like a baby gift y'all would get me him fired.
Listen.
You know what?
Good idea.
I'll talk to Jeremy about it.
Michael, you're on notice.
You've got how many months left here?
July 5th due date.
So put in your notice, severance package, a couple of months here.
I'm really rooting for 4th of July, baby, because that'd be awesome.
That would be awesome.
I mean, 4th of July backstage, baby, maybe?
I mean, honestly, my daughter, my first kid, was born during the State of the Union address that Obama was giving, and it was fantastic.
I didn't have to cover the State of the Union, and I got a baby out of it.
It was great.
It's amazing.
Zachariah says, have you read any of the Star Wars books, and if so, which one is your favorite?
I have, indeed.
The Thrawn books are very, very good.
I like the Thrawn books.
I've recommended them on the show, and that's what they should have done.
When they reset Star Wars, you stupid idiots, that you have two choices when you reset Star Wars.
Now, see, when you talk about values, I'm, you know, into it, but when you talk about Star Wars, then I get passionate.
So here is the deal about Star Wars.
You fools.
You absolute jackasses.
Here is the story about Star Wars.
You had two choices and you blew it.
Okay, choice number one.
You fast forward a hundred years.
And then you just take up from there.
And everybody is in the past.
They sort of went off and had their happy lives.
And now you're still in the same universe with the same sort of machinery and you can have You can have people discovering stuff about Han, and Leia, and Luke, and Ben Kenobi, and the books, and all this kind of stuff.
And that's fun, right?
That's 100 years in the future.
Everybody had their happy life.
And you didn't ruin my childhood.
Number two, you could just recast the series.
You actually did this with Alden Ehrenreich, right?
You actually did this with the solo movie, which, by the way, I kind of enjoyed.
I liked the solo movie.
I thought it was that and Rogue One were the two best of the new Star Wars movies.
The actual Star Wars canon movies are terrible.
And the reason is because they decided to do exactly What Kylo Ren suggests they should do in the last Star Wars movie.
Kylo Ren says we need to kill off all the oldies so we can make room for the newbies.
And he's the bad guy.
You know what Disney is doing with Star Wars?
Killing off all the oldies.
All the people from my childhood.
Making them losers and then killing them.
So that they can make room for a bunch of boring, boring characters that you don't care about.
They turn Han Solo into a divorced loser father who's driving around in his old caddy.
And what the hell?
He was the coolest guy in the original Star Wars.
And then you turned Luke into some reprobate who lives on a planet where he milks giant space aliens.
Like, what?
What was the decision making here?
What was it?
If you're going to go for the nostalgia play, you actually have to be nostalgic.
You can't just destroy the characters I grew up with.
I pretend those movies aren't part of canon.
All right.
Grant says, why has politics become a religion for many on the left and the right?
Good question.
I have a book for you.
That's legitimately the thesis of the book.
Why is it that we are treating politics as religion?
And the answer is because we've lost our religion.
Human beings have a religious instinct.
We are looking for something more important for us to be a part of.
We are looking for something that motivates us and gives us a sense of meaning.
You can find that in tribalism.
You can find that in anger.
You can find that in a victimhood mentality.
You can find that in communalism, the idea that the community matters more than the individual.
Or you can find that in the values and traditions that brought us to the greatest country in the history of the world.
All right.
Dustin says, Ben, that he's a longtime fan.
So his question is, if you could pick one thing and only one, what do you think is the biggest problem that we as a country need to address today?
I mean, so on a political level, abortion is obviously the biggest problem.
The continued killing of the unborn is a great evil.
And as Thomas Jefferson suggested about slavery, When you think that God will not sleep forever, or God's justice will not sleep forever, it's a little bit disquieting.
As far as generalized problems, the problem of soul, the problem of motivation, the problem of meaning and purpose that I think is lacking in people, and that we have to re-inculcate.
People have to understand what an opportunity they have been given.
Gratitude.
Gratitude is the big one.
And if we can install a sense of gratitude in our kids, then I think that we'll be fine.
All right.
Gratitude in kids is so important.
I play a game with my kids whenever we go to the store that they can't ask for anything.
Oh, wow.
How does that go for you?
If they ask for something, they have to go to bed 30 minutes early.
Whoa.
You're very hardcore.
Alicia's a more hardcore parent than I am, is the truth.
Like, Alicia will, like, I mean, she takes out the belt.
Don't get CPS called on me now.
I take him to church.
I send him to religious school.
The state of California is going to kick me out.
Exactly.
You have a small closet where you lock them for days.
No more wire hangers.
This next question comes from Christian.
It's about religion.
So, brace yourself.
He says, Hi, Ben.
If God is perfect, then why did Lucifer become Satan and humans became corrupt?
Thank you so much for all you do and inspiring me to become my school's first editor-in-chief.
If you're going to ask me Christian theology questions, then probably you should direct those there.
Because in the Jewish view, Satan is not, in fact, a fallen angel.
He's not at war with God.
Satan is called the accuser.
I mean, that's literally what Satan means in Hebrew, is the accuser.
And his job is to be the prosecutor against human beings.
And you see this in, for example, the story of Job, where Satan actually shows up and has a conversation with God.
And he says, do you think this guy here believes in you because you've done all these great things for him or because he actually believes in you.
That's Satan's job.
Satan is like any of the other angels.
In Jewish philosophy, the angels basically have one purpose and one purpose only, and they're God's emissaries.
That's why the word in Hebrew for angel, malach, literally means messenger.
So messenger, like a human messenger, and an angel, it's the exact same word in Hebrew.
And so for angels, it is not that Satan, who's an angel, is now a bad angel or a fallen angel.
That's not how Judaism sees it.
So if you want a Christian theological view, you should ask Knowles or Clavin or Jeremy or Elisha or anyone else around here, actually.
Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh.
Paul Bois.
The Cardinal.
I'm listing all the authors at Daily Wire that would love to answer this question.
Exactly.
I won't take up your time.
I'll beg off, yeah.
Yeah.
Alright, we only got about five minutes left, so let's try to roll through some more.
Marvin says, greetings, Ben.
For my daughter, who, uh-oh, she's a leftist, please explain the absurdity of the coalition between feminist organizations and people like Linda Sarsour.
So, how is it possible for them to coexist when they allegedly have these two opposing ideologies?
So the truth is they should not be able to coexist.
Linda Sarsour is an advocate openly of what she has called Sharia law.
She is associated with terrorists like Rasmia Oda.
She has praised Saudi Arabia as liberal.
Linda Sarsour is a disaster area of a human being.
And for her to be treated as a feminist icon is simply bizarre, except that the philosophy of intersectionality suggests that none of this actually matters.
Intersectionality has destroyed everything.
Basically, the idea of intersectionality started with a basic truth, like all philosophies, and then proceeded to spin off a web of garbage.
The basic truth was that if you look at a black woman, a black woman may be treated differently than a black man because she's both black and a woman, right?
The intersection of black and woman is different than the intersection of black and man.
Well, that may be true on a generic level.
That should not trump individual experiences.
Intersectionality, however, suggests that individual experiences no longer matter.
We can tell by the membership in a group, your membership in a group, what experiences you have had.
And therefore, we can determine whether your opinion ought to hold more or less weight in any discussion.
And in fact, people from different groups can't listen to each other.
Because if we listen to each other, that suggests a common humanity that overrides the assumptions of intersectionality in the first place.
So what that means is that intersectionality, says Linda Sarsour, can be a good feminist while also being a rabid anti-Semite and terror supporter.
Because after all, she is a woman and a Muslim woman, which means that she has been victimized in the United States.
She's part of the Victims Coalition.
More important that we hug the other members of the victimhood group here than that we actually hold fast to anything that remotely resembles, you know, actual honest feminist values.
All right, Paige says, "Hi Ben.
"I'm a woman in the military, "and I'm naturally surrounded by conservatives "on a daily basis.
"However, I've had friends who've called me "a misogynist for voting for Trump.
"How do you suggest I open up a civil dialogue "with someone who cannot see past identity politics "and things for what you do?" - So, honestly, I think that you have to be honest about this.
The reason that you voted for President Trump is not because you were like on the fence and then you heard the Access Hollywood tape and you're like, yeah, that's my guy.
That was no one, right?
Legitimately no one in the United States was like, you know what?
I can't decide between Hillary and Trump, but now that he says that he randomly grabs women by the genitals, I'm in.
Now I'm there, man.
There was no one who did that.
People voted for Trump in spite of that stuff.
I'm sure you voted for Trump in spite of that stuff.
You are not embracing every aspect of Donald Trump by voting for him.
All you are saying is that you do not see how you can vote for the person on the other side.
Now, there are reasons that I expressed during the 2016 election for why I didn't think that the choice was purely binary, and also what I hoped to forestall by not voting for President Trump.
I understand why everyone did vote for President Trump, and it seems like a fairly decent rationale, saying, I would rather that his policies be put in place with all of the drawbacks of him as a human being, than the opposite.
So, I don't have to defend everything Trump does in order to defend his policies, nor do I have to defend my vote for his policies on the basis of him saying terrible things about women.
I've been saying for literally years, on this program and elsewhere, that President Trump's treatment of women historically has been garbaggio.
And this maintains, this continues to this day.
I'm not sure what has changed or why, if I then say I like his tax cuts, this makes me a misogynist.
I'm confused.
Alright, this final question comes from, I hope I'm saying this right, Duong, who says, Hi Ben, what movie or movies are you the most excited for that are coming out in 2019?
Well, I mean, there's the show, right?
Game of Thrones is coming back, so I'm excited about that.
I've never watched an episode.
Yeah, you're missing out.
Game of Thrones is pretty spectacular.
They blew it a little bit last season, but Game of Thrones is really, really good.
Is there a movie that you're excited?
Because you're a theater guy.
You like to go to the movie theater and see a movie.
This is true.
Well, Nolan's next movie comes out next year.
OK.
I will say that just like everybody else, I'm looking forward to the final installment of Infinity War, because you sort of have to say that.
I'm not looking forward to it as much as Elisha is, because Elisha's a crazy person.
The trailer looks so good.
I'm just pissed that they... Again, now you've got me going.
I know.
Okay, so here is the deal.
If you cried when Spider-Man or Black Panther disappeared at the end of the last movie, you're an idiot.
No, I didn't.
Okay, I'm not accusing you.
Was I looking at you?
Well, I don't know.
There are people I know who are like, yeah, I was so sad when Spider-Man died.
I'm like, you're an idiot.
He's not dead.
It's a billion dollar industry.
What are you... Yeah, you're right.
They killed off Black Panther, the most iconic hero they've created in the last 15 years.
I'm sure they killed him off for no reason at the end of Infinity... And he's never coming back, guys.
What a joke.
But I'm looking forward to that.
I saw the trailer for the new Tarantino film.
I'm not a huge Tarantino fan, actually.
But there's always something interesting in the Tarantino films.
I think Scorsese has a new movie that is coming out, The Irishman, that looks kind of interesting.
So I'll check that out as well.
Those are the ones that come to mind.
All right.
That was the last question.
But don't worry.
That's all the time we have for today.
But we thank you to everyone who watched this very special episode of The Conversation and asked Ben questions.
And it's, I mean, you still got books over here.
So I'm just going to keep putting them in front of you.
And you can still get your, if you're like, oh no, it's over.
I can't get a signed copy.
Not true, guys.
You can still get your signed copy over at PremierCollectibles.com slash Ben Shapiro.
And be sure to tune in next month to ask Andrew Klavan your questions on his episode of The Conversation.
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