Ben Shapiro addresses unplanned pregnancies via community support and argues parental values trump systemic educational fixes. He critiques Planned Parenthood funding over border walls, predicts Trump's inevitable Republican primary victory, and rejects the Green New Deal in favor of nuclear power. Shapiro condemns transgender policies violating biological facts, identifies abortion as the core political issue, and explains Satan as a divine accuser rather than a fallen angel. Ultimately, he attributes polarization to lost religion replacing faith with tribalism while advocating for Judeo-Christian values rooted in objective reality. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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'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 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.
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.
"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.
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?