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April 17, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
50:33
Media Matters’ Burro | Ep. 761
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The Washington Post prints an op-ed coming after me, Media Matters rushes to join in, and Rolling Stones celebrates Notre Dame burning.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
A lot to get to today as the radical left takes precedence It's pretty amazing.
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Again, text BEN, my name, Okay, so yesterday, I was minding my own business, covering the news as we do here every day on the Ben Shapiro Show.
And suddenly, across my feed comes this piece from a woman named Talia Levin.
She's a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn.
She used to work for Media Matters.
She also used to work for the New Yorker until she was unceremoniously fired.
Why was she fired?
Well, she was fired from the New Yorker.
She was fired or resigned from the New Yorker.
After she suggested that a retired Marine was actually a Nazi.
We have to go all the way back to, well, actually, it's not that long ago, June 2018, when this happened.
According to the Tampa Bay Times, Talia Levin, whose tweet about a PASCO veteran's tattoo implied that he was a Nazi, has apologized to him and resigned from her position as a fact checker at the New Yorker magazine.
But in another tweet, Levin also lashed out at the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, saying it unfairly targeted her in its own tweet about combat wounded veteran Justin Gertner.
This has been a wild and difficult week, Levin said in a tweet.
I owe ICE agent Justin Gertner a sincere apology for spreading a rumor about his tattoo.
However, I do not think it is acceptable for a federal agency to target a private citizen for a good-faith, hastily rectified error.
Well, you weren't a private citizen when you said this.
You were a reporter when you suggested that the guy was actually a Nazi.
Levin tweeted about a cross-shaped tattoo on Gertner's elbow.
Of course, that was just a cross.
It was a symbol of his own Marine Battalion, apparently.
He is... He was wounded, I guess, in both legs.
Levin tweeted, I had become a weapon used to discredit my colleagues and the vital work they do holding power to account.
As a result, I've resigned after three years at The New Yorker.
And then she suggested that ICE misled people about her.
She said, ICE lied about me, saying I originated the scrutiny of Gertner's tattoo.
She says, I wasn't the genesis of this rumor.
There are still tweets up with tens of thousands of likes explicitly calling the tattoo Nazi.
My own tweet was responsive to extant scrutiny.
I deleted it.
I issued a correction within 15 minutes, long before ICE could have been aware of it.
I was targeted because I was part of a news organization critical of ICE.
And then she said she was a useful foil, a fat Jewish feminist with a Harvard education.
ICE said I baselessly slandered an American hero, artificially pitting me against a disabled veteran, and engineered a conservative news cycle in which I was a villain.
So she is, you know, a person who is fond of leveling charges against others and then playing victim.
So naturally she ended up working at Media Matters for a short while before, I guess, she moved on to writing freelance.
Well, today she has a piece in the Washington Post titled, How the Far Right Spread Politically Convenient Lies About the Notre Dame Fire.
She says, as the conflagration spread through the ancient timbers of Notre Dame's cathedral attic on Monday, a parallel fire was spreading on social media.
This one was willfully set.
A series of conspiracy theories neatly slotted into pre-existing cultural biases.
And soon enough, willing believers were aflame with hate.
The conspiracy theorizing began almost as soon as the blaze did, right when people saw the shocking, transfixing video of the cathedral's spire toppling.
While French authorities began to assert almost immediately that the fire was apparently accidental, the brief gap between the startling image's generation and their explication was enough for far-right figures to exploit with their own sinister insinuations.
Their prevailing view was nearly identical, and apparently completely false, that the fire was deliberate and was probably set by Muslims.
And then she quotes several people who suggest that the fire might not have happened accidentally, There are certain people who suggested that perhaps this was Muslims.
And then she says this.
Many figures on the right took the opportunity to turn Notre Dame into a metonym for Western civilization as a whole, intimating that far more than a cathedral was in peril.
Just as the fire had social media, conspiracy theorist and brain supplement salesman Mike Cernovich dramatically tweeted, the West has fallen.
And here's where it gets good.
Shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro, that's the only description that they take of me these days, radical conservative or far-right, The Economist calls me a radical conservative after falsely labeling me alt-right.
And now, this dolt writing in the pages of the Washington Post suggests that I am a far-right pundit.
But that's not all, she suggests.
She says, shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
Now, that seems pretty unambiguous and Pretty inoffensive, right?
I mean, I said that it was a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
Yesterday on the podcast, I did a 15-minute segment all about the history of Notre Dame as well as its place within the Judeo-Christian river of history.
But Talia Levin is very upset about this.
She writes, Shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
Given the already raging rumors about potential Muslim involvement, these tweets evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West that is also part of numerous far-right narratives.
It was a central thread in the manifesto of the alleged Christchurch New Zealand shooter.
She names him, I won't.
On Tuesday, Shapiro called this article simply gross and said he called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization because it is, not because of malicious intent.
She puts this back in in in parentheses.
That is a late addition to the article.
She then juxtaposes me with Richard Spencer, an actual white supremacist and white nationalist.
She says Richard Spencer, professional racist and coiner of the term alt-right, openly advocated for such warfare, stating and misspelling his hopes that the fire would spur the white man into action to seize power in his country, in Europe, in the world, and declaring such an insurgence a glorious purpose.
And as Buzzfeed's Jane Litvinenko reported, other more oblique figures managed to go even further from provocation in the abstract to more concrete incitement.
Omar under and then she talks about how Ilhan Omar has been has been slandered and how terrible it is.
And then she ends with this.
She says, by Tuesday morning, French authorities had declared the fire extinguished.
The structure of Notre Dame is intact, although its spire in 19th century edition collapsed.
But the conflagration of conspiracy, a corruption of the natural human tendency to assign meaning to events, rages through our information sphere unchecked.
It should not take the imprecations of journalists to restrain this dangerous flow of misinformation.
It is past time that those who stoke inflammatory rhetoric, knowing its potential to catalyze racist violence, were made to stop playing with fire before it's too late to control the inferno.
So she finishes by calling for censorship.
So, in other words, I say that Notre Dame is a Judeo-Christian symbol and a symbol of Western civilization.
She suggests that I'm calling for war with Muslims based on that extraordinarily anodyne tweet.
And then she suggests that I must be silenced because I am participating in a dangerous flow of misinformation.
And then she blames me for violence.
So, hilariously enough, she says all of this.
I tweet out how dumb this is, because it is perfectly obvious what I meant in my original tweets.
I talked about it repeatedly.
Nowhere in my original tweet thread, or anywhere else, have I suggested that Muslims were behind the burning of Notre Dame, because the evidence suggests that is not the case.
That is not what the French government has said.
Okay, all of this prompted Media Matters, the former employer for this not very nice person, Tali Levin, to tweet at me.
Why?
Well, because she had tweeted also that she thanked Media Matters for gathering information so she could write that column, which just demonstrates, by the way, where Media Matters lies in the sort of information complex for the mainstream media.
Media Matters is a left-wing group founded by David Brock in coordination with John Podesta and Hillary Clinton right before Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000.
It has long been a font for Clintonista hackery, and its main mission is basically to knock right-wing people off the air, not conservatives off the air.
Media Matters has for years been funded by members of the Democratic Party left and higher echelon people on the left.
Specifically, to dig up garbage on people on the right and then to try to initiate fake secondary boycotts against the advertisers.
They did this to Tucker Carlson.
They've done it to Laura Ingram.
They've done it to Rush Limbaugh.
They've done it to Sean Hannity.
They've done it to a... They're a 501c3 group.
They certainly do not act like a 501c3 non-profit.
They're a horrible organization designed specifically to smear their own political opponents and the political opponents of people like Hillary Clinton and then to target advertisers who dare to spend their money with those people, even if those advertisers are not actually involved in promoting that show alone.
So an advertiser can advertise on Tucker and also advertise on MSNBC.
Media Matters targets the advertisers for Tucker.
Media Matters, by the way, is so obviously partisan that after Joy Reid was hit with a bunch of allegations and, in fact, proof that she had said some terrible things in her past, Media Matters said that that was a hit job against Joy Reid.
So Media Matters' only job is to create these long, giant files of supposedly terrible stuff that people on the right have said.
So Talia Levin thanked Media Matters on her Twitter feed for helping her gather information for her crap column.
And then I tweeted out that her crap column was in fact a crap column and that she was taking a tweet that was perfectly Innocent and historically accurate, and then trying to link me to violence against Muslims on the basis of that, which is not only a stretch, it is a tearing apart of any semblance of logic or reason or honesty.
So I tweet that out, and Media Matters tweets back at me, from their corporate account.
F you and the burro you wrote in on.
So first of all, man, leave the borough out of it.
Like, I don't know what the borough has to do with anything, but you leave that borough out of it.
And I don't understand, honestly, what the reference is supposed to be, too.
Then, Media Matters tweets this out, trying to justify, so they start getting ratioed, which means people on Twitter point out how dumb this is, and that Media Matters is a garbage organization, because they are.
By the way, it is well, it is worthy of note.
Media Matters is constantly quoted as a media watchdog, that's how it is termed, constantly, by the left-wing media, by the mainstream media.
They are constantly calling Media Matters a media watchdog, just as they called the Southern Poverty Law Center a racism watchdog, These are hardcore leftist groups with motivation.
Media Matters proved it yesterday.
F you and the bro you wrote in on for criticizing an opinion columnist in the pages of the Washington Post for basically throwing out slanderous material.
Not legally slanderous, but in the generic sense.
We'll get to more of this in a second because wait until you see what else Media Matters had to say.
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Media Matters didn't stop with suggesting that I F myself and also that they wanted to have sex with a donkey.
They also continued by then trying to explain their way out of this.
And so they tweeted out, in the aftermath of this, they also tweeted, quote, Some context, Talia Levin, a great writer who worked with us, has been on the receiving end of right-wing harassment for the better part of a year now, often spurred by spurious attacks on her work.
So, in other words, I am now inciting violence against her?
So, let's review the history.
She attacked a disabled veteran and called him a Nazi and then deleted it.
And when people got uptight, then it was incitement against her.
She attacks me as someone who is supposedly calling for a war between Islam and the West, a war on Muslims or blaming Muslims based on Notre Dame Cathedral, a thing that I have not done.
And then Media Matters responds by suggesting that my criticism of her crap column means that I am now generating harassment against her.
Some context.
A great writer who worked with us has been on the receiving end of right-wing harassment for the better part of a year now, often spurred by spurious attacks on her work.
All of this, by the way, is a demonstration of the incitement lie that the left keeps telling over and over and over, which is that anybody on the right who says anything at all is involved in incitement.
And it doesn't stop there, because Media Matters then continues.
They keep trying to double down on this thing.
The first rule of holes, of course, is to stop digging, but Media Matters never stops digging.
So here's what Media Matters tweets then, quote, some additional relevant context here.
This is hours later.
This is the jerk store routine from Seinfeld.
You know, they owned themselves, they played themselves, and now they're desperately trying to spin their way out of their own stupidity.
So they say some additional relevant context here.
Indeed, the specific MMFA tweet response Ben is drumming up outrage about is unbecoming of and unusual for an organization as prestigious as MMFA.
By the way, so I guess now they're members of Prestige International from Step Brothers.
That's exciting.
When an organization calls itself prestigious, you know they're not.
Then they say, but, you see, it was actually a reference to, drumroll, Ben's own tweet on related matter.
And then they go and they dig up a tweet from a month ago.
In which I suggested that if you call me alt-right, you ought to F yourself and F the horse you rode in on, which was directed, I read it at the time on the air, at The Economist because The Economist suggested in their headline that I was the alt-right sage without the rage, which was another lie.
So Media Matters is now trying to dig up times where I have used the F-word online and then try to claim that they are making a callback reference rather than just being partisan heh.
Hacks, which is what they are.
By the way, their incitement lie isn't just restricted to me.
They have a piece today called National Review Writer's Distortion Invites Harassment of an Abortion Clinic Director.
A National Review Writer, her name is Alexandra DeSantis, she's terrific.
So she pulled a tweet from Hales' Twitter thread to wrongly claim, according to Media Matters, that the clinic director did not believe that infants were legal persons until 30 days after birth.
Supposedly, supposedly, this is now incitement.
So what exactly happened here?
So Sanctus tweeted out, a quote tweeted, one of these tweets about a North Carolina bill.
Hales's tweet highlighted, according to Media Matters, some of the potentially unconsidered legal implications of the bill.
For example, as Hales explained, while the bill states a born-alive infant is a legal person for all purposes, that definition appeared to be in conflict with Hales's understanding that an infant younger than 30 days cannot be added to a will in North Carolina.
DeSanctis said, oh, here's a NARAL board member opposing a born-alive bill in North Carolina and claiming that an infant can't be a legal person because you can't add them to a will until they're 30 days old.
That is true.
That is true, okay?
DeSantis' characterization is accurate, and Media Matters is now saying that that is incitement of violence.
This is the big lie of the week, and it's going to be the big lie going forward.
And the big lie, on a daily basis, from the left, is that if you criticize the left, you are now involved in incitement against the left.
That's a horrible lie.
I mean, they've been using it for the last couple of weeks about Ilhan Omar, that if you criticize Ilhan Omar for being a rabid anti-Semite, somehow you're inciting violence against her.
When Bernie Sanders says that millions will die because Medicare for All has not been passed, that's not an incitement of violence.
When Democrats suggest that President Trump is a Russian agent, that is not incitement of violence.
When Democrats call me alt-right or suggest that I am responsible for violent attacks for which I have no responsibility, that is not incitement of violence.
But it's incitement of violence for us to point out when the left is wrong.
I mean, that Media Matters tweet is so telling.
The one where they suggest that me defending myself against a slander is now incitement of violence against the person who attacked me in the first place.
It's just amazing.
And you can see how cynical this tactic is.
All of small-r republicanism is reliant on us being able to have discussions with each other and, yes, criticize each other.
And if bad-faith criticisms take place, the proper answer to that is to point out that a bad-faith criticism has taken place.
It is not to suggest that the person who made the bad-faith criticism is somehow involved in incitement to violence.
If we reach the point where every critique is now considered incitement, free speech no longer exists.
Remember, incitement is not covered by the First Amendment.
So if the left moves to the standard Where everything that they don't like is now incitement to some form of violence, and therefore can be regulated, you end up with the repressive tolerance regime first proposed by Herbert McHugh's, the 1960s-era make-love-not-war Frankfurt School professor, who suggested that true tolerance lay in silencing voices from the right.
Because if we allowed those voices to speak, then somehow even the expression of those viewpoints would amount to a targeting of people on the left.
And this mentality, unfortunately, which started on a lot of college campuses, has expanded outward.
It's expanded outward to the point of the absurd.
To the point where even the expression of certain views is considered a form of supremacy that must be shut down.
The best example of that today is there's an article from a woman named Sophia Lung In Library Journal, in which she suggests that libraries are now repositories of white supremacy.
Why?
Because there are a lot of books by white people at libraries.
In a piece that was put up yesterday, she said, Whiteness as Collections.
I had this interesting mini-eureka moment a few weeks ago I wanted to share for a few reasons.
One, I don't usually reflect on the connections that help me understand how I learned something new or what goes into coming up with some new concept.
Most of the time, the connections aren't clear to me.
Two, I like to show students that inspiration for new research or scholarly ideas doesn't have to come only from scholarly publications.
Three, I needed to write it out to fully understand how I came to this conclusion and to really understand what this conclusion means.
Marie Kondo has been in the zeitgeist for a while, but especially now that she has a Netflix series, I saw the first episode a while back and it reminded me of how having a space clean of clutter and mess really helps the mind feel clearer.
Marie Kondo's spiritual approach to objects also made me reflect upon our relationship with objects and why we feel so much attachment to intimate objects, to inanimate things.
Why can't we just let those things go?
And she goes on to suggest that libraries themselves are a formation of whiteness.
She says, One of the mind-blowing things she shared was this idea of how our library collections, because they're mostly written by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks.
of color whose thinking continues to push me and who I respect and admire so much.
And we had some really interesting discussions where I learned a lot.
One of the mind-blowing things she shared was this idea of how our library collections, because they're mostly written by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks.
Pause here and think about this.
So in other words, if there are a lot of books by white people, those are white ideas.
They're taking up too much space in the library.
That's white supremacy too.
So the left is now going to label everything white supremacy, and white supremacy, of course, is a form of incitement, and so burning books, hey, what the hell, throw the books out of the library, and why not burn them?
I mean, come on, what are they gonna do?
You don't want them getting into the wrong hands.
We'll get to more of this stupidity in just one second.
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Okay, so back to this stupid idea that libraries are a repository of white ideas.
If you don't already know, says this writer, Sophia Lung, writing for Library Journal.
She says, if you don't already know, whiteness as property is a seminal critical race theory concept first introduced by Cheryl Harris in her 1993 Harvard Law Review article by the same name.
She writes, slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property, and the formation of whiteness as property required the erasure of native peoples.
Basically, white people want to stay being white because of the privilege and protection whiteness affords under the law they created.
So, I guess the theory of the article, according to Elisa Fialong, is that property itself is a white people creation.
Which is ridiculous.
I mean, truly ridiculous.
It is a deep part of Judeo-Christian history at the very least.
Harris makes this really good point.
Whiteness and property share a common premise, a conceptual nucleus, of a right to exclude.
Bam!
That really hits it on the head.
If you look at any U.S.
library collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections—books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.—are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things or ideas, people, and things they stole from people of color and then claimed as white property with all of the rights to use and enjoyment that Harris described in her article.
When most of our collection is filled with this so-called knowledge, it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color.
Collections are a representation of what librarians or faculty deem to be authoritative knowledge, and as we know, this field and educational institutions historically and currently have been the site of whiteness.
Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries.
No more collections!
Stop that!
Stop library collections!
Burn the books!
They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc.
Yeah, I'm sure that's what happened.
I'm sure that Widener Library at Harvard is built solely on white people stealing black people's money.
That's for sure what happened there.
And I'm sure that all the collections at Widener Library at Harvard University, one of the largest libraries on planet Earth, I'm sure that it's all about preserving whiteness, not about, you know, having lots of books that we can all peruse.
Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicate that we don't care about what people of color think.
We don't care to hear from people of color themselves.
We don't consider people of color to be scholars.
We don't think people of color are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people.
To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out black indigenous people of color as they were meant to do and continue to do.
One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a black Columbia student for being black.
That is not accurate.
What happened at Barnard, we talked about it on the radio show, what happened at Barnard is that a black student went for free food at a library, refused to show ID to police over and over and over again.
One of the officers was black.
And then, after the police said, OK, we're going to take you outside, then he told everybody to turn on their cameras and urged people to distribute all of this information.
I mean, this is insanity.
But this is, unfortunately, the growing wave of the radical left.
It's not everybody on the left, but it is a growing wave within the radical left.
All speech we don't like is violence.
White supremacy is violence.
Listen, I hate white supremacy.
I think it's evil.
White supremacy is not violence, and simply existing is not white supremacy.
So here is the chain of thought.
All conservatives are Nazis.
Nazis deserve to be punched.
Punch the Nazi.
All conservatives are far-right.
All conservatives are far-right.
Far-righters incite people.
Therefore, regulate them.
All white people are conservative.
All conservatives are racist.
All racism leads to violence.
Therefore, get rid of the white people collections at the libraries.
And this chain of thought is so perverse and so stupid and so non-unifying, it's nearly astonishing.
Unfortunately, as I say, it is becoming more and more prominent.
In fact, there is a piece from Rolling Stone today talking about Notre Dame, in which Rolling Stone suggests that burning down Notre Dame was good for Notre Dame.
They tweeted out, quote, the building was so overburdened with meaning that it's burning feels like an act of liberation.
That's according to Rolling Stone magazine.
Why?
Because the history of Judeo-Christian values, the history of the West, is in fact burdensome and bad, and thus must be torn out at its roots.
So if Notre Dame burns, that's not bad.
That's not a bad thing.
So here is what this article from Notre Dame, from Rolling Stone suggests by E.J.
Dixon.
Hey, the article suggests, for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution, and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place.
You see, when symbols burn, that's good, because we have placed meaning in those symbols.
The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation, says Patricio del Real, an architectural historian at Harvard University.
If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of the Old City, the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith, just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre, and change, Michael Kimmelman wrote for the New York Times.
Despite politicians on both sides of the French political spectrum discouraging people from trying to politicize the Notre Dame fire, it would be a mistake to view the building as little more than a Paris tourist attraction, says John Harwood, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of Toronto.
It's literally a political monument.
All cathedrals are, he says.
For centuries, the cathedral was the seat of the bishop of the Catholic Church at a time when there was virtually no distinction between church and state.
Notre Dame acquired even more overtly nationalist symbolism following its renovation in the 19th century by Eugène-Emmanuel Vallée-Ledoux, who is widely considered the godfather of modern historical architecture restoration.
His restoration of the church was highly controversial, to an extent it still is today.
His approach to restoration was not, let's fix the building as it is and put it in decent structural condition, says Cesare Barignani, assistant professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York.
In fact, he acted in a much more inventive and problematic way, because he claimed to re-establish or restore to the church an image that it may never have had.
It was his own reinvention, or his own idea of how the church may have existed at the beginning of the 13th century.
The restoration led to a reappraisal of the Gothic style as a kind of ultimate symbol of French architecture.
What it means to be French, however, has obviously changed a great deal over the past few centuries.
While France is still predominantly Christian, the number of practicing Catholics has fallen year after year.
From 64% in 2010 to 56% in 2012, according to one census figure, the number of Muslims in France is also growing, comprising more than 5% of the population, giving rise to rampant Islamophobia.
A profound income gap has led to the explosion of protests from the Yellow Vests.
Therefore, Notre Dame has lost some of its weight as a totem of national identity.
It is, so therefore it burning, not a terrible thing, not a terrible thing.
Instead, we should, you know, reflect on what France means now and then rebuild this monument, not in its original style, but in line with what France means now.
So this is, this is the push from the left.
And unfortunately, as I say, it is becoming more and more prominent.
There's an article in the Washington Post today suggesting that the Judeo-Christian tradition, even the invocation of that very good, true, and historically accurate phrase, is a very bad thing.
I'll explain in just one second.
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All righty.
So as I say, the left is in the business now of tearing apart traditional ideas because those traditional ideas are apparently inherently dangerous.
So the new one that they don't like is Judeo-Christian tradition.
If you say Judeo-Christian tradition, that is now divisive, and as we have learned, Divisive language is inciting language, and inciting language should be illegal.
This is the chain of thought.
So, I'm not suggesting that that is what Anna Grismala Boussey is saying at Washington Post.
She is not calling for censorship of the term, but the attempt to use, she is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies at Stanford, the attempt to take terms like Judeo-Christian tradition and turn them into wedges is pretty astonishing.
It's pretty astonishing and pretty negative.
So she suggests, even as Notre Dame Cathedral was burning, pundits such as Ben Shapiro began to mourn it as a monument to Western civilization built on a Judeo-Christian heritage, describing the fire.
And Katie Hopkins, she links me together with a right winger in Britain named Katie Hopkins, who has described the fire as symbolic of Judeo-Christian annihilation, which is not something that I actually suggested.
And then she says, so what is Judeo-Christian tradition?
She says many people use the term Judeo-Christian tradition to describe a religious and ethical consensus.
The phrase commonly refers to the shared religious texts, moral precepts, and millennia of shared cultural and historical values between Christianity and Judaism.
Both faiths affirm one God, prize the covenant between God and His people, and value the dignity of human life.
Said to be the basis of Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian tradition invokes shared values and connected fates.
Okay, all of that is true, and that is accurate, and that is what most people mean when they use it.
But, she says, that is not real.
She says there is no Judeo-Christian tradition.
She says it is neither as religiously or politically coherent as it sounds.
Judeo-Christian fuses together distinct theologies.
Few elements of doctrine or belief are shared.
Okay, few elements of doctrine or belief?
Few elements between Judaism and Christianity?
How about like the first half of Christianity?
How about like the entire Old Testament?
That is pretty shared right there.
How about the fact that the vast majority of statements in the New Testament mirror statements in the Old Testament?
That's kind of shared.
How about the fact that Jesus was Jewish?
Yes, Christianity and Judaism are not the same religion.
I'm aware.
I'm aware, Professor.
I wear a Jew hat all the time.
And I'm taking off Jewish holidays next week.
I'm pretty well aware of the history of Christian persecution of Jews.
I'm very well aware of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism and their differences with Judaism.
Very well aware of that.
But to suggest that there is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian history in the West is simply asinine.
She says, There is not much history of shared fates here on earth.
In the name of defending Christian communities, European rulers and clerics promulgated the blood libel, forced Jews to convert, and had Jewish children taken away from their parents.
Historically, ghettos, pogroms, expulsions, restrictions on jobs and education, the toleration of violence and prejudice directed against Jews in the name of Christian integrity, all belie the notion of shared fates, much less shared moral principles.
Well, no, all of those evils were indeed evil.
And as the West progressed, it made more room for Jews.
To pretend that Judaism and Christianity don't have a shared root of the tree, however, is simply silly.
That's silly.
And the attempt to turn what is a uniting term into a divisive term is demonstrative of how little people actually like the religion.
Because in order to divide Judaism from Christianity in Judeo-Christianity, all you have to do is focus on the evils that Christianity has perpetrated rather than the great good that Christianity has perpetrated, by the way, on behalf of Jews, as well as many other people around the world.
But using mainstream uniting terms to divide and then suggesting that those terms are inherently divisive, Pretty, pretty ugly stuff.
So, what do we have here?
We have historians who are denigrating history, librarians who are denigrating libraries, and popular magazines suggesting it's good when great symbols like Notre Dame burn.
Yes, we may have a problem here in the West.
As I've said, and I've said this in my book, Right Side of History, as I've said many times, there are two visions of what Western civilization constitutes, and we are watching that play out in real time.
Version number one is that Western civilization is good.
Western civilization, in fact, is the best civilization.
It was funny, some lefty yesterday suggested, you know, Shapiro, with his tweets, implies that Western civilization is the best civilization.
I'm not implying it, I'm stating it openly.
Western civilization is the best civilization.
If you disagree, why don't you turn in those vaccines, all your technology, democracy, free speech, and human rights.
You can turn those in at the door if you don't think that Western civilization is the best civilization.
Women's rights, gay rights, all those things.
Turn them in at the door.
Western civilization is the best, as I posit in my book, because Western civilization is a fusion between shared Judeo-Christian values, values shared between Jews and Christians, springing back to Sinai and moving forward through the Sermon on the Mount, And Greek reason.
That is the thesis of my book.
And there are people who see that as good.
And then there are people who see Western civilization as inherently evil and racist and predatory.
And for those people, even the invocation of Judeo-Christian tradition or Western civilization, these things are a great lie promulgated in order to hide the evils of Western civilization.
To me, those are not a lie.
And if you are living in the greatest time in the history of planet Earth, in great comfort and safety, I would suggest that you don't actually believe that the principles of Western civilization are a lie either.
Or if you do, you are being dishonest with yourself.
Alrighty, meanwhile, the 2020 Democratic race continues to heat up.
And I will say the level of incompetence in the Democratic race is pretty astonishing, which is one of the reasons that you're seeing the rise of Pete Buttigieg, who happens to be the least incompetent person in the field right now, other than maybe Bernie Sanders.
So President Trump is pretty much trying to forecast who he's going to run against.
He tweeted out yesterday, I believe it will be crazy Bernie Sanders versus sleepy Joe Biden as the two finalists to run against maybe the best economy in the history of our country and many other great things.
I look forward to facing whoever it may be.
May God rest their soul.
Okay, so you got to enjoy competitive Trump because I mean, come on.
Again, you can either continue to to I don't know why he's going with Sleepy Joe Biden.
Why not Creepy Joe Biden?
Wouldn't that be the way to go?
Hasn't he used Sleepy before?
I feel like he's used Sleepy.
So he is high energy, but Joe Biden is Sleepy.
Crazy Bernie.
I don't know why he's going with sleepy Joe Biden.
Why not creepy Joe Biden?
Wouldn't that be the way to go?
Hasn't he used sleepy before?
I feel like he's used sleepy.
So he is high energy, but Joe Biden is sleepy.
Anyway, him saying that it's going to be Sanders versus Biden, that's probably correct.
And all the other Democrats are trying to vie for attention.
Beto O'Rourke is desperately trying to vie for attention.
Beto!
Still out there on the campaign trail, trying to find himself.
And so he was asked about Trump, and he says, you know what?
Trump's the worst, man.
Trump's so terrible.
He's like the guy who one time stole my pot from the glove compartment.
That was just the worst.
And I was forced to, you know, vape instead, bruh.
Here's Beto going on Trump.
It's not just that he's partisan.
It's not just that he is divisive.
He's hateful.
He is racist.
He's encouraging the worst tendencies amongst our fellow Americans.
Okay, so that is his pitch, is that Trump is mean.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Beto is truly incompetent at this.
The reason that I say that he is truly incompetent, he was asked last night at a town hall at the University of Virginia.
I've served in public office since 2005.
I do my best to contribute to the success of my community, of my state, and now of my country.
There are ways I do this that are measurable.
There are ways I do this that are immeasurable.
He donated like a couple of grand out of $317,000 or something.
Here was his response, quote, "I've served in public office since 2005.
I do my best to contribute to the success of my community, of my state, and now of my country.
There are ways I do this that are measurable.
There are ways I do this that are immeasurable.
Like, well, there are charities that we donate to that we've recorded and itemized.
Others we've donated to that we have not, but I will tell you, I'm spending everything, I'm doing everything I can right now, spending this time with you.
Not with our kiddos, not back home in El Paso.
Because I want to sacrifice everything to make sure that we meet this moment of truth with everything we've got.
Wow, is that a garbage answer.
Holy moly, is he bad at this.
I love that.
So he, by the way, he was asked, okay, so do you have like any record of the charities that you gave to that you didn't itemize?
No answer from the, to the press.
My favorite thing there is he says, listen, I give a lot of charity, but true charity is that I'm here with you right now.
Because what a charitable dude I am.
We get to sit together and I'm spending my precious time talking with you.
And we're talking about like life and the universe and Trump being a racist.
That's charity brah.
Oh, okay.
Now the proper answer to this question, by the way, is you are totally right.
I should have given more charity.
I look forward to giving more charity in the future.
You know, everybody is a sinner, and I've been remiss.
We can all give more charity.
I'm one of the people who should have done better.
That's such an easy answer.
It's such an easy answer.
And yet, Beto O'Rourke can't do it.
I mean, all that's doing is expressing gratitude to people who do give more charity than you.
I've said it on the program before that I should give more charity, and I've been really attempting to do so.
Yesterday, I gave a bunch of charity.
Like, I'm looking forward to giving more charity as I earn more money.
That's a good thing.
And in the past, I should have given more charity.
We should all have given more charity, and I'm one of the all.
I feel the same thing about people who do military service.
They undertook a sacrifice that I did not.
So if Beto is asked, dude, why didn't you actually serve in the military when people like Pete Buttigieg did?
His answer should be, some people have undertaken sacrifices far greater than anything that I have undertaken.
Instead, I think what you get is, dude, is serving in Afghanistan really that much better than me, like, standing on this table right here in a Dairy Queen in Iowa, He's so bad at this.
It's incredible.
Speaking of really bad at this, Cory Booker, also really bad at this.
The senator from New Jersey.
Yesterday he was asked about late-term abortion.
Here is his dumb answer.
There's this recent bill that caused a lot of controversy where I had people from church communities that I frequent say to me, did you vote against this thing that allows us to kill babies when they're born?
And I'm like, that is a felony.
That is a crime.
That cannot happen under any law.
This was something that was put forward to try to further create schisms and differences between us.
You cannot kill a child after birth in this country.
That is against the law.
Okay, but you can let a child die after birth in this country in a botched abortion in some states.
So there is that.
And also, if you don't actually like the bill, then you're going to have to explain why it's bad.
Two weeks before the partial birth abortion bill came up, again, before the Protection of Unborn, Pain-Capable Unborn Children Act, before that came up, Cory Booker voted for a federal anti-lynching law.
Lynching is illegal in every state in America.
It's murder.
It's illegal everywhere.
Cory Booker voted for it because he said it's good for the federal government to put its imprimatur of disapproval on this.
So why exactly is he fighting back against this?
Good luck.
He's just bad at this.
Now, here's the problem.
Pete Buttigieg is getting worse at this.
So as Buttigieg moves into the mainstream, he also feels the necessity to push to the left.
So instead of pushing as the sort of moderate candidate who kind of likes capitalism, instead, Buttigieg is pushing to the Bernie Sanders left, hoping to steal some of that vote.
Good luck with that, dude.
He says capitalism has let a lot of people down.
I think the reason we're having this argument over socialism and capitalism is that capitalism has let a lot of people down.
I guess what I'm out there to say is that it doesn't have to be so.
I believe in democratic capitalism, but the democratic part is extremely important.
At the end of the day, we prioritize democracy.
And, you know, having that framework of a rule of law, of fairness, is actually what it takes for markets to work.
Okay, no, that is not what it takes for markets to work.
The idea that people can vote to stifle markets is a violation of fundamental human freedom to control the labor that you create.
If you can't control your own labor because other people vote that you're not allowed to do that, that is not capitalism at work, nor does that help capitalism.
Okay, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
There is a fantastic series on Netflix.
I was only made aware of this in the past couple of weeks by my friend Jason Rantz up in Seattle.
The show is called Broadchurch.
And it's with Olivia Colman, who is just terrific, and David Tennant.
The acting is fantastic.
The acting all the way through the series.
Now, it does sandbag you a little bit at the end, but with that said, it's really, really well done.
It's a murder mystery about an 11-year-old boy who's been killed, and these two police officers, these two detectives have to look into it, and it's this small town, and everybody's got a secret.
So the premise is pretty common, but the execution is first-rate.
Here's a little bit of the trailer.
This morning, the body of an 11-year-old child was found on Harbour Cliff Beach at Broadchurch.
Why didn't you say that he was gone?
I didn't know.
Okay, so it's really good.
The acting is really good.
The pacing is a little slow, but that's okay because it does truly build.
Go check out Broadchurch.
I haven't seen any of the other seasons, but I finished season one this morning and it is excellent, so go check that out.
Okay, other things that I like.
So, Yashar Ali, who is an independent reporter and he does a lot of really good work.
Yashar Ali also started pushing a crowdfunding campaign yesterday for three fire-ravaged black churches in Louisiana.
So, Yashar Ali was the one who started pushing this really hard.
I saw it.
Among others, I gave money.
Hillary Clinton gave money.
Jake Tapper from CNN gave money.
A lot of folks, left, right, and center gave money.
They have raised well over a million dollars in the last 48 hours to rebuild these three fire-ravaged black churches that were burned down by a white supremacist.
In Louisiana.
So pretty amazing, amazing stuff.
And it just goes to show you that people do want to help each other out.
There's this idea that runs through leftist thought that innately human beings don't want to help each other out and that you need government to step in and do something about it.
There's this idea that runs through, yes, Judeo-Christian values.
And by the way, in Muslim communities as well, many religious communities, That the social fabric requires you to take care of each other.
And this is a perfect example of how a Judeo-Christian country goes out of its way to help people that you don't know, because you feel like there are institutions important to building a social fabric.
Originally, the goal was $600,000.
They tripled the number to $1.8 million.
It looks like that will be hit within the next 48 hours.
So, good stuff there.
And if you have a little bit extra money, this is a really good cause, rebuilding these churches in St.
Landry, In Louisiana, so you can go check that out right now.
And Yashar Ali does this kind of stuff all the time online, pushing charitable causes.
Twitter is a flaming garbage heap, but sometimes Twitter comes through.
Sometimes Twitter actually provides some good stuff.
Alright, time for some things that I hate.
So speaking of crackdown on Judeo-Christian values, Concordia University in Canada had invited Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield to give the spring commencement address for its Liberal Arts College.
That makes perfect sense because Mansfield is one of the great scholars in the Western tradition.
Mansfield has done translations of Plato.
Mansfield has done translations of de Tocqueville.
Mansfield is first-rate.
He's really good.
The college's students study great books in Western thought.
Mansfield teaches these subjects.
He's one of the most prominent scholars of it in the West.
But then the university rescinded its invitation.
Principal Mark Russell sent Mansfield a weaselly letter expressing regret that faculty and alumni were unable to reach consensus as to what we wanted to achieve with this event, is according to Reason.com.
Russell lamented that the selection committee acted in good faith but rather precipitously when it invited him in the first place.
Mansfield discovered the true explanation.
He relates this in his Wall Street Journal op-ed.
What had taken place, I learned not from the principal, was a faculty meeting prompted by a letter from 12 alumni that demanded a reversal of the committee's invitation because my scholarly and public corpus heavily traffics in damaging and discredited philosophies of gender and culture, promoting the primacy of masculinity.
Apparently a reference to my book, Manliness, attracted their ire.
Though I was to speak on great books, not gender, this trafficking, as if in harmful drugs, disqualified me without any need to specify further.
Such sloppy, inaccurate accusation was enough to move a covey of professors to flutter in alarm.
Mansfield is politically conservative.
He's also an advocate of natural law.
Natural law is conservative on matters of gender.
Because it turns out that nature also happens to be rather conservatives on matter of gender.
Mansfield says speech is not an alternative to power, but a form of power, political power, and political power is nothing but the power to oppress according to people who are targeting him.
A professor like me might trick gullible students and lure them to the wrong side, so it is quite acceptable to exclude speakers from the other side.
Supremacy of the wrong side must be prevented by supremacy of the right side.
And Mansfield has this one pretty much spot on.
So Harvey Mansfield, great scholar, now has been basically thrown out of a commencement.
Pretty incredible, incredible stuff.
Okay, one more thing that I hate.
So, there was a guy who bet $85,000 on Tiger Woods, something like 12 to 1 odds, and made a million bucks on Tiger Woods, winning the Masters.
And pretty good story, right?
Well, not for long.
The media then went after this guy.
So the media decided to look into him, and they found that the guy who won $1.2 million betting on Tiger Woods has a lengthy criminal record, including a domestic violence conviction.
Why are the media digging into a guy who just won some money?
Like, was winning the money the crime?
You were leaving him alone until now.
Now he won some money, and we're supposed to all be upset about this because he has a criminal history?
If you want to say that he was unjustly freed because of that criminal history, that's a story.
It is not a story to randomly dig into the past of people who are in the news for another reason, simply because you feel like it that day.
Our news media, don't worry folks, they're not actually attacking harmless civilians.
They're not just attacking people who are just doing stuff randomly and then trying to dig up their past the way they did to Joe the Plumber.
They're actually doing yeoman's work.
This is deeply important media digging right here.
And again, that's not a defense of the guy's criminal history, but come on.
I mean, don't the media have anything better to do these days?
Doesn't democracy die in darkness?
Okay, we'll be back a little bit later with two additional hours.
We have some big guests coming up for you today on the radio show, so you're going to want to subscribe at dailywire.com.
Go check it out right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Hey everyone, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
The Mueller Report is scheduled to be released tomorrow.
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That's on The Andrew Klavan Show.
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