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May 3, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:08:13

The Great Censorship Debate | Ep. 773

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	Facebook, Bars, Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos, Democrats continue to smear Attorney General William Barr, and we check the mailbag.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Man, a lot to get to today.
	We'll jump into all of it momentarily.
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	Alrighty, so the big story of the day, to begin, is the situation with regard to the United States economy.
	We'll get to the censorship on Facebook in just one second.
	But the U.S.
	economy created 263,000 jobs in April.
	Unemployment has now fallen to its lowest rate since 1969.
	Since 1969.
	So the economy continues to boom.
	For all the talk about President Trump and his volatility and President Trump and President Trump and President Trump, the fact is President Trump's policies have made businesses feel comfortable.
	His regulatory policies have made them feel as though they are not going to be targeted.
	The fact that Republicans still control the Senate provides a check on Democratic excesses.
	So businesses are looking at all of this and they are saying, OK, well, for the foreseeable future, let's keep pumping money into the system.
	For the foreseeable, let's hire up.
	This is a good time for the economy.
	Let's make this thing happen.
	The economy generated a stronger-than-expected 263,000 new jobs in April, helping to drive down the unemployment rate to a 49-year low of 3.6%.
	The increase in new jobs easily topped the 217,000 market watch forecast.
	The jobless rate slid from 3.8% in March to hit the lowest level since December of 1969.
	Economists consider Anything below a 4% unemployment rate in the United States to effectively be full employment.
	The average wage paid to American workers rose 6 cents, or 0.2%, to $27.77 an hour.
	Now, I want to, again, emphasize that wage.
	$27.77 an hour.
	We keep hearing from the left that a $15 minimum wage is necessary.
	The average wage in the United States is more than $12 more than that.
	The number of people who are surviving on minimum wage is extraordinarily low overall.
	The 12-month rate of hourly wage gains was unchanged at 3.2 percent.
	Hours worked each week fell 0.1 hour in April to 34.4.
	So, for all the talk about how Americans are being deeply overworked, if people are working less than 35 hours a week on average, it is hard to make the case that they are being desperately overworked.
	Less than 35 hours a week, on average, and wages are increasing, means that people aren't being worked harder for less pay, it means they are making more pay for working fewer hours.
	35 hours a week is 7 hours a day.
	Okay, some simple math will tell you this.
	This does not mean that people are slaving away in a wage-slave economy, the way the Democrats seem to be suggesting.
	The government revised the increase in new jobs in March to $189,000 from a preliminary $196,000.
	February's gain was raised to $56,000 from $33,000, which means that the past months have also seen higher increases in jobs than normal.
	was raised to 56,000 from 33,000, which means that the past months have also seen higher increases in jobs than normal.
	The economy is still going great guns.
	President Trump's economy, he doesn't get full credit for the economy Obama didn't.
	But, he does get credit for not quashing the economy.
	President Obama got blame for the slowest recovery in American history, and the economy continues to boom.
	So, this is very good news for President Trump.
	As I've said, if the economy continues to be good, and if President Trump keeps his mouth shut, then he will have a significant shot of being able to win a general election, re-election bid.
	And if you look at the polls right now, it's fascinating.
	If you look at the polls right now, what you are seeing is that the various Democrats running against President Trump are not running in the mid-50s.
	You would expect, given President Trump's approval rating, that all of these polls would have Trump at 42%, the same as his approval rating.
	But his approval rating does not match up with the number of people who say they will vote for him.
	His approval rating hangs around in the low 40s.
	The number of people who say that they will vote for him is always hanging about 45 to 47%.
	In fact, the only candidate in this new CNN poll, this is amazing, this new CNN poll, the only candidate who drives Trump down to his approval rating in terms of his public support for voting is Beto.
	Really, this new poll from CNN has Beto at 52 and Trump at 42.
	It's pretty hilarious, actually.
	So it has Bernie at 50 and Trump at 44, which I think would not be the final result of that election cycle.
	It has Biden at 51 and Trump at 45, which is the reason that Biden right now is doing so well in the primaries, because Democrats are effectively suggesting that he is the most electable candidate.
	Pete Buttigieg only at 47% to Trump's 44%.
	Kamala Harris at 49% to Trump's 45% so they're not winning a majority against the guys unpopular as President Trump.
	Elizabeth Warren loses to Trump in this poll.
	So Trump 48, Elizabeth Warren 47.
	Naturally this means probably The Democrats will probably nominate Elizabeth Warren.
	I think that's the way this works.
	Okay, so that's the latest on the political race.
	Now, the real big news this morning is not even the economy.
	All that's huge news.
	The real big news this morning is that Facebook has now banned a bevy of what the media termed far-right extremists.
	There's only one problem.
	Some of the people who are termed far-right extremists are not, in fact, of the right.
	Okay, so they labeled Louis Farrakhan a far-right leader.
	The New York Times talked about what happened here, and then we'll get to the media coverage of the actual issue.
	So, the New York Times originally said that far-right extremists were being banned, and they used that description for Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam and a virulent anti-Semite who's been pictured with virtually everybody in prominent circles on the left.
	An article for The Atlantic was originally titled, Instagram and Facebook ban far-right extremists.
	The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, and the Atlantic all describe Louis Farrakhan as a far-right extremist.
	Now the reason that this matters I will get to in just one second.
	So here is the actual story.
	According to the New York Times, after years of wavering about how to handle the extreme voices populating its platform, Facebook on Thursday evicted seven of its most controversial users, many of whom are conservatives, immediately inflaming the debate about the power and accountability of large technology companies.
	Now, I think it is worthwhile noting here that the New York Times description, it's funny, As soon as they start describing people who are fringe, like Alex Jones, they start calling them conservatives.
	That's because, for the press, there is no difference between conservatives and, quote, far-right extremists.
	According to The Economist, I was alt-right, and then when they corrected it, I was a radical conservative.
	There's no difference, for the media, between a normal mainstream conservative and Alex Jones.
	They just don't see any distinction there.
	And not only that, they also see if somebody is extreme, that person must be far-right.
	I've never seen any of these newspapers describe anybody, as far as I can recall, as a far-left extremist.
	Bernie Sanders is an open socialist who used to defend the Soviet Union and talk about the glories of bread lines, and he is the secondary contender in the Democratic primaries right now.
	The press conflate conservatism with alt-right, and then they conflate not being a wild leftist with being a conservative, and they lump all of that together, and then they say, okay, conservatives are bad.
	This is how the game is played.
	The social network said it had barred Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist and founder of InfoWars, from its platform, along with a handful of other extremists.
	Louis Farrakhan, the outspoken black nationalist minister who has frequently been criticized for his anti-Semitic remarks, was also banned.
	The Silicon Valley company said these users were disallowed from using Facebook and Instagram under its policies against dangerous individuals and organizations.
	Now, their statements here is so impermissibly vague.
	It's so insanely vague.
	If you're going to ban somebody from your platform, you should have a pretty good reason.
	You're talking about Facebook, which is the biggest social media platform on planet Earth with billions of users.
	If you are a platform, you really should have to release a specific statement explaining what this person did wrong, not only so that the person has a right to defend themselves against the charge, which could very well be a smear, but also so that everybody else knows what the rules are.
	But Facebook is acting like an arbitrary centralized government here, banning people without even... We don't need to give you an excuse why you were banned, you're just banned.
	Why?
	Well, because we call you a hateful extremist.
	Well, what makes somebody a hateful extremist?
	Facebook has no hard definition, because it's an innately malleable term.
	A Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement, quote, we've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology.
	The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive, and it is what led us to our decision to remove those accounts today.
	Well, thanks.
	I now know nothing about your standard.
	This statement itself has a bunch of problems embedded in it.
	So they say they've always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate.
	Okay, well, Alex Jones has been promoting exactly the same sorts of material for years.
	Only now do you decide that he has to be banned.
	Milo Yiannopoulos has been promoting the exact same sort of stuff for years.
	Only now do you decide he has to go.
	Louis Farrakhan has been calling Jews termites for years.
	Only now do you decide that he has to go.
	So what changed?
	What was the new thing that happened that changed Facebook's opinion on all of this?
	That's question number one.
	Question number two.
	They say that they've banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate.
	So how about organizations that promote violence against like ISIS?
	So as my friend Eric Weinstein pointed out, he suggested correctly that he is a supporter of the Peshmerga in Kurdistan fighting ISIS.
	They're engaged in violence.
	Does that mean that he is engaged in supporting violence?
	I mean, you're gonna have to make some distinctions here, I would assume.
	And then, they conflate violence and hate.
	Organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, because Alex Jones, so far as I'm aware, has not engaged in violence.
	Now, if you can show me evidence that he has, like, I do not, I've seen no evidence that Paul Joseph Watson, another person who was banned, mainly because he's the top reporter at InfoWars, I've seen no evidence, at all, that Paul Joseph Watson has engaged in violence.
	Now, we have to make a distinction between violence and speech.
	I'll explain in just a second.
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	Okay, so, back to this statement from Facebook.
	So, people saying bad things is not the same thing as people issuing calls for, say, murder.
	organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate so as i say the violence standard is vague and then they're conflating violence and hate so people saying bad things is not the same thing as people issuing calls for say murder i should know this because as news have reported there's a person who was arrested this week for for making violent death threats against jared kushner and donald trump jr and who has made violent death threats against me and against my employees.
	Okay, this person was engaged in a level of criticism that is not the norm.
	That's why this person has been arrested right now.
	And thank you to law enforcement for doing their job.
	There's a vast difference between that and people who just say bad things about me, who say hateful things about me.
	And there are plenty of people who say hateful things about me on a regular basis.
	There is a vast difference between people utilizing their free speech in ways that I don't like.
	I get hit by more of it than... Listen, I was the number one target of anti-Semitic bile in 2016 according to the Anti-Defamation League.
	The number one target.
	I never filed a police report with any of this stuff.
	I know the difference between people who are spewing hateful garbage at me and people who are actively threatening my life.
	There's a difference between violence and hate.
	There's a difference between speech and violence, no matter how much I dislike the speech.
	So that's a distinction that Facebook seems to be obliterating.
	And then finally, they have no hard definition as to what is hateful.
	So this is completely arbitrary.
	Now it's, okay, well, basically what it feels like is that Facebook came up with a list of people that they wanted to ban who were anti-left.
	I don't want to say they're on the right because, again, I think that the right is a somewhat confusing term sometimes.
	When I say the right, generally, I'm talking about conservatives.
	When the press uses the right, they mean people who are anti-left.
	I don't think that those are the same category of people.
	There are a lot of people who are anti-left who also happen to be not conservative and anti-conservative.
	One group of people who seem to be anti-left but also are not conservative in any way are white supremacists, for example.
	They are anti-left because they don't like multiculturalism and because they are racial supremacists and all of that.
	But they're not conservative because they don't believe in limited government.
	They don't believe in the values of Western civilization.
	They scorn Judeo-Christian values.
	They scorn the idea of freedoms in the Constitution.
	Those are people who are anti-left, but they are not conservative.
	The media will consider them right.
	So, for purposes of the media's terminology, the people who they are banning, many of them, are on the quote-unquote right.
	They really mean anti-left.
	Okay, but they kind of threw Louis Farrakhan in there so that they could say, listen, we're not biased here.
	We're throwing in Louis Farrakhan too.
	But the fact is, that again, none of these people said anything new that got them banned.
	Facebook is simply deciding that they want to ask people that they consider hateful.
	Now, I may even agree with some of the people who they consider hateful.
	Again, I've been personally targeted by several of the people on this list.
	But that does not mean that my definition of hate is the definition of hate that is legally applicable.
	It doesn't mean that my definition of hate should trump everybody else's definition of hate.
	There really is too much play in the joints here.
	Now I think that if Facebook wanted to issue rules that say you're not allowed to call people certain names, for example, like you can't call somebody the N-word, like, how about a clear definition of rules?
	How about that?
	That's pretty much all that people are asking for, and Facebook refuses to grant that.
	Instead, they wish to go after people along vague standards, and those standards do not apply equally to everybody.
	I'll show you in just one second.
	Okay, so Facebook suggests that they have this constant standard.
	They say that the process for evaluating potential violators is extensive.
	It's what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today.
	Facebook's move, says the New York Times, is one of the tech industry's broadest actions to punish high-profile extremists at a time when social media companies are under fire for allowing hateful content and misinformation to spread on their services.
	It's a politically delicate moment, they say.
	And then, the only suggestion that we have seen thus far with regard to why many of these people were banned is because many of these people featured shows hosting, for example, Gavin McGinnis.
	So Facebook found instances of extremism by Alex Jones and others that pushed the company to take action against them, according to the New York Times.
	For example, Jones last year hosted an Infowars show featuring Gavin McGuinness, a far-right political commentator whom Facebook had designated as a hate figure.
	Okay, you know who used to host Gavin McGuinness was CRTV.
	CRTV used to have a show with Gavin McGuinness, now The Blaze TV.
	Are they going to ban The Blaze TV?
	Gavin McGuinness has appeared on a wide variety of shows, including Fox News.
	Does this mean Fox News will now be banned?
	Yiannopoulos had signaled praise for Gavin McGinnis earlier this year.
	By the way, on the spectrum of people who suck, Gavin McGinnis is actually not as crappy as Milo Yiannopoulos, in my personal opinion.
	But if the idea is anybody who's ever talked to Gavin McGinnis gets thrown out, well then, this is going to create quite a problem for Facebook as well.
	Now, the reason it's going to create quite a problem for Facebook and for Instagram, for example, is because one of the people they banned was Louis Farrakhan.
	Louis Farrakhan is as evil in his views as anybody on the list.
	I would say more evil in his views than pretty much everyone on the list.
	He's probably the most evil of the people who are on this list.
	Louis Farrakhan, for years, he's been an open, brutal, blatant anti-Semite who uses genocidal language about Jews.
	And Lewis Farrakhan is being pushed today by Snoop Dogg.
	So, is Instagram and Facebook, are they going to ban Snoop Dogg?
	Because the fact is that, according to the New York Times, people like Alex Jones are being banned not for stuff that they did, but for featuring Gavin McGinnis.
	And Milo Yiannopoulos is being banned.
	By the way, I think Milo sucks.
	Milo is the kind of person...
	As a human being, who during the 2016 election, he said that I was insufficiently committed to the cause of preserving whiteness in the United States effectively, and he called me a cuck for this.
	And on the day that my son was born, he sent me a picture of a black baby on Twitter because obviously I wanted my wife to have sex with a black man to produce a black child because I was in favor of what?
	The racial mixing of the United States or something?
	I mean, it's just, it was an insane thing.
	So Gavin, so, so, Yiannopoulos is bad, on his, on his own merits, but Yiannopoulos is being banned because he signaled praise for Gavin McInnes?
	Okay, fine, if that's the standard, why is Snoop Dogg still on Facebook and Instagram?
	Yesterday, he put out an Instagram video in which he actively encouraged people to post videos of Louis Farrakhan on Facebook and on Instagram.
	This is okay.
	Snoop Dogg was at the White House, by the way, with Barack Obama.
	Snoop Dogg is a deeply influential public figure.
	So, does Snoop Dogg go away?
	Because if it's killed by association, this is pretty strong association, is it not?
	What up?
	If you down with it, like I'm down with it, post your favorite Minister Farrakhan video on your Instagram and Facebook page.
	Show some love to a real brother.
	Post it right now.
	He got footage everywhere.
	If you ain't got none, snatch it off of YouTube.
	It's everywhere.
	Put up some Minister Lewis Farrakhan footage.
	Show some love.
	Show what he really be talking about.
	Educating.
	Truth.
	Can't ban all of us.
	Can't ban all of us.
	He's a real brother.
	Okay, so there is Snoop Dogg not just making the case for free speech for Louis Farrakhan, but defending Louis Farrakhan.
	He's a real brother.
	Show what he really be talking about.
	Okay, that... Okay, so you're telling me that Milo is banned or Paul Joseph Watson is banned for... So let me just get this straight.
	Paul Joseph Watson is banned because he is associated with Alex Jones, who is associated with Gavin McGinnis.
	Is this the standard Facebook is using now?
	Okay, you're gonna have to ban Snoop Dogg, right?
	Snoop Dogg is actively associating with Louis Farrakhan if this is the standard.
	Now, I don't think any of these people should be banned.
	And I think that if they are banned, I need a clear standard as to why these people should be banned.
	Facebook won't even articulate that.
	I love this.
	Joan Donovan, the director of Harvard's Technology and Social Change Research Project, who studies online extremism, says, I'm sure they're going to make a slippery slope argument here.
	No, I'm not making a slippery slope argument.
	I am making an argument that you do not have clear standards by any stretch of the imagination.
	I'm not saying you're going after Alex Jones, therefore you'll go after Paul Joseph Watson, therefore you will go after me.
	That is not the case that I am making.
	The case I am making is that you have not articulated any standard at all.
	And so, having not articulated a standard, it's not that I suspect there will be a slippery slope.
	I am suggesting there is no absolute principle that is being applied here.
	And I have proof.
	I have proof that there is no absolute principle being applied here.
	This proof comes courtesy of Jewish Insider today.
	Quote, In a letter, Facebook Vice President Joel Kaplan makes clear the site will not remove lies or content that is inaccurate, and that includes denying the Holocaust.
	So if you are an open Holocaust denier, you will not be removed from Facebook.
	But, if you once had a conversation with Gavin McGinnis, or said something nice about Gavin McGinnis, not on Facebook, you will be removed from Facebook.
	Kaplan.
	Who's the vice president for global public policy at Facebook.
	He said that Facebook intends to allow Holocaust denial on the platform so long as it doesn't advocate violence against Jewish people in any way.
	By the way, this is the actual correct perspective.
	What Kaplan is articulating here should be the perspective.
	You should be allowed to say whatever you want on places like Facebook so long as you're not advocating for violence.
	Because there is a stark difference between violence and speech that is unpalatable and gross and terrible.
	Kaplan says, I want to underscore that Facebook rejects hate.
	We take down any content that celebrates, defends, or attempts to justify the Holocaust.
	So let me, let me get this straight.
	If you deny the Holocaust, if you say it didn't happen, you're cool.
	But if you take down, but if you put up content that says the Holocaust was justified, then you're bad.
	What does, what does he think Holocaust deniers do?
	Does he think that Holocaust deniers are just like, no, you know, I just, I have questions about the historicity.
	Is that really what he thinks that Holocaust denial is?
	Holocaust denial is a way of downplaying the evil of the Nazis.
	That's what Holocaust denial is for.
	Okay, so the same goes for any content that mocks Holocaust victims, accuses victims of lying about atrocities, spews hate, or advocates for violence against Jewish people in any way.
	So now he's broadening the standard again.
	But the standard is so inconsistent that, like, my sister has been targeted on Facebook by anti-Semites.
	She's reported them for years.
	Okay, nothing has ever happened to any of these people.
	This is a wildly inconsistent standard.
	And the media, who are celebrating Facebook for doing this, now they're finally standing up to hate.
	I have some questions about this media.
	I have some questions about these free speech firefighting advocates.
	Because I don't think that that's actually what they are doing here.
	I don't think that's actually what they are doing here.
	And again, if we are going to now start banning people for having guests on their program, you know who had Alex Jones on his program?
	Joe Rogan.
	So is YouTube and Facebook, are these people going to ban Joe Rogan now?
	And then because I had Joe Rogan on, are they going to ban me?
	And then because they had me on, are they gonna ban everyone?
	Because I've been on pretty much... I mean, like, I've been on with Vox.
	I mean, this is all nonsense.
	It's anti-free speech nonsense.
	And I'll talk about the legality of it in a second, because there are people calling for regulation of Facebook.
	I'll talk about what that would look like, whether that should be done in a second, but first I want to talk about what the media are doing here, and why I don't trust the media to set a standard for hate, and a standard for what should be banned first.
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	So, members of the media who suggest that they, they and they alone, have a window into the meaning of hate.
	I mean, I saw members of the media celebrating this yesterday because they don't like any of the figures on the list.
	Guess what?
	I'm not fond of any of the figures on the list and I've been targeted personally by many of them.
	I keep repeating that because I do not have a stake in these people staying online other than that I like free speech, which seems like a pretty heavy stake.
	The reason I don't trust the media on this stuff is because the media lie and then they conflate.
	To the media, as I mentioned earlier, as they labeled Louis Farrakhan, a far-right extremist, there is no such thing as a far-left extremist and everyone on the right is an extremist who ought to be banned.
	As evidence, I point to the Poynter Institute, a journalism non-profit organization.
	They put up a list of 515 news websites it identified as unreliable They raised eyebrows this week when it posted that index of what it identified as unreliable news sites.
	The index came from merging various lists identifying websites purportedly spreading misinformation.
	The list was compiled by the group's international fact-checking network.
	It initially included the Washington Examiner.
	The language on the website called for full boycotts by advertisers of all of these blacklisted sites.
	And the list included everyone.
	It included Daily Wire, it included Drudge Report, it included Breitbart, it included Daily Signal from Heritage Foundation, it included the Washington Examiner, it included just an enormous, enormous list of pretty much every site that was to the right of center.
	Like, all of them were considered unreliable by Poynter.
	And finally, after blowback, and they were calling for boycotts of these folks, right?
	This is what the left will do.
	This is why Media Matters does this.
	They try to label it the Southern Poverty Law Center.
	It's all the same.
	They try to generate the idea that if you are anywhere to the right of center or anti-left in any way, that you ought to be banned, that you are unreliable, and that you ought to be shut down.
	You ought to be deplatformed, is the way that they put it.
	And Poynter actually had to pull the list But I promise you, if Poynter had not pulled the list, it would be cited by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
	Every time they mentioned the Daily Wire in any of their stories, they would say, an organization that Poynter has declared unreliable.
	They do that with media matters all the time.
	For years, they were using the Southern Poverty Law Center, a hack-left organization, to smear all right-wing sources.
	Every time they mentioned PragerU, or Daily Wire, or anybody else, they would say, an organization deemed hateful by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
	So the media create this echo chamber where everybody who disagrees with them is evil and everybody who agrees with them is good.
	And you can tell who's evil and who's good by who disagrees with you.
	Very convenient.
	Well, on Thursday night, Poynter actually had to pull the list.
	Their managing editor, Barbara Allen, posted a letter to the editor explaining the decision.
	Allen wrote that the initial aim of the project was to provide a useful tool for readers to gauge the legitimacy of the information they were consuming.
	However, she wrote, Soon after we published, we received complaints from those on the list and readers who objected to the inclusion of certain sites and the exclusion of others.
	We began an audit to test the accuracy and veracity of the list, and while we feel that many of the sites did have a track record of publishing unreliable information, our review found weaknesses in the methodology.
	We detected inconsistencies between the findings of the original databases that were the sources for the list and our own rendering of the final report.
	As a result, she wrote that Poynter was removing this unreliable sites list until we are able to provide our audience a more consistent and rigorous set of criteria.
	Well, there is no consistent and rigorous set of criteria here.
	One of the things that I always find amusing is that they put together these lists, members of the left do, in which they say that sites are unreliable.
	How do they determine unreliable?
	They find a couple of stories that have been wrong over the course of a four-year history, and then they say the site is unreliable.
	You see this in a lot of these studies.
	Okay, well, the New York Times blows stories on a pretty routine basis.
	So does CNN.
	These are not considered unreliable sources because the vast majority of stories that they print are not factually inaccurate.
	We here at the Daily Wire post 50 stories a day.
	We've been doing so for four years.
	That means that at this point we have posted tens of thousands of stories.
	It should not be hard to find four or five stories that are unreliable.
	But that is also true for all these other outlets.
	What this really comes down to is a subjective method of measuring these sites you don't like and then finding some sort of covering excuse to ban them.
	It's almost impossible not to read this stuff in this way.
	So, what should be done about this?
	So, there's been a lot of talk about the idea of regulating Facebook as a public utility.
	Now, I don't think that Facebook is a public utility.
	It's a private company.
	Facebook is actually begging the United States government to regulate them.
	Facebook, Twitter, they've been asking members of the government to regulate them.
	Why?
	Because they're on the verge of being bankrupted by the European standards on hate speech.
	So they're caught between sort of a rock and a hard place.
	In Europe, they don't have the same standards on speech.
	Because Europe does not respect free speech in the same way that the United States does.
	One of the reasons the U.S.
	is better than Europe.
	The U.S.
	has better standards on free speech.
	That is a very, very good thing and you are the beneficiary of it.
	But what's happening in Europe right now is that the Europeans have set these standards for hate speech and then they are looking at suing or taking down Facebook over quote-unquote hate speech appearing on the platform.
	So Facebook is now looking for similar regulation from the United States so that they don't have to be eaten alive by the market in the United States.
	They can blame it on the government of the United States.
	That's what's actually happening here.
	Now, there's been a lot of talk about whether they should be regulated because they're effectively a monopoly.
	I don't think they're effectively a monopoly because I think that there can be competitors to Facebook.
	I'm not a fan of antitrust law as a general area of law.
	The only monopolies that I really see are government-guaranteed monopolies.
	If you are just a company that is very successful in your space and you are not gouging the customer, I don't think that you have a technical monopoly.
	I tend to be a consumer side advocate when it comes to deciding whether a company's a monopoly.
	There's sort of two theories of monopoly.
	One is that if you are the only company in your space, so the supply side, then you are monopoly.
	The consumer side says, well, who cares if you're the only company in your space, so long as you're not gouging the consumer.
	If the consumer is getting a better product, that is the purpose of the market.
	It is the possibility of competition that allows for cheap products to continue being in the marketplace.
	Two different theories of monopoly.
	I tend to side with the second theory, which is why I was not in favor of, for example, breaking up Microsoft in the late 90s.
	The other way of looking at Facebook is to try and try and ration out, to reason out whether they are in fact a platform or a publisher.
	You've heard me talk about this before.
	In a second, I'm going to explain legally speaking what that means.
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	Alright, in a second we're going to get to the legal status of Facebook.
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	All righty, so let's talk for a second about whether Facebook is a platform or a publisher.
	So, to illustrate the difference between a platform and a publisher, think about the difference between your phone line and dailywire.com, the website that I run.
	So your phone line, if you are talking on your phone line and you say something terrible, AT&T, Verizon, they are not responsible for what happens on your phone line.
	None of them are responsible for what happens on your phone line because it's an open platform.
	My publisher, if I print something that is libelous, we can be sued.
	If we violate copyright, we can be sued.
	And now there's a section, 47 U.S.C.
	230, which is a provision of the Communications Decency Act, which creates an enormous amount of freedom on the Internet.
	It's a very good provision as a general rule.
	Section 230, was designed to protect providers or to protect publishers effectively, well, platforms effectively.
	Section 230 says, quote, no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
	So in other words, YouTube is not really responsible for you posting a copyright violative video.
	You are responsible for that.
	Now, YouTube will take it down because they don't want to be legally liable, but it is you who are responsible for that.
	The same thing is true on Facebook.
	If you decide to post something that is a violent threat, Facebook is not responsible for your violent threat.
	You are responsible for your violent threat, which is appropriate.
	These are open platforms.
	Anyone can post virtually anything.
	And in fact, it is even true Then on DailyWire, the site that I run, we are not responsible for your comments.
	If we have open threads and you post something that is terrible or libelous, we are not responsible for all that.
	Now, that changes.
	All of that should change, logically speaking, if there is no clearly articulated standard by which comments are being removed or by which videos are being removed.
	In other words, let's say that YouTube decides that they are only going to release videos provided by users that are That are on one topic.
	And then they just decide that they are going to remove all other topics.
	That's a clear standard.
	But now let's say that YouTube is doing what people suspect they are doing, which is demonetizing specific sides of the aisle.
	That they are taking down videos that violate certain things and not taking down other videos.
	Let's say that Facebook decides to do that.
	The question now is do they look more like how I run my website, Daily Wire, where all of my independent contractors, right for me, were responsible for them?
	Does it look more like that?
	And we have free contributors, by the way, and we are responsible for their writing.
	If people write for us, it doesn't matter if we pay them.
	If we print something, and it goes through the editorial process, and then it goes up, we are responsible for that.
	Does Facebook look more like that?
	Or does Facebook look more like an open forum where they're, like, back-policing things on a consistent basis?
	If there are no standards articulated, there's a good case to be made that Section 230 of the Communications Act should actually, of the Communications Decency Act, should be changed to require that if you are a platform, you should have to have at least a clearly articulated standard for what is removed and what is not.
	Because otherwise, you're really not acting like a platform.
	Really, you're acting more like a publisher.
	Like, I decide on an editorial level what we wish to publish.
	Well, Facebook, if they have decided that politically motivated concerns are the issue, well, then they look more like us.
	So, that is what is going on with these sort of vague hate standards.
	If you have a vague hate standard that is only being applied to one side of the aisle, that would suggest that you are acting more like a publisher than like a platform.
	And that means that there should be some serious consideration to revising Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
	Now, the case against that, just to give the other side, is that you don't want government getting involved with regulating websites generally.
	You don't want the government... Now, I don't think that's what would be happening here.
	I think that instead what would be happening here is that you are opening up to liability websites that act like publishers.
	They're not quashing my free speech.
	I'm the publisher of Daily Wire.
	They're not quashing my free speech, the fact that we can be sued for libel or for copyright violation.
	Well, the same case could be made with regard to Facebook.
	If you're responsible for your material, you're responsible for your material.
	There's a better thing that could happen here.
	Facebook is asking for wider regulation than that, by the way.
	They want the government to actually regulate the speech that can be put on Facebook.
	But there's a better stance than this, which is, how about a clearly articulated standard that says what you can put up and what you cannot put up on Facebook?
	How about that?
	How about like terms of service that aren't impermissibly vague?
	How about you have to offer an excuse when you ban somebody from your service and so we can all see it and learn from the case study?
	But these social media companies don't want to do that, and that's why people are so suspicious of what exactly is going on here.
	And they should be suspicious of what is going on here.
	Again, if you are a person who has once said a nice thing about Paul Joseph Watson, and you're gonna be banned, or if you're Paul Joseph Watson yourself, right?
	Paul Joseph Watson, by the way, is not nearly as extreme, just as a human, from what I have seen.
	He's not nearly as extreme as even Alex Jones, a guy for whom he works.
	But if Paul Joseph Watson The idea is that Paul Joseph Watson was nice to Gavin McGinnis, Milo Yiannopoulos was nice to Gavin McGinnis, and they can be banned.
	Again, you're going to have to ask, why is Snoop Dogg still there?
	Why are half the people in Congress who took pictures with Louis Farrakhan still there?
	These standards are not being evenly applied because they can't even be articulated.
	They are not even trying to articulate them, frankly, because they know that they're going to get help from the mainstream media that agrees with them.
	That's the bottom line.
	In the end, the New York Times is very happy.
	A free speech newspaper supposedly is very happy that these social media outlets are throwing people off that they don't like.
	I don't like a lot of these people either.
	That doesn't mean that they should be thrown off the platforms.
	It doesn't.
	If you don't like what they have to say, I have an easy solution.
	You don't have to watch them.
	I have another easy solution.
	You can yell at them.
	All of these are appropriate.
	I don't mean like physically yell at them and disturb events.
	I mean like you can go online and you can yell at them.
	I know.
	I get a lot of it.
	So, there's that.
	Okay, meanwhile, the Democrats continue to proclaim that the Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, is a liar.
	A brutal, terrible, evil liar.
	So, Nancy Pelosi says that William Barr lied.
	What did he lie about?
	She still cannot name a single lie that William Barr has told.
	The Attorney General of the United States has fallen under fire.
	For no apparent reason.
	He wrote a four-page synopsis of the findings of the Mueller report.
	Then, within six weeks, he released the entirety of the Mueller report.
	That's called transparency, folks.
	That ain't a cover-up.
	Nonetheless, Democrats are going after William Barr because they wish, they wish, that Robert Mueller had recommended prosecution.
	He did not.
	And thus, Democrats say it was William Barr.
	William Barr was what stood between President Trump and prosecution.
	As I say, if Mueller wanted to recommend prosecution, he could have.
	Instead, he abdicated.
	He handed it over to William Barr.
	William Barr said no.
	Appropriately, I've read the report.
	But according to Nancy Pelosi, this makes William Barr a political hack and an emissary of evil and a liar.
	Now, if she believes that he's a perjurer, she can impeach him anytime.
	I don't see her making any serious moves in that direction, do you?
	Yesterday was quite a day.
	I really lost sleep last night after watching over and over again the testimony of the Attorney General of the United States.
	How sad it is.
	How sad it is for us to see the top law enforcement officer in our country misrepresenting, withholding the truth from the Congress of the United States.
	The Attorney General of the United States of America was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States.
	That's a crime.
	OK, well, she's going to have to explain where the crime is.
	I think the Democratic definition of crime is basically crap I don't like.
	Well, that ain't a crime, lady.
	In a second, we'll get to more on the Democrats attacking William Barr.
	Okay, so it's not just Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi who is openly suggesting without any evidence at all that William Barr committed perjury, which he did not.
	It is also Ted Lieu, who is just a terrible congressperson, suggesting that William Barr, the Attorney General, is one of the most dangerous men in the country.
	Really?
	You mean that dorky lawyer is one of the most dangerous men in the country?
	For giving you a report that's sitting in front of you, you dolt?
	My goodness, here is Ted Lieu making that case.
	Attorney General Bill Barr is now one of the most dangerous men in Washington, D.C.
	for three reasons.
	First, he intentionally mischaracterized the Mueller report.
	He was then told by Robert Mueller that he mischaracterized the Mueller report, and instead of apologizing, he doubles down and continues to mislead the American people.
	Second, today he ignored the will of Congress, oversight responsibilities of Congress, and lawfully issued subpoenas.
	And third, right now he is suing to eliminate your healthcare coverage.
	Let's not forget, right now he is suing in court to eliminate pre-existing conditions healthcare coverage.
	This is just such nonsense.
	Now here's the reality.
	Democrats are not going to do anything about William Barr.
	This is all sound and fury signifying nothing.
	This is them whining and whining and bitching and moaning because they didn't get what they wanted from Robert Mueller and they can't blame Robert Mueller because they spent several years building him up As the deus ex machina who's going to save us all from President Trump, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York let the cat out of the bag.
	He said, yeah, we're not jailing Barr.
	So like all this talk about how we're going to hold him in contempt and then throw him in jail.
	Yeah, that's not happening.
	How do you get this thing moving?
	Do you oppose fines?
	Do you suggest maybe even, as some have said, jail time for the Attorney General of the United States?
	Well, jail time is not something that I believe is being seriously contemplated, and look, we're going to continue along the track of trying to find common ground on behalf of the issues that would improve the lives of everyday Americans, while at the same time understanding that there's another lane which is going to require for Congress to hold the administration accountable when it steps over the line, and we're not going to shirk that responsibility either.
	Okay, well, you know, they're not going to shirk that responsibility, except that there is no responsibility here because they're not going to do anything.
	They're not interested in doing anything.
	So all of this is manufactured.
	Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee is trying to get Robert Mueller there in the wild hope that Robert Mueller will come in and then say, listen, I decided that I couldn't indict because the president's the president, but secretly you guys should impeach him.
	That's what they want from Robert Mueller.
	I don't think Robert Mueller is going to give that to them, apparently.
	NBC News and ABC News are reporting that the committee is now speaking with Mueller's team.
	When it was previously dealing with the Justice Department, NBC reports that a hearing has not been finalized, a date was not set, but they're apparently negotiating with Mueller to come testify.
	Well, I mean, the networks, I'm sure, will be happy with the ratings because that's exciting stuff, but we have Mueller's thoughts.
	In 450 pages, he had things longer than a Tolstoy novel.
	We have all of his thoughts.
	He didn't hide them.
	They haven't been hidden from you.
	They are publicly available.
	You can buy a print copy online right now at Amazon.
	This is all silly talk.
	Now the reason I think that Democrats are truly upset about a lot of this stuff is because there are news stories that are coming out pretty much every day now about the lengths to which the Hillary Clinton campaign was interfering with other countries in the election of 2016, the extent to which the intelligence community was intervening with regard to election 2016.
	There's a story that I've mentioned over the last couple days from the New York Times.
	In which the New York Times reports that the FBI sent yet another quote-unquote spy, another investigator, posing as an assistant to meet with George Papadopoulos.
	According to the New York Times, there was a woman who posed as a research assistant.
	She was actually a government investigator.
	She went to spy on George Papadopoulos.
	She said her name was Azra Turk.
	And this would be a spy being deployed to go talk with a member of the Trump campaign.
	Trump was never told about any of this.
	There will be investigations into the extent to which the intelligence community targeted members of the Trump campaign, whether Trump himself should have been told, and whether there was enough of a supportive evidentiary basis to suggest the use of informants and surveillance against people like Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.
	That Inspector General report is set to come out, I believe, in June.
	I think Democrats are fearful of that.
	I think Democrats are also fearful of new reports like this one that is coming out.
	According to Fox News, Ukraine's embassy wrote that a Democratic National Committee insider reached out in 2016 seeking dirt on President Trump's team, according to a bombshell new report on Thursday that further fueled Republican allegations that Democrats were the ones improperly colluding with foreign agents during the campaign.
	Ambassador Valerie Chaley said DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa pushed for Ukraine's then-president Petro Poroshenko to mention Paul Manafort's ties to Ukraine publicly during a visit to the United States and sought detailed financial information on his dealings in the country, according to The Hill.
	At the time, Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman.
	Chaley said in a statement, quote, the embassy got to know Miss Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington, D.C., and not in her DNC capacity.
	We learned about her DNC involvement later.
	We were surprised to see Alexandra's interest in Paul Manafort's case.
	It was her own cause.
	The embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter.
	In other words, it looks like a DNC contractor slash operative was trying to get information for the 2016 campaign on Paul Manafort.
	Now, again, that's not collusion.
	It wasn't collusion when Trump Jr.
	was talking with a Russian lawyer about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton.
	Collusion is a quid pro quo, or the organization of the release of material.
	But, with that said, is that just as bad as the Trump Tower meeting?
	I mean, yeah, kinda, right?
	I mean, it is trying to get information from a foreign source about a domestic political adversary.
	So, Democrats are in for a rough ride here, I think, and I think that they know it.
	So, that is probably why they are attempting to misdirect to William Barr.
	I don't think the next couple of months go real well on the intelligence community.
	I don't think that they do a lot of wonders for the credibility of the Democratic Party and the intelligence community on any of this stuff.
	So, that may be why they are trying to misdirect to William Barr or Robert Mueller and all the rest of this stuff.
	Okay, time for a little bit of mailbag, because it is indeed a Friday.
	So, We begin with Leia.
	leah says hey ben a few friends and i are planning a month-long trip for october and at the end of our trip we are planning to visit turkey and lebanon i've traveled all over the world with the exception to the middle east so when they said they wanted to visit i said i'd be on board however i heard you can't enter lebanon if you've been traveling to israel marked on your passport while i've never been there i was curious of the reason for this and what your thoughts are on traveling there and turkey when i'm a strong supporter of israel thanks and love the show so i am not sure what the actual rules are in lebanon i'm not sure what the actual rules are in I know that those rules do apply in places like Saudi Arabia.
	There are certain countries that refuse to acknowledge the existence of the state of Israel.
	Don't worry, it's not anti-Semitism to fail to acknowledge a Jewish state that exists.
	It is merely a form of anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism at all.
	Those rules obviously are targeted toward Jews.
	That is the goal of them.
	Israel does not have similar rules with any country on planet Earth.
	It's pretty amazing that all of that is tolerated, but it's soft bigotry of low expectations when it comes to radical Muslim leadership in that part of the world.
	Kyle says, What is your argument to people that say the economy will crash after Trump because of his Reaganomics-type policies, tax cuts, trade regulations, etc.?
	Is this a possibility in your mind?
	Well, number one, there are very few economists who have been consistent in being able to predict economic crashes.
	This is just a reality of the situation.
	I think people suspect there will be one in the sometime near future, simply because every eight to ten years in the United States, there is some sort of economic downturn.
	The last one was in 2008.
	It's now 2019.
	So that means that we're probably due, but that's more of like in the earthquakes are coming, feeling that you get sitting on the porch, right?
	That is not based on any economic criteria.
	I have no idea why you would say that Reaganomics type policies create recessions when Reaganomics type policies created the greatest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States.
	The greatest peacetime economics expansion in the history of the United States.
	Even short-term downturns like Black Monday back in October of, what was it, 1987, Even that was quickly rectified and the economy kept on growing.
	Even the short-term downturn in 1991 was reversed by the end of 1991.
	By the time 1992 election came about, the economy was already moving forward again.
	So, the idea that Reaganomics-type policies is what quashes economic growth.
	No, what quashes economic growth, downturns are unpredictable.
	Economic growth, however, is predictably tied to a business climate that is friendly toward business as opposed to a heavy regulatory and tax-based climate That tends to quash growth.
	That's what we found out from Barack Obama.
	Keith says Dear Ben.
	I'd like to be a better influence in defending and spreading conservative ideas.
	How can an average conservative, such as myself, help change hearts and minds in my daily life?
	Well, a couple of things.
	Number one, you have to read and read and read.
	You really do need to know the issues about which you speak.
	Second of all, seek commonality and common definition before you start a conversation.
	The way to have a bad political conversation is for somebody to say something like, you're mean, you're cruel, and then you say, no, I'm not mean and cruel.
	That's not a conversation, that's an argument.
	What you have to do is say, I need you to define meanness and cruelty so that we can have a definition of what exactly we are talking about, because I don't believe your definition.
	If your definition is you just don't like me, well, you know, then we can't have a conversation.
	If we want to have a conversation, we have to get to commonality of terms.
	It's funny, I have conversations with folks all the time on a variety of issues, particularly on the other side of the aisle.
	And to use an example, I just did an interview with, I believe it was Salon, I think?
	And the reporter over at Salon was extremely antagonistic.
	The entire interview was basically this person trying to make an argument over... It was not an interview.
	It was an argument.
	And you can read the transcript of it.
	They wouldn't release the audio because it made the reporter look pretty bad.
	That is my opinion.
	We asked for the release of the audio.
	They would not do it.
	And then I had a similar conversation about my book with Sean Illing at Vox, who happens to be an honest reporter who's read my book and who disagrees with my book.
	But because we were having a conversation that was productive, he would ask my opinion on something.
	I would ask him for a clarification of definition.
	I would respond.
	He would ask for a clarification of my definitions.
	He would respond.
	This is what is called a nice conversation.
	You can do that.
	Specifics help conversations move forward.
	This is true in marriage.
	It's true in child-rearing.
	It's true in parenting.
	It's true in all areas of life.
	Specificity and clarity is what you should be seeking in conversation if you wish to have a conversation.
	broad-based terminology about which there is no common understanding, that's how you have an argument.
	Sarah says, "Ben, what books do you recommend "to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" Well, there's a great book that I've recommended on the show by David Bragg called "Reclaiming Israel's History." It's very short, it's about 200 pages, and that gives you a pretty good background on what you need to know.
	There's also a book by Eli Bard called "Myths and Facts" that I always recommend, mainly 'cause it's bite-sized.
	It has a myth and then it will have the fact, and that's like a page long, and it answers most of your questions about it.
	I'd start with those two books.
	And then if you want sort of longer form histories, there's a book by Howard Sachar called The History of Zionism that is worth reading.
	Benjamin Netanyahu actually wrote a great book called The Durable Peace back in the 1990s that talks about the kind of long-term history of Israel and the Palestinians, and more than Israel and the Palestinians, Israel and the Arab world around it, because the Palestinians as a cohesive entity really did not exist as a cohesive entity until the creation of the state of Israel.
	All the Palestinians.
	Palestinian actually referred to Jew, right?
	The Palestine Post was referring to the Jerusalem Post was referring to Jews.
	Palestinians as a specific political entity were not created really until 1948 and everybody was considered Syrian.
	Not to say that they weren't indigenous to the area.
	There were Palestinians indigenous to the area, but they considered themselves Syrian or Egyptian or Jordanian or Saudi.
	So it is worth reading all of those books.
	I can give you more if you're interested.
	Anthony says, Hey Ben, Is there ever an argument from a conservative side for any implementation of a Keynesian-style economic policy?
	Also, do you believe we are in a late-stage capitalist system currently?
	The phrase late-stage capitalist is very irritating because there is either capitalist or there is non-capitalist.
	The idea that capitalism is moving toward an endgame where it falls apart?
	That is a Marxist construct that I just don't believe.
	Marxism suggests that eventually history will end with the seizure of the means of production by the workers.
	And that has not happened historically.
	Instead, what has happened historically is a forcible Seizure of the means of production by governments and then the collapse of that system repeatedly because that system sucks and is terrible for human beings.
	So I don't really believe in the phrase late-stage capitalist.
	I believe in economic that there is such a thing as top-down economic fascism or corporatism.
	That exists, but I don't think that's capitalism.
	I think people tend to conflate a lot of this terminology.
	As far as the argument for implementation of a Keynesian style economic policy, which I assume would mean seizure of money from people who are more wealthy, giving it to people who are poorer, So they can start spending that money, that spending is better than saving?
	No, I disagree with Keynesianism.
	There's a great book by the author of Economics in One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt.
	It's about a 450-page book that really breaks down Keynes' work at length.
	It's very detailed.
	So if you're interested in that, that's available.
	Richard says, hello, Mr. Shapiro.
	I've heard several times you say that Congress has subpoena power.
	Where does it say that in the Constitution?
	Is it a part of the necessary and proper powers?
	Well, Congress can pass legislation that allows them to subpoena.
	Then the other branches have the power to resist a subpoena, and then the judiciary gets to decide whether the subpoena in fact holds.
	So they have to pass a piece of legislation.
	You're correct.
	There's nothing in the Constitution of the United States that specifically refers to subpoena power.
	But there's no doubt that Congress does have investigative powers under the Constitution.
	That's how they keep the other branches in check.
	No.
	The answer is no.
	I think Donald Trump would win every primary.
	He's the incumbent president of the United States.
	There has yet to be an incumbent president of the United States who loses in the primaries.
	Even LBJ did not lose in the primaries.
	He just came close to losing in a couple early primaries and decided not to run.
	So that is not the same thing.
	The strongest primary contenders have never taken out an incumbent president.
	It's never happened.
	Okay, let's see.
	Jackson says, Hey Ben, totally agree with your assessment of endgame.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	I appreciate it.
	Being a huge Marvel fan, I still enjoyed it.
	Totally fair.
	I said if you're a Marvel fan, and you're really into it, and you liked the, I guess it was 21 movies leading up to Avengers Endgame, and you're looking for the Easter eggs, and it's all nostalgia for you and fan service, totally fine with that.
	I personally thought it was bloated.
	I thought that what they did with the main characters didn't make any sense.
	I had a lot of critiques of Endgame.
	Listen, I was just, I wanted to enjoy it the same as everybody else.
	The thing's gonna make a bajillion dollars.
	I mean, it's already racked up.
	I think by the end of first weekend, it had racked up almost $1.5 billion worldwide.
	I wish I could enjoy it like everybody else.
	I just have critiques.
	Jackson says, I was wondering how you would have constructed the final battle.
	Personally, I would have just had Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America fight Thanos and his generals.
	Yes, this is correct.
	The battle at the very end of Avengers Endgame should not have taken place, meaning that it is obvious that Thanos is facing off against them.
	And, so, as I mentioned in my review of Avengers Endgame yesterday on my show, on the podcast, the biggest problem with Avengers Endgame, one of the big problems, my business partner Jeremy Boring pointed this out, is that the relative powers of the various characters make no sense.
	So, in the first Avengers Infinity War, Thanos is barely able to hold off just Thor, and he's got the Infinity Gauntlet while he's doing that.
	And the Infinity Gauntlet is super duper powerful.
	Well, at the end of Avengers Endgame, spoilers here, okay guys?
	You're all warned.
	At the end of Avengers Endgame, Thanos does not have the gauntlet.
	He's just a big guy.
	And he's a big guy, and he's holding off simultaneously Thor and Captain America and Iron Man.
	He's holding all of them off.
	And Captain America has Thor's hammer.
	I mean, he's got all these things.
	Okay, and still Thanos is holding them off without the Infinity Gauntlet?
	How?
	How?
	So you'd have to construct the final battle scene better.
	Also, there's something inherently a little bit unfair about a three-on-one.
	So the only way to make that fair is if he does have the Infinity Gauntlet, for example.
	Also, having Captain Marvel come in and she's able to basically take on Thanos alone.
	Like, none of these relative power arrangements make any sense.
	Why is she so much more powerful than Thor, the God of Thunder?
	Why?
	Like, none of this... Again, the internal logic doesn't make a lot of sense.
	I think there is a way to construct it where it makes sense.
	Where, for example, Tony Stark is wounded.
	That would make sense.
	Or Captain America is finally feeling his age.
	This would make sense.
	Or you have Thor, who is so broken that he can't fight properly.
	That would make sense.
	There are ways to construct this, but I just don't think it was done.
	It turned into kind of the same big beat-em-up, smash-em-up battle you have at the end of every one of these Marvel movies.
	William says, hey, Ben.
	You've said many times on your show you're a huge sports fan.
	I'm curious what your favorite teams are from the major sports NBA, NFL, and MLB.
	So number one, NHL should be included in the major sports.
	Number two, I don't know.
	I just didn't grow up with hockey.
	I wish I had, because every time I go to a hockey game, it's awesome.
	So I am a Blackhawks fan, you know, sort of peripherally, but NBA, NFL, and MLB.
	NBA, I'm a Celtics fan.
	I know, I live in Los Angeles, it makes no sense.
	I'm a Celtics fan because I picked up all of my father's sports allegiances because, like religion, fandom for sports teams is picked up from your parents.
	This is why my kids will be White Sox fans, even though they are two generations removed from Chicago.
	So, the NBA, I'm a Celtics fan because my parents went to school in Boston, and the Chicago Bulls really were not a thing when my dad was growing up, so he was a Celtics fan.
	He's partially a Celtics fan because Red Arbok was the owner of, was the owner slash general manager of the Boston Celtics and was an early integrator of the NBA, for example, was Jewish, etc.
	The NFL, I'm a Chicago Bears fan, so I picked up all the Chicago allegiances.
	I know, it's a terrible fate to be a Chicago Bears fan.
	And Mitch Trubisky, yeah.
	And MLB, I am a huge Chicago White Sox fan.
	If you wish to hear my thoughts about the Chicago White Sox, all you have to do is go to Amazon.com.
	My father and I wrote a full book about the 2005 Chicago White Sox championship season.
	We traced every single game of the season.
	And it's a series of letters from me to my dad, and back and forth.
	It's really a lot of fun.
	It's called Say It So.
	You can go check that out at Amazon.com.
	Yeah, Adil says, hey Ben, question, how would you respond to the argument regarding abortion that in a life and death situation, the life of the mother takes precedence over the unborn baby?
	Admitting to a certain extent that the two lives are not the equal at that point, unborn versus born, while I myself have a bunch of issues with what is extrapolated from this point, I'm having a hard time discrediting the logic.
	Well, the logic makes sense that you prefer the life of the mother so long as the baby is not born yet because there is a difference between unborn and born with regard to choice of life.
	But that does not mean that in a vacuum you can just kill the unborn.
	This is what people seem to get wrong.
	You don't actually have to make the argument that an embryo is of the exact same value.
	You can make the argument, you don't have to make the argument that an embryo is of the exact same value as a 30-year-old person in order to make the argument that an embryo must be preserved.
	You don't have to make that argument because it is not a choice.
	The choice is between your inconvenience and the embryo or your wishes and the embryo's existence.
	That is not the same choice.
	First, what people do is they create the false choice between the existence of an adult life and an unborn life.
	And then the next thing that they do is they say that all cases are that choice, which they are not.
	So it's just bad logic.
	I don't think you have to accept even the, you don't even have to accept the premise that all life is innately of equal value to, especially, you know, in early stages of, you don't have to accept, you can accept it.
	Again, you can say an embryo is exactly the same as a fully grown human being, but you don't have to in order to make the argument for the preservation of the embryo.
	That's historically been the Jewish argument, for example.
	Okay, time for a quick thing I like, and then we'll do a quick thing I hate, and then we'll get out of here.
	So things I like.
	So yesterday was Yom HaShoah.
	I talked at length about Holocaust Remembrance Day, and there's a great video I saw yesterday from El Al, the Israeli national airline.
	The plane, which is full of Jews who were going to Israel on Yom Hashoah, they were flying over Germany, and a guy, one of the flight attendants, got on the intercom, and he starts telling everybody about how all of his grandparents were slaughtered in the camps.
	He gets on the intercom and he says, and if they could see now that there is an airplane with a Jewish star flying over Germany.
	Imagine, I mean, imagine the miracle of that.
	It really is a miraculous, miraculous thing.
	How bad was the Holocaust?
	The Holocaust was so horrible in terms of human populations that there are still fewer Jews on earth 80 years after the Holocaust than there were before the Holocaust.
	And so many Jews were murdered.
	It's an amazing, amazing thing.
	And then all the people on the plane start singing together and dancing in the aisles.
	It's pretty, it's pretty amazing.
	Well, I was asked yesterday by somebody for movies that concern the Holocaust.
	I mentioned some yesterday.
	One of the ones that I mentioned that has been wildly underrated, there was a movie, a TV movie that was done about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which is one of the great inspiring stories of Jewish history.
	A small band of barely armed Jews have been cut off by the outside world, holding up for a month against the mechanization of the German military forces.
	It is a strong argument, by the way, that people should be armed because armed Jews held off the Nazis for a month.
	In the middle of complete privation, without proper ammunition, without proper firearms.
	There's a very good movie called Uprising, as I say.
	I believe it's only available on DVD.
	You can order it from Amazon.
	It's certainly worth the watch.
	It's quite good.
	In fact, I find the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising story so important that I'm actually working on a musical about it with my father.
	My father writes musicals.
	I wrote the libretto.
	My dad writes the music.
	So we're hoping to bring that out, I think, probably sometime next year.
	In any case, okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	So Burger King, all these corporations now feel the need to social justice message.
	I am a huge advocate of people who have mental illness need to seek help.
	People who have mental illness need to seek help.
	Mental illness runs in my family.
	People who have a problem need to seek help.
	They need to find somebody who can help them.
	Burger King runs a commercial about mental illness and it makes no sense at all.
	It just doesn't make any sense.
	So here is Burger King's weird commercial, which, I mean, I guess capitalism for the win, but here is Burger King trying to, I guess, push depression eating?
	Is that the idea here?
	Not everybody wakes up happy.
	Sometimes you feel sad, scared, crappy.
	All I ask is that you let me feel my way.
	Feeling blue.
	Okay, so it's just a bunch of little poetic statements about feelings, and then the chorus is, I just want you to let me feel my way.
	You can feel your way, okay, but what you really should do if you're depressed and you're down and you're having a problem is you should go see somebody and do something about it.
	Burger King's eventual solution to all of this is that if we just let you feel however you want to feel, without trying to intervene, And then we give you a bunch of meals that you're gonna eat, so we're gonna let you harden your arteries.
	That's the proper solution, is for you to feed.
	Very weird take.
	Very, very odd take.
	By the way, for folks who are depressed, one of the greatest methods of trying to fight depression is something called cognitive behavioral therapy, in which the goal is not to let you feel your way, the goal is to try to explain to you how you can intervene in the chain of your own feelings and stop yourself from feeling a way you don't want to feel.
	Burger King making money off depression eating, and then virtue signaling about it.
	Welcome to... If there is such a thing as late-stage capitalism, this would be what it would look like.
	Man.
	Alright, so, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours.
	Plus, remember, you should subscribe so you can get the Sunday special a day early.
	We got Nikki Haley this weekend, so that's pretty awesome stuff.
	Go check.
	We have a bunch of big-name guests who are coming up.
	Also, we have a very special episode that I can't wait to tell you about of the Sunday special coming up next month.
	It's going to be just fantastic.
	I've been doing the interviews for it all week.
	It's so good.
	We'll get to that.
	But go subscribe so you get all that stuff.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
	And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Adam Sajevitz.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright, Daily Wire 2019.
	Hey guys, over on the Matt Wall Show today, Facebook has stepped up its censorship efforts.
	So we'll discuss the great purge of supposedly dangerous People who all reside, coincidentally I'm sure, on one side of the political spectrum.
	And we'll also talk about the ethical and legal implications of what they're doing.
	Also, we're now being told that it is white supremacist to try to be objective.
	Objectivity is white supremacy.
	So I want to talk about how the left has made white supremacy into a completely meaningless concept.

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