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Aug. 16, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:09:24
Israel Boycotts Anti-Semites | Ep. 841
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Israel boycotts the boycotters.
The New York Times goes fully woke.
And we check the mailbag.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Oh, man, we have a lot to get to today.
Let's just jump right in.
So the big story of the day continues to be the reverberations, the fallout from Israel rejecting the request to visit by Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two anti-Semitic members of Congress.
Now, this is being completely misportrayed by the media.
Shock of shocks.
I mean, the same media that pretends that every time Hamas organizes a terrorist attempt on the Israeli border, and then Israel has to shoot people attempting to invade its country, that Israel is the aggressor.
That same media that routinely defends the Palestinian Authority, which is a terrorist entity, which funds terrorists, which names streets after terrorists.
That same media that champions those folks, that they are actually championing Ilhan Omar and Rashida's leadership.
I can't believe it.
I just can't believe it.
Listen, the media bias against Israel goes back 30, 40 years.
I'm old enough to remember back in the 1990s when my parents cancelled their membership to the L.A.
Times because the L.A.
Times had run a photo on the front page suggesting that a picture of an Israeli member of the IDF protecting a Jew from being beaten by Arab Muslims in Israel was actually a picture of an Israeli member of the military beating an Arab Muslim in Israel.
They cancelled their membership to the L.A.
Times over this.
The media bias against Israel is longstanding, and it has not abated in any way, shape, or form.
So the media coverage, naturally, of the Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib fake visit to Israel is similarly egregious.
All the headlines are, Israel rejects American congresspeople.
And the members of the media are also buying the line put out there by Tlaib and Omar that Israel is rejecting them because they are Muslim.
Which is eminently untrue and insane to boot.
20% of Israel's population is Muslim.
There are Arab Muslim parties sitting in the Knesset right now.
Members of those parties have called for the destruction of the state of Israel, but because those members of the party happen to be Israeli Arab citizens, they are free to say whatever they want.
There are Israeli Arab members of the, not only of the Knesset, but of the Israeli Supreme Court.
So all of this talk about Israel is wildly discriminatory against Muslims.
Arabic is an official language in Israel.
Israel has ruled off-limits for Jews.
Prayer on the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.
You have to have a special armed guard to go up on the holiest site in Judaism, controlled by Israel, in order to pray up there out of respect for the Islamic Waqf.
When there are riots up there every year or so, the Israelis basically protect the right of the Muslim population on top of the Temple Mount to riot.
The Islamic Waqf has been destroying historic artifacts up there, and the Israeli government is doing nothing about it.
The notion that Israel doesn't tolerate dissent is obviously insane.
The only people who could believe that are people who have never been to Israel or watched Israeli media coverage.
Haaretz, which is a major Israeli newspaper, is not even comparable to the New York Times.
Haaretz's coverage of Israel is more akin to Al Jazeera than it is to the New York Times.
And that is a major Israeli newspaper.
So this notion that Israel can't tolerate criticism or that Israel is discriminating against Muslims is sheer absolute nonsense.
And yet, that is the way the media is portraying Israel's rejection of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
In reality, the reason they are rejecting Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar is it is against Israeli law for Israel to allow people into the country who seek to destroy the country through boycott, divestment, and sanctions.
That is a movement that was started by terrorist sympathizers who openly wish to see Israel wiped from the map.
Their idea is that if they can get the world community to leverage economic sanctions against Israel, then Israel will be greatly weakened.
And they've made no secret of this.
The leaders of the BDS movement have made no secret of the fact that they are not interested in forcing Israel to a negotiated peace with terrorists.
Instead, what they are interested in is Israel not being on the map.
And Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are part of that movement.
Both of them are anti-Semitic.
Rashida Tlaib has used publicly the dual loyalty smear.
Rashida Tlaib has hung out with Hamas sympathizers, with Hezbollah sympathizers, with terrorist sympathizers for large swaths of her career.
I mean, going back to January, there was a report in the Times of Israel about Tlaib posing with a Hezbollah-backing anti-Israel activist named Abbas Hamideh, who actually painted a picture of her in front of the Capitol building wearing the Palestinian scarf, the Palestinian pride scarf.
According to the Times of Israel back in January, an anti-Israel extremist who heads a right-to-return advocacy group, which would call for the importation of every Palestinian into Israel as citizens, which would of course destroy the Jewish nature of the state and destroy the democracy, attended a Detroit swearing-in reception and dinner party for freshman Rashida Tlaib, where he posed with her for a photograph that he tweeted.
He said, I was honored to be a Congresswoman Tlaib swearing in ceremony in Detroit and private dinner afterward with the entire family, friends and activists across the country.
In the picture, Hamida is holding a painting of Tlaib in front of the U.S.
Capitol while she is wearing a thobe, a traditional Palestinian gown that she wore during her swearing in on Capitol Hill.
Hamida's social media presence is noteworthy for its virulent attacks on the Jewish state.
He has tweeted things like criminal Zionism will eventually die, just like Nazism.
No racist and supremacist political ideology should maintain itself.
Israel does not have a right to exist.
This is a person posing with Rashida Tlaib at her inauguration, at her swearing-in.
And then she also posed with a second terrorist supporter.
This is according to Stephen Emerson, IPT News.
Two months after that, in March, she posed with Nader Jalajal, a Palestinian activist who last year mourned the death of a terrorist who led a shooting attack that murdered a rabbi.
So, Rashida Tlaib has not been particularly shy about her associations, neither has Ilhan Omar.
And they weren't being very shy about their associations on this particular trip either.
Because as it turns out, the Israeli government, and I've spoken with members of the Israeli government, members of the Trump administration about all this, the Israeli government was fully prepared to let Omar and Tlaib visit.
And then they saw their itinerary.
And the Israeli government said, no.
This is not a thing that's going to happen.
Why?
Because the itinerary, first of all, said nothing about even visiting Israel.
It wasn't about visiting Israel.
It was about visiting quote-unquote Palestine.
OK, and when they said visiting Palestine, they didn't mean visiting Ramallah.
The first day is in Jerusalem.
So Jerusalem, according to Omar and Tlaib, is Palestinian territory.
You think Israel would stand for that?
Why should they stand for that?
Not only that, the groups that Omar and Tlaib were going on this trip with are openly anti-Semitic terror supporting groups.
So why would Israel let these people in?
I mean, it's the fault of their constituents in the United States.
They're in Congress.
That's not Israel's fault.
And as we will see, the United States actually has a record of barring Israeli legislators from entering the United States if they feel they have terrorized.
This happened back in 2012.
So let's talk a little bit about this trip.
Okay, because all of this is just a giant PR setup for Omar and Tlaib.
That's all this is.
The whole thing is manipulative garbage on the part of both Omar and Tlaib, which became absolutely clear today when Rashida Tlaib made it clear that she hates the Jews more than she loves her own grandmother.
That is pretty obvious from her behavior today.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so.
What exactly were these illustrious Congresswomen, these anti-Semitic Congresswomen?
And notice, by the way, media bias in its purest form.
When Donald Trump says something that is racially insensitive or xenophobic, the media rush to call it racist, which is an editorial judgment.
They say this is a racist comment.
And in fact, when the New York Times prints a headline after the El Paso shooting, Trump urges unity versus racism, people lose their minds because you're not even allowed to suggest the truth, which is that he was urging unity against racism.
In other words, newspapers will characterize what Trump says.
The way they see it, right?
They'll call him a racist because they feel the duty to do so.
When Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar say something anti-Semitic, the first move of the media is to ignore that and pretend they are not saying anything anti-Semitic.
And the New York Times will print headlines about how they've opened a conversation about Israeli money on Capitol Hill or some such, which is what they did after Ilhan Omar suggested that American support for Israel is all about the Benjamins.
In any case, so what were Omar and Tlaib actually going to do in Israel?
As I say, their itinerary was labeled a trip to Palestine, which in and of itself eliminates the Jewish state.
There is no actual territory called Palestine.
It does not legally exist.
There are Palestinian-administered territories that are disputed under international law and that Israel claims ownership of, both historically as well as in terms of winning a war, which they did in 1967 as well as 1973.
they did in 1967 as well as 1973.
Both wars initiated by Israel's enemies.
Well, what exactly was on their itinerary?
Well, apparently, the office of the Prime Minister of Israel has revealed that Omar and Tlaib had plans on meeting with organizations during their visit that have expressed support for terrorism against the nation.
The office of Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted, quote, the itinerary of the two congresswomen reveals that the sole purpose of their visit is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it.
In addition, the organization that is funding their trip is MIFTA, which is an avid supporter of BDS and among whose members are those who have expressed support for terrorism against Israel.
OK, so what is this MIFTA group?
That's a non-governmental organization that is extremely anti-Semitic.
They have ties to terrorist sympathizers.
They have falsely accused Jews of using the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover.
Mifda, this group that these women were traveling with, has also reportedly praised suicide bombers and deems terrorists as being national heroes.
One of the most stunning findings on the group, according to Ryan Saavedra at Daily Wire, is that they have on their website promoted content from a neo-Nazi organization which itself promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that Jews control the media.
The author of the article in question that was promoted on the MIFTA website is the research staff of National Vanguard Books, which is a neo-Nazi organization according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
They actually put out a piece on their website talking about the evils of miscegenation.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
A closer look at the travel itinerary for Omar and Talib shows they also plan on meeting with additional extremist organizations, including the Defense for Children International Palestine, which has ties to terrorism.
NGO Monitor reports that DCIP leads the campaign exploiting children to promote demonization of Israel and is linked to the PFLP terror group.
Many of its allegations are false and part of attempts to smear Israel with allegations of war crimes and promote BDS.
Several past and current DCIP board members and employees have apparent ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is a designated terror organization by the US, EU, Canada, as well as Israel, and they support BDS, which Nancy Pelosi called, like, two months ago, anti-Semitic.
Seth Mandel of Washington Examiner Magazine, he tweeted, One reason you won't see coverage of the organization funding Tlaib and Omar's trip is that it would undermine the narrative this is about criticism of Israeli policy.
It shows the true face of BDS, blood libels, Nazi screeds, celebration of terrorists.
And naturally he's right, the media have completely ignored all of this.
Okay, so, President Trump had suggested that Israel bar them.
And Trump is doing this for his own political reasons.
One of those reasons is that President Trump would like to make Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib the faces of the Democratic Party.
He wants to force Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Chuck Schumer to all get behind the most radical members of the Democratic Party so that he can run against them.
And it's not a bad domestic political strategy.
So there is some strategy to it.
It's also true that Trump happens to be morally right when he says that Israel shouldn't let these people in.
OK, so I'll talk a little bit about the strategy here in a second, whether it benefits Israel, whether Israel did the politically right thing in barring these women.
I think that the case is getting stronger that they did actually, as these women exposed their own agenda.
But President Trump had made the very strong case that Israel shouldn't let these people and people are now in the United States.
How dare he say something like really?
Really?
Okay, if you're a Democrat and you went out there and suggested that Mexico shouldn't let Trump in, do you think there'd be any hubbub at all about that?
Like, really, on the part of the media?
Would that be considered unpatriotic?
If some Democrat suggested that Steve King should be barred from entry to, for example, an African nation, do you think that anybody in media or government would think that this was an element of treason?
Here's Trump saying Israel shouldn't have to let in people who want to destroy it.
If you look at their language, if you look at what they've said, if I ever said it, it would be a horrible month, to put it mildly.
So the things that they've said, Omar, Khalid, what they've said is disgraceful.
So I can't imagine why Israel would let them in.
But if they want to let them in, they can, but I can't imagine why they would do it.
Okay, and then he continued along those lines.
He said they've said some of the worst things about Israel.
Of course, everything he is saying here is 100% true.
I think that if Israel allowed them to come in for the normal reasons, other than those reasons, I really believe that it would be a terrible thing for Israel.
I think it would show a terrible sign.
They want to do boycotts.
They said horrible things about Jewish people.
They said horrible things about Israel and Israelis.
I think it would be a terrible thing, frankly, for Israel to let these two people, who speak so badly about Israel, come in.
And the media's response to how dare Trump again, if this were Barack Obama as president talking about Steve King visiting Africa, no one would think that that was a bad thing.
Right.
Or if he had said that about Donald Trump visiting Mexico, right, then nobody would think that that was a bad thing, particularly in the media.
In one second, I'm going to get to what the Prime Minister of Israel has to say about all of this.
It is obvious what the agenda was from the start.
Today, Rashida Tlaib totally exposed the agenda because she is not only a terrible person who believes terrible things, she's also a fool.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so Prime Minister Netanyahu put out this statement.
No country in the world respects America and the American Congress more than the state of Israel.
As a free and vibrant democracy, Israel is open to critics and criticism, with one exception.
Israeli law prohibits the entry into Israel of those who call for and work to impose boycotts on Israel, as do other democracies that prohibit the entry of people who seek to harm the country.
In fact, in the past, the U.S.
did this to an Israeli member of Knesset, as well as to other public figures from around the world.
This is true.
In 2012, the Obama administration barred a member of Knesset named Ben-Ari.
And they did so because he was associated with the Kahanei Chai party, which is considered a terrorist organization in the United States, the Koch party.
He was no longer in the Koch party, but his past with the Koch party led the United States to bar him from entry.
An entire Israeli delegation then canceled its trip.
This was not considered a big deal at the time because countries have rules.
Prime Minister of Israel continues, Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar are leading activists in promoting the legislation of boycotts against Israel in the American Congress.
Only a few days ago, we received their itinerary for their visit in Israel, which revealed that they plan to visit whose sole objective is to strengthen the boycott against us and deny Israel's legitimacy.
For instance, they listed the destination of their trip as Palestine and not Israel.
And unlike all Democratic and Republican members of Congress who have visited Israel, they did not request to meet any Israeli officials, either from the government or the opposition.
A week ago, Israel warmly welcomed some 70 Democratic and Republican members of Congress who expressed broad bipartisan support for Israel, which was also demonstrated a month ago in a resounding bipartisan vote against BDS in Congress.
However, the itinerary of the two Congresswomen reveals the sole purpose of their visit is to harm Israel and increase incitement against it.
In addition, the organization funding their trip is MIFTA, which is an avid supporter of BDS and among whose members are those who have expressed support for terrorism against Israel.
Therefore, the Minister of Interior has decided not to allow their visit, and I, as Prime Minister, support his decision.
Nonetheless, if Congresswoman Tlaib submits a humanitarian request to visit her relatives, the Minister of Interior has announced that he will consider her request on the condition that she pledges not to act to promote boycotts against Israel during her visit.
All of that is reasonable.
The U.S.
ambassador to Israel is David Friedman, and he released his own statement supporting Israel.
The statement says, The United States supports and respects the decision of the government of Israel to deny entry to the Tlaib Omar delegation.
The BDS movement against Israel is not free speech.
It is no less than economic warfare designed to delegitimize and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.
Israel properly has enacted laws to bar entry of BDS activists under those circumstances present here.
And it has every right to protect its borders against those activists in the same manner as it would bar entrance with more conventional weapons.
Initially, Israel had indicated it would accept the Tlaib Omar delegation and use their visit as an opportunity to engage with and educate the delegation members with regard to Israel's vibrant and robust democracy, its religious tolerance, and its ethnic diversity.
Unfortunately, the itinerary of the Tlaib-Omar delegation leaves no room for that opportunity.
This trip, pure and simple, is nothing more than an effort to fuel the BDS engine that Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar so vigorously support.
Like the United States, Israel is a nation of laws.
We support Israel's application of its laws in this case.
That statement is entirely just and proper.
Okay, so Ilhan Omar then responds with a completely dishonest statement, which is a giant shock knowing Ilhan Omar's history as a Congress person and before.
Quote, It is an affront that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under pressure from President Trump, would deny entry to representatives of the U.S.
government.
Trump's Muslim ban is what Israel is implementing.
There's such sheer nonsense built into this line.
It's pretty incredible.
Trump's Muslim ban.
No Muslim ban has ever been enforced in the United States, nor should it.
The travel ban involves seven countries, only five of which are majority Muslim.
There are 50-plus majority Muslim countries on planet Earth.
Most of them, the vast majority, nearly all of them, are not covered by the travel ban.
Israel is not implementing a Muslim ban.
They're implementing a U-ban.
They are banning Omar and Tlaib, not because of their Muslim heritage, not because of their religion, but because they want to destroy the state of Israel.
But Ilhan Omar's a liar, so she lies.
Trump's Muslim ban is what Israel is implementing, this time against two duly elected members of Congress.
Denying entry into Israel not only limits our ability to learn from Israelis, but also to enter the Palestinian territories.
Okay, um, you had no intention of learning from Israelis.
We saw your itinerary, so you're a liar.
Sadly, she says, this is not a surprise given the public positions of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has consistently resisted peace efforts.
Two years ago, he offered to come to the table with Mahmoud Abbas and negotiate without preconditions.
It turns out it's very difficult to negotiate with people who want to murder you.
Restricted freedom of movement of Palestinians.
That's true, because every time the security fence is opened up, people try to commit acts of terrorism.
Limited public knowledge of the brutal realities of the occupation.
Yeah, why don't you read Haaretz once in a while?
And aligned himself with Islamophobes like Donald Trump.
That's of course his great sin.
As a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, it is my job to conduct oversight of foreign aid from the United States of America.
This does bring up a point.
Nancy Pelosi, by putting this This ideologically radical, nasty human being on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs committed a great sin against the American people.
Because this lady should not be anywhere near the levers of power when it comes to the delegation of foreign aid.
There can be good arguments to be made about foreign aid.
She is not going to make them.
This is not an honest person trying to push the priorities of the United States abroad in terms of human rights, because this is the same person who says we shouldn't sanction Venezuela or Russia or China or Iran, but we should sanction Israel.
This is not a good faith human being.
By the way, this is on Nancy Pelosi and it's also on Ted Deutch, two members of Congress for the Democrats who had to sign off on this congressional delegation visiting using an NGO.
That has to be signed off on by party leadership.
Okay.
That is her statement.
Okay?
And her statement is a bunch of crap.
How do we know that her statement is a bunch of crap?
Well, one of the ways that we know that her statement is a bunch of crap is because Rashida Tlaib then decided that she was going to fulfill that request.
She put out a bunch of tweets about how she really, really wanted to visit her city.
No one knows what that means.
I don't know what that term means, but apparently that refers to her grandmother.
How she really, really wanted to visit her grandmother, who lives in Judea and Samaria, lives in the West Bank.
And it is very important for her to visit her dying grandmother.
And in fact, she issued a letter.
She issued a letter to Aryeh Derry, who's Minister of the Interior in Israel.
And here is her letter.
Quote, Minister Derry, I would like to request admittance to Israel in order to visit my relatives, and specifically my grandmother who is in her 90s and lives in Beit Ur al-Fuqa.
This could be my last opportunity to see her.
I will respect any restrictions and will not promote boycotts against Israel during my visit.
So, that was granted.
Israel said, okay, you want to visit your grandmother?
That's fine.
You just don't get to propagandize on behalf of our destruction, but you want to visit grandma, all you, go for it.
And then Rashida Tlaib turned around and said, you know what?
Screw it.
Grandma, I know she's old.
If I don't see her before she dies, whatever.
If I don't get to go there and crap on the Israelis and the Jews while I'm there, I'm not going to visit grandma.
This is really what she said, right?
So she tweets out, My city wanted to pick figs with me.
I broke down reading this and worry every single day after I won for my family's safety.
My cousin was texting me which photo of Ilhan Omar and I they should put on a welcoming poster when I heard the news.
I couldn't tell her.
Okay, and then the Israeli government came back and they said, Sure, you want to come?
You can come.
You just can't be a propagandist on behalf of terrorism.
And Rashida Tlaib was like, No!
No, I don't want to come.
My city can go Can go do whatever she wants.
Take my city and do it.
My grandma.
You know what?
I guess I don't need to see her that much.
She tweeted out, when I won, it gave the Palestinian people hope that someone will finally speak the truth about the inhumane conditions.
I can't allow the state of Israel to take away that light by humiliating me and use my love for my city to bow down to their oppressive and racist policies.
So now the agenda is exposed, right?
This was never about visiting Grandma Ma.
This was never about going and visiting my relatives in the West Bank.
This was never about any of that.
It was about propagandizing.
That's what this is all about, which is why Israel rejected her application to enter in the first place.
It is truly amazing.
It is truly amazing that Rashida Tlaib would expose herself this way, but again, You give these folks on the left enough rope and they will hang themselves.
She followed that up with another tweet.
Silencing me and treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me.
You've not been silenced, lady.
It seems like you get to talk however much you want.
You just don't get to go to Israel and use it as backdrop for your propaganda.
She said it would kill a piece of me.
Which piece would that be, exactly?
Like your toe?
It seems like you're getting a lot of media attention.
She says, I've decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in, fighting against racism, oppression, and injustice.
Also, let's be real, grandma's kind of boring.
It's unbelievable.
And the media is treating this like Israel has barred her from visiting her grandma.
No, Israel said you can visit grandma.
You're just not allowed to hang out with terrorists while you do it.
And she's like, nope, grandma's on her own.
What a delight.
What a delight these folks are.
Now, in a second, we'll get to the Democratic response to all of this.
What should they have said?
What will they say?
Was this a good strategy by Israel?
We'll get to that in one second.
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Okay, so, as we have now found out, Rashida Tlaib cares much more about slandering Israel than about visiting Siti, than about visiting her grandmother.
It was all a bad faith effort from the beginning.
It was all a bad faith effort.
Now, the Democrats have responded, of course, by defending Omar and Tlaib.
And maybe that was the intent for President Trump.
Maybe the intent for President Trump was Get the Democrats to defend Omar and Tlaib so we can point to them and show how radical they are.
Now, I don't think they needed to do this, frankly.
I think that if Trump wanted to label the squad, the leadership of the House, that's already on the board, right?
I mean, I think people already kind of get that.
Especially because the squad is extraordinarily loud.
I mean, AOC, again, being a liar, she tweeted out, Members of Congress are frequently asked to visit Israel to see things for ourselves.
But Netanyahu choosing to ban the only two Muslim women in Congress from entering tells the U.S.
that only some Americans are welcome to Israel.
Not all.
Again, this is a lie.
They're not banning them because they're Muslim.
They're banning them because they're hanging out with terror activists.
That would be it.
Trump is exporting his bigotry, says AOC, and making matters worse.
Oh, what strength.
What a pillar of genius she is.
Now, as I say, I think that Trump's strategy here is to make the squad the face of the Democratic Party.
That does come with some dangers.
Danger number one is that the Democratic Party could then win and then the squad is in charge.
That's actually a scary thought.
You don't actually want the Democratic Party to rally around the nasty, discriminatory, gross ideology of the squad, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib in particular.
So it's a dangerous game to elevate those people to a position of prominence rather than trying to force Democrats to separate off of them, which probably is what would have happened, by the way.
Omar and Tlaib probably would have gone.
They would have propagandized.
That propaganda would have become a serious subject of controversy among the intelligentsia.
But it would be obvious that it was propaganda, and then Trump could go to all the Democrats and say, guys, you really okay with this sort of propagandizing on behalf of terror?
Everything I told you before about the terror-supporting groups with whom Omar and Tlaib are associated, that could have been made front-page news by President Trump.
He could have done that after they went there.
The preemptive bar forces a lot of Democrats to back Omar and Tlaib when they might not necessarily otherwise have done so.
Anyway, this is what the Democrats do.
Now, what the Democrats should do here Right.
Is they should say, listen, Israel has rules.
They're applying their rules.
Omar and Tlaib have have beliefs that are way out of the Democratic mainstream, which is why we voted against those beliefs instead.
But and by the way, I think that Republicans would do that with Steve King, for example.
Right.
If Steve King had wanted to plan a trip to Mexico and the Mexican government said, no, not interested, I think a lot of Republicans would have gone.
All right.
All right.
Fair enough.
But the Democrats are always going to defend their own.
So Joe Biden tweets out something truly disingenuous.
Quote, I've always been a stalwart supporter of Israel.
Not so much.
A vital partner that shares our democratic values.
No democracy should deny entry to visitors based on the content of their ideas.
Even ideas they strongly object to.
And no leader of the free world should encourage them to do so.
Okay, that is a bunch of horse manure.
And the United States bars entry to a wide variety of people based on the beliefs that they hold.
Based on the content of their ideas.
Like, if you come here and you want to destroy the country, then you are not allowed in.
In fact, even if you don't want to destroy the country, you may not be allowed in.
In 2012, the Obama administration banned a delegation.
Banned a delegation from Israel.
Why?
Because there was a member named Ben Ari, And Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union Party.
They said that he had ties to terror group called Kach.
And the U.S.
refused entry to him.
So Ruven Rivlin, who is the speaker of the Knesset, announced that he would ban the entire delegation of members of Knesset from attending a women's conference in Washington in retaliation.
Guess who was vice president when the Obama administration barred entry to the United States for a sitting member of the Israeli parliament based on that person's viewpoint and associations?
Who was the vice president?
Oh yeah, that was Joe Biden.
So when he says, no democracy should deny entry to visitors based on the content of their ideas, yeah, you did.
You did that, right?
The administration you served under did that.
And then you get Chuck Schumer's response.
So Chuck Schumer similarly suggested denying entry to members of the US Congress is a sign of weakness, not strength.
It will only hurt the US-Israel relationship and support for Israel in America.
Well, he said no democratic society should fear an open debate.
Israel does not fear an open debate.
They are not going to import people to hang out with terror supporting groups.
Many strong supporters of Israel will be deeply disappointed in this decision, which the Israeli government should reverse.
The question is whether Omar and Tlaib should receive special dispensation because they're members of Congress, when if they were not members of Congress, they would certainly be barred.
Ariel Gold is a Jewish woman who works for Code Pink, and she was barred from entry to Israel specifically because of her support for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
So if she were a member of Congress, should she be allowed in now?
Is that how this works?
Again, the Democrats are wrong here, but it is true that the strategy here by the Israelis Was probably destined to do this.
Steini Hoyer does the same thing.
Steini Hoyer is the House Majority Whip and he similarly put out a statement talking about how this was bad.
He said the decision of the Israeli government to deny entry to Israel by two members of Congress is outrageous regardless of their itinerary or their views.
Really?
So if they went there and just said we're meeting with Hamas and we want to blow up the state of Israel, could Israel deny entry?
According to Steini Hoyer, the answer is no.
Ted Lieu, one of the dumber members of the Democratic delegation, he went even further.
He accused the U.S.
ambassador to Israel of dual loyalty.
He suggested that David Friedman, who is the U.S.
ambassador to Israel, is actually loyal to Israel, not to the United States.
Ambassador Friedman, the U.S.
Ambassador to Israel, actually I think he should resign because he doesn't seem to understand that his allegiance is to America, not to a foreign power.
He should be defending the rights of Americans to travel to other countries.
But the ambassador was basically saying what the President of the United States, his boss, was saying.
Well, I wish President Trump would resign.
I don't think he's going to do that, but certainly I can call on Ambassador Friedman to resign.
His allegiance, again, is to America, not to a foreign power, and it's to the Constitution of the United States, not to the President.
Okay, so the fact is that his allegiance is not really in question.
You can have allegiance to the United States and also believe that Israel has no duty to import terror supporters onto its shores.
Okay, Ted Luthen, he tweeted the same thing, and then he tweeted out, it has been brought to my attention, my prior tweet to the U.S.
ambassador in Israel raises dual loyalty allegations that have historically caused harm to the Jewish community.
That's a legitimate concern.
I'm therefore deleting the tweet.
Yeah, it's a little late, dude.
I mean, it's pretty obvious.
You said it twice on CNN.
Like, we all know what you meant.
So, in terms of strategy, here's the problem.
There is something beneficial to Israel in having Democrats, who are weak supporters of Israel, still be titular supporters of Israel.
Forcing them to back Omar and Tlaib, or putting them in a position that makes it easy for them to back Omar and Tlaib, may bear some negative fruit down the line when Omar and Tlaib gain more and more power inside the Democratic caucus, and when Democrats make clear that they're going to continue kowtowing to them.
It is opening a rift that doesn't necessarily need to be open.
Now, maybe that rift already exists.
It's been my belief that since the Obama administration, the Democratic Party has been moving radically anti-Israel, and they continue to do so.
And that extends all the way to Chuck Schumer and his Democratic Party backing the Iran nuclear deal.
With that said, is it a good strategic move?
I'm not sure it's a good strategic move by Israel to bar Omar and Tlaib.
I think there are other ways of demonstrating what Omar and Tlaib were doing.
On a moral level, is there any question that Israel has the right to do this?
No.
Should they do this on a moral level?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
The only question is logistics.
Is it smart for Israel to do it?
Is it good PR for Israel to do it?
Again, I think that the case is now moving in Israel's direction, given the fact that Rashida Tlaib has basically come out and explained that she doesn't care about visiting her grandma at all.
All she cares about is slandering the state of Israel.
Alrighty, in just a second, we're gonna get to a coverage shift over at the New York Times that demonstrates full-scale the insanity of our mainstream media, and how it seems that editorial is now in the control of a bunch of woke interns from Wesleyan.
We'll get to that in just a second.
First, there are only a few days left to purchase tickets to our backstage live show.
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I hope to see you there next week.
Also, good news, gang.
The Daily Wire has somehow managed to turn four years old.
That's right.
We've survived.
I'm just as surprised and thrilled as you are.
So are our employees who continue to be paid incredibly.
You've spent almost 72 million hours listening to our podcast.
Not you, individually, because you're not gonna live that long.
But, collectively, you've spent 72 million hours listening to our podcast, which, for me, feels just like listening to one episode of Michael Knowles' show.
As a thank you to our fans, we are giving away one month of our premium monthly subscription to anyone who uses the code, BIRTHDAY.
That's right, the code is BIRTHDAY.
Go check it out right now, you get one month free of the premium monthly, which is pretty awesome.
That's right, for this entire month, all of August, as we celebrate this magical milestone, We are giving away a free first month for new premium monthly subscribers, which is a great deal.
Again, just use the code BIRTHDAY and come join the fun.
It's 13 months for the price of 12.
Yay, good stuff.
Also, our Sunday special this week is fantastic.
Okay, so I've been waiting to break the news to you, but our Sunday special this week, which is available to subscribers tomorrow early, is with Wait for it.
Piers Morgan.
Who, as it turns out, is a really nice dude.
He and I get along great.
So Piers Morgan and I had a great conversation.
It ranged on everything.
Yeah, we did cover some gun control stuff.
In this particular conversation, I really wanted to let Piers kind of spill out his own ideas on the subject, since he let me do the same on his show.
And you should check it out.
It really is great.
Here's a little bit of what it sounded like.
At what point does the safety and the health of a lot of people get dictated to by a group of other people?
It's a fundamental question for the public health of the country.
And treating guns like a public health issue would be a really smart move for America right now.
The conversation is really fantastic.
It is not just on gun control.
The vast majority of the conversation actually is on other stuff.
It's on media, it's on the nature of celebrity, it's on President Trump.
He's good friends with President Trump, so there's a lot of insight, and I think you'll find it fascinating.
And Pierre's a good dude.
I mean, one of the beautiful things that I love about doing the Sunday Special is I really do get to hang out with people on the other side of various aisles.
Right.
People with whom I disagree about a wide variety of topics.
And it turns out when you're trying to have a discussion with them, you can actually learn something from them.
Maybe they learn something from you.
That's what's great about America.
I feel like it's dying right now, but that's... I really enjoyed the Sunday special.
I think you will too.
Also, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire subscriber.
Today, it's a Twitter user named Dustin, who clearly understands the reality of a hard working life.
In this pic, Dustin's glorious Leftist Tears Tumblr takes a breather while sitting on a busy waterway with huge commercial ships in the background.
The caption reads, out here working hard on a Sunday.
Someone has to pay the taxes for liberal policies.
Hashtag commercial diver.
Hashtag salvage driving.
Hashtag Leftist Tears Tumblr.
That is more of a man than I will ever be right there, this guy.
Yeah, that about sums it up.
Thanks for the pic, Dustin.
Stay safe down there.
Keep up the good work.
See, this is what America's about, making those choices to make your life better, make your family stronger.
This is good stuff right here.
Thank you, Dustin.
Also, I hope that you are not actually a Russian bot, because your actual screen name is RussianBot0331 at Twitter.
So, if you're a Russian bot, sorry everybody, but if you're not, I hope you're not a diver for the Russian government.
Okay, so, we will get to more in just a second.
As I say, please go subscribe.
We're the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
So meanwhile, I have some brief bad news.
Apparently, Greenland is not for sale.
This is very disappointing.
President Trump apparently was super interested in buying Greenland.
This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
And I was, like, totally on board with this.
Honestly, if you didn't want America to buy Greenland, I think you hate them.
I mean, if we're gonna, let's just buy places, right?
I mean, we're rich.
We got some, we got, I mean, sure, we have like 21 trillion dollars in debt, but we're rich.
We can afford like a giant iceberg.
That seems kind of fun.
Plus, eventually, a lot of those icebergs will melt.
That will be a, that'll be a waterway, like a northern passage.
It'll be, it'll be really, really important.
So why not just buy Greenland?
I think that was Trump's law.
Also, you could build a beautiful, unbelievable hotel.
Make a golf course right on the glacier.
Unbelievable.
It was a great idea, buying Greenland.
Sadly, this has now been quashed by the government of Greenland.
They say we are not for sale.
So it's war then!
Alright.
We will be sending over ten of our finest.
Honestly, we should just buy Hong Kong.
It seems like the return on investment is better and the people are very interested in getting the hell away from Chinese governance.
So maybe we can make that deal.
Maybe as part of the closing of the tariff deal with China we just buy Hong Kong.
That seems like a good idea.
I felt I needed to give you that update because I was so enthusiastic yesterday on my radio show about buying Greenland that I'd feel bad if you went into the weekend thinking that was still a possibility.
Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, the woke have taken over.
It is amazing, very often, these sorts of ridiculous, censorious decisions that are made, I mean, at these organizations, like the Atlantic, to go after Kevin Williamson, or Business Insider, to go after Daniella Greenbaum.
Those decisions are usually not made by the editors.
Those decisions are being made by the interns who get the coffee.
Because, very often, the editors Out of a feeling of, I need to care what my employees think, and if they're offended by somebody, then we need to change our editorial policy.
That's had a major impact on how organizations run, up to and including the New York Times.
According to the Washington Examiner, Dean Beckett, the executive editor of the New York Times, said recently that after the Mueller report, the paper has to shift the focus of its coverage from the Trump-Russia affair to the president's alleged racism.
He says, we built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well.
Now we have to regroup and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.
So in other words, the editorial coverage at the New York Times, the news coverage, is being dictated by narratives that the New York Times left wants to push.
So it went from Russia, which was a giant fail for them, to Trump's a racist in no time flat, and they're going to shift how the paper is constituted in order to push that.
Baquette made the remarks at an employee town hall on Monday.
Her recording was leaked to Slate, which published a transcript on Thursday.
Baquette explained, That was a really hard story, by the way.
Let's not forget that.
We set ourselves up to cover that story.
I'm gonna say it.
We won two Pulitzer Prize covering that story.
And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.
But then the Mueller report came out, and it turns out that none of it ended up being a thing.
And then he says that we have to shift.
He says, I think we've got to change.
The Times must now write more deeply about the country, race and other divisions.
He says, I mean, the vision for the coverage for the next two years is what I talked about earlier.
How do we cover a guy who makes these kinds of remarks?
How do we cover the world's reaction to him?
How do we do that while continuing to cover his policies?
How do we cover America?
It's been become so divided by Donald Trump.
No, guys, there's no such thing as media bias.
That's just the executive editor of the nation's foremost newspaper talking about shifting his coverage from Donald Trump's a Russian spy to Donald Trump is a vicious KKK-like racist dividing the country.
Why do you think there's media bias again?
Are you suggesting there's media bias, madam?
How dare you?
Now, why does this happen?
This happens because the staffers inside The New York Times would like to pressure the people at the top.
How do you know this?
Because the transcript has been released.
So the staffers were asking Baquette why they don't just call Trump racist every day.
And Baquette was like, yeah, you know, maybe we should.
He says, you know, we shouldn't use racially tinged or racially charged.
He says, if you're going to do what I said, you got to put your money where your mouth is and just describe it.
And then a staffer said, quote, I have another question about racism.
I'm wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting.
Just because it feels to me like it should be a starting point, you know, like these conversations about what is racist, what isn't racist.
I just feel like racism is in everything.
It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting.
And so to me, it's less about the individual instances of racism and sort of how we're thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all the systems in the country.
And I think particularly as we are launching a 1619 project, I feel like it's going to open us up to even more criticism from people who are like, OK, well, you're saying this and you're producing this big project about it.
But are you guys actually considering this in your daily reporting?
So in other words, the foundation of every story written by The New York Times, according to this unnamed staffer, is that white supremacy lies at the root of America, not the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution of the United States, not broader principles, but racism.
The story of America is the story of racism and how racism infects everything.
And Baquette says, pretty much, that he agrees with this.
He says, maybe we shouldn't use the word racist, because everything is racist.
He quotes a guy named Keith Woods, who's ombudsman for NPR, and he says, his argument boils down to this.
Pretty much everything is racist.
His view is that a huge percentage of American conversation is racist, so why isolate one comment from Donald Trump?
I do think that race has always played a huge part in the American story, and I do think that race and understanding of race should be part of how we cover the American story.
Sometimes news organizations sort of forget that in the moment, but of course it should be.
I mean, one reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that.
Because that's the job of a newspaper, is to indoctrinate you in a particular political point of view using their news coverage.
Man, oh man.
I mean, that is astonishing stuff from the New York Times, but only astonishing if you've never actually watched the coverage from the New York Times.
Alrighty, time for some mailbagging, so let's do it.
Carlo says, hey Ben, I'm a free market guy, but recently I've been doubting the validity of the claim that wages reflect a person's productivity.
I'm 23, I have a pretty high salary for my age.
I have a bachelor's in economics, I'm proficient in two programming languages.
The thing is, I don't really do anything.
I work in an office and watch videos on YouTube most of the day.
I have a friend that nurses in intensive care that makes $20,000 less than I do.
My question is, is the free market really that good at determining wages?
If it were true, shouldn't all the people I know that have real jobs make more than I do?
No, Carlos, here's the problem.
You're mixing up the value of your labor with the effort of the labor.
You're sort of using a model of the Marxist labor theory of value, meaning that how hard you work should be reflected in your wages as opposed to the value of your work reflected in your wages.
So presumably the reason that you are earning more than your friends who are nurses who work in intensive care is because you have a very specialized skill set that you have spent a lot of time cultivating, and there's a demand for that skill set.
And so you're getting paid more, meaning that somebody needs to do that job.
There are not that many people who can do that job.
You are one of the people who can do that job.
And so what determines wages is not how hard you work.
There are people who are working, digging ditches every day, who work a lot harder than I do, and I'm sure I get paid more than most of those people.
Okay, but that isn't because I have a specialized skill set that people want to hear from.
Now, does that mean that my work is quote-unquote more valuable on a moral level?
No, of course not.
Of course not.
My wife's work is much more important than mine on a moral level.
My wife is a doctor, she takes care of people, she makes a lot less money than I do.
Right?
And she's doing much more valuable work in terms of societal influence.
She's doing much more valuable work in terms of helping people.
But that's a moral judgment, not a judgment as to What the value of her work on an economic level is.
Now, the reason that people mix these two things up is they think, OK, well, that's not fair.
Your wife is helping people and you're not helping as many people on a direct level.
Right.
But the answer is that if you want more people who are doing what my wife does, then you actually need to incentivize them to do it.
And also, that is determined by how many people can do what my wife does.
Right?
This is the problem with teaching, for example.
So people say, teachers don't get paid enough.
And the answer is, teachers very often are not getting paid enough.
And in many cases, they're getting paid too much because it's not a free market system.
The question is, how many people can fill that slot?
How many people can do that job?
The question is not, what is the inherent moral value of the job?
Because there is no way to determine what somebody should be paid based on the inherent moral value of the job.
My wife should be paid infinity based on the fact that she saves lives.
But infinity is not an option.
The question is, how do you create a system where a lot of people are going into medicine to help people while also recognizing that not everybody should go into medicine because at a certain point you're gonna have a surplus of doctors or a surplus of nurses.
The way that markets determine how much labor is necessary is through the pricing mechanism.
That is what the pricing mechanism is designed to do.
And this is just as true in labor and services as it is in product.
I think just on a pure level, stethoscopes more important than pencils.
Stethoscopes are more important than pencils.
But the question as to how many stethoscopes should be produced and how many pencils should be produced, that's a question of how many people want to buy stethoscopes and how many people want to buy pencils.
That's how we allocate the amount of labor that should be designated for a particular task.
This is why baseball players get paid lots and lots of money, because they have a very specialized task, and a lot of us want to see the best baseball players, but there are very few people who can play baseball at that high a level, and so they're paid a lot of money.
That's not a problem with the market.
Maybe that's a problem with our priorities.
Maybe we ought to make a case that our priorities ought to be different, but that's a case for individual human beings, and forcing people to quote-unquote have different priorities is a mistake, because people's priorities are what they are.
Hey, Tori says, do you have any favorite documentaries?
First of all, Ken Burns' Civil War documentaries are really, really good.
Grizzly Man, which is a documentary about a guy named Timothy Treadwell who got eaten by a bear by Werner Herzog, is really good also.
And not only is it good, also it has Werner Herzog narrating, which is always somewhat hilarious.
Ah, when nature is man's enemy.
Nature, he goes out to see the bears, but the bears do not see him the same way.
They see him as food.
He saw them as friends.
It's pretty fantastic.
Other documentaries, there's one that just came out on HBO called The Cold Blue that is very good about flyers during World War II.
Peter Jackson just came out with a fantastic documentary where he went back and recolorized and put sound into a lot of the old footage from World War I called They Shall Never Grow Old.
And it's fantastic?
Yeah, there are a bunch of great documentaries out there.
Well, thank you.
Hello, Almoing Shapiro.
Well, thank you.
I had a question I'd like to ask.
I'm 20 years old and in college.
I'm wanting to dive deeper and know more about the current issues going on today, but wanting to get multiple viewpoints on those issues so I can hear what both sides think.
What are some ways you would recommend going about finding info on issues from both sides while still trying to get accurate details?
Thank you, Justin.
Well, I've always said that you should think of news coverage as a series of intersecting lines.
So if you listen to this podcast and then you listen to the leftist podcast, Pod Save America, for example, you'll hear two wildly different perspectives on the politics of the day.
See, this is also the difference between this podcast and Pod Save America.
Pod Save America will never recommend that you listen to my podcast.
I'll recommend that you listen to their podcast.
I don't care.
I think you should.
I think you should listen to lots of different podcasts.
Okay, so Pod Save America, you listen to their podcast, you listen to my podcast, and then what we are saying that is the same, which is usually the basis of fact, that is the intersection point.
Everything else is viewpoint.
And that's how you can tell, right?
You actually have to look at two different news, look at Daily Wire, and then look at Huffington Post, and where they cross over, that would be the core of fact, and then everything else is opinion.
I've been recommending this for years, because I think people should think for themselves and be fair-minded in how they approach subjects.
Just because something is printed in the New York Times doesn't make it false.
It may be biased in its coverage, but you have to look at how the New York Times covers something and National Review and what they have in common.
That's probably the core effect.
And then everything else is the opinion drawn from that core effect.
Brian says, Hey, Ben.
Not really a question, but want to thank you on speaking on working hard and not complaining.
It is personal and cannot be solved by the government.
I have cerebral palsy and my parents always taught me to work hard.
My first job was at McDonald's and a regional manager said I was too slow.
Things worked out.
Through hard work, my brother and I were the first to go to college in our family.
I got my PhD from a top medical research university.
I'm now an assistant professor.
Yes, there are some conservatives in the crazy world of academia with a great salary doing clinical work and research with over 20 publications.
Anyone can achieve their dreams through hard work.
Blessings, Brian.
Brian, I really... What a fantastic, fantastic story, and it is 100% true.
The decisions you make in your life are going to impact your life way more than anything else you do.
I can't tell you the number of letters I've received this week.
I mean, probably hundreds of letters this week in my mailbag.
Specifically about the podcast the last couple of days and the radio show the last couple of days in which I talked extensively about how it is that the personal decisions that you make determine the course of your life.
How it is not impersonal forces that politicians blame that determine the course of your life.
That usually, in a free country, the decisions you make are the ones that are important.
How you problems have you solutions.
How when I say that you having two jobs to pay for a roof over your head, that's a you problem.
What I mean by that is that it is a problem for you to solve.
That is not a problem that can be solved by Kamala Harris riding it on a white horse.
I've gotten so many letters from people saying, yeah, I work two jobs, and I'm glad I do, because it's my decision, and this is a free country.
And a ton of letters from people who say, yeah, I used to work two jobs, and now I don't have to work two jobs, because I've worked hard, and I've developed a skill set, and I've made decisions, and I've moved to different parts of the country.
Life isn't all you're guaranteed in the United States.
I've said this before.
All you are guaranteed in the United States is the adventure.
But that's a freaking fantastic guarantee, isn't it?
Isn't that an unbelievably great guarantee?
Your grandparents from another country?
Maybe they weren't guaranteed that adventure.
That's why they came here.
The people who crossed the continent in covered wagons and taking months and their kids dying of dysentery like an Oregon trail, okay?
Those people weren't guaranteed anything but the adventure.
My great-grandparents coming to the United States in 1907 weren't guaranteed anything but the adventure.
And the adventure was, that was the point.
That was the point.
Seeing an American life as an adventure in which you are the hero of your own story, making those decisions, it will make your life so much better than sitting around whining to Kamala Harris that the economy is rough right now.
That ain't gonna change anything, because Kamala Harris ain't saving you.
And if you think that welfare benefits are going to save you either, we are spending $30,000 plus per capita on welfare in this country for poor families.
And that is not guaranteeing a ladder out of poverty for people.
The best way for you to make your way in the world is to make a series of smart decisions.
Make those decisions over and over and over.
Learn to become the kind of person who makes those smart decisions.
You will be so much more successful and happier in life because you'll have taken control of your own life.
And I've gotten, I promise you, dozens to hundreds of letters in the mailbag this week proving it.
People saying that they actually appreciate this perspective because there's nothing more enervating than being told by a politician you can't do it.
And the Obama line, the si se puede line, yes we can, routine?
The answer is not yes we can, the answer is yes you can.
Yes you can.
It's a free country.
Yes you can.
And if you need help, then reach out to a local charity.
Reach out to people who want to help you, to give you opportunity.
I get letters every single day from people asking for opportunities.
Many of them I can't handle.
Some of them I can.
Some of them we've hired.
We've hired people based on this sort of stuff.
If you are constantly seeking opportunity and taking advantage of opportunity, your life will be so much better and so much happier.
And Brian, that's an amazing story and thank you for that story.
As I say, I wish I could read all the letters I've gotten this week.
They're fantastic.
I was showing them to my wife last night and she was crying.
I mean, it's amazing.
There's so many people who...
Who are inspiring stories of how America still works.
Zach says, Ben, I'm trying to study the ancient Greek philosophers.
I'm wondering if there are any introductory books you could recommend that help explain Plato and Aristotle's ideas.
Well, I mean, first of all, there are some very good translations.
There's an excellent, what is his name, Harvey Mansfield translation of Plato's Republic that is really, really first-rate.
There's also an excellent translation available of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
All these translations are available.
But if you're just looking for sort of a brief overview, then there is a book by Will Durand called The Story of Philosophy that's great.
It gives you like 15 to 20 page introductions to each of the great philosophers.
There's also a great compendium called History of Political Philosophy edited by Leo Strauss that gives you 20 to 30 page summaries of philosophy.
There's also a great book called The Passion of the Western Mind that really spends some heavy time going through Plato and Aristotle.
It's really good.
If you want like a very, very brief intro, then my book, The Right Side of History, does cover some Plato and Aristotle right at the very beginning, talking about the foundations of Greek thought.
So, those are a few recommendations.
Maureen says, how do you think you'd fare on Jeopardy?
Don't be modest.
So, the answer is, I would not fare great on Jeopardy because all the categories in which I know a lot of things are the categories they don't quiz on Jeopardy.
So, it depends on how, how, okay, so great story.
Okay, so here's the thing.
My dad was on Jeopardy.
So, many, many years ago, like 30 years ago, my father was on Jeopardy.
And he made a mistake.
So the way that they do the seeding, they actually seed Jeopardy.
So sometimes you're watching Jeopardy.
And when you watch Jeopardy, you are saying to yourself, I could answer every single one of these questions.
These people seem like dullards.
I could answer every one of these questions.
And sometimes you're watching like, oh my God, who are these people?
How do they know the answers to this?
That's deliberate.
So what they do is there's first an entry test to Jeopardy, at least this is the way it worked 30 years ago.
Then there's a secondary test in which they test you again.
And they don't tell you what the test is for.
What the test is for is to seed you, like in the NCAA rankings.
So if you are really, really smart, then they put you with all the other smart people in that pool.
So my dad passed the entry level, and then on the second level, he did the secondary kind of quiz.
And he came out, and he said to somebody, the person said, how did you do?
He said, I blew it out.
He said, oh, you're an idiot.
You're stupid.
Why would you do that?
Naturally, they proceeded to seed my father against the three-time champion of Jeopardy and a professor from Princeton or something.
And my dad actually performed pretty well.
My dad's a smart dude.
And he performed pretty well.
He was in second place going into final Jeopardy.
And second place on Jeopardy was a trip to Mexico City.
And third place was a refrigerator.
And my mom was sitting in the audience, rooting for my dad to lose.
Because they needed a refrigerator!
Who the hell needs a trip to Mexico City in 1982?
So, my dad gets the final question, he blows it, and my mom is super excited because now she has a refri- that refrigerator was in our house for a solid 15 years.
How would I do on Jeopardy?
So, it depends on the category.
So, if it's a classical music category, I'd do fairly well.
If it's a baseball category, I would do pretty well.
If it were any sports category, I would do pretty well.
If it's a pop culture category, that's not movies, if it's like modern music or something, I'm dead in the water.
I got nothing.
I got nothing for you beyond like 1925 in modern music.
Maybe Gershwin, that's it.
So, it really depends on the category.
Also, there's a mechanism on Jeopardy that locks you out.
So a lot of it's about the timing.
This is why you see people who are returning champions who do really well.
Because if you buzz in too soon, you have to wait for the question to finish before you hit the buzzer.
If you buzz in too soon, they lock you out.
So that kept happening to my father.
So a little bit of Jeopardy insiderism.
I don't think I would do great on Jeopardy, I'll be honest.
Theodore, I know a lot of the answers, but again, really depends on the seating, really depends on the categories.
Theodore says, Hey Ben, I'm a long time fan and a new subscriber.
I've heard you make a few Mean Girls references along with a few other pop culture references that sound a bit surprising coming out of your refined mouth.
What are your other guilty pleasure comedy movies?
Keep up the good work.
I think I've answered this before, but Tommy Boy is one of the great comedies of all time.
Okay, I'm gonna let you finish, but Tommy Boy is fantastic.
So the first time I told that to my parents, they were like, oh, let's watch it.
And then they thought I was an idiot.
Because Tommy Boy is an incredibly stupid movie.
And yet, and yet, it is also a fantastically wonderful movie with Chris Farley and David Spade.
It's just, it's glorious.
Oh, I'm laughing just thinking about Tommy Boy.
Fantastic.
Other guilty pleasure comedy movies.
Rat Race is really underrated.
Rat Race is hysterically funny.
I have three younger sisters.
The one who's the oldest, this was her favorite movie growing up.
She loves physical comedy and Rat Race is full of it.
Okay, Ashira says, do you think it's irresponsible for a young couple to get married before they can be financially responsible for themselves?
No, I don't.
I think that getting married is a smart thing to do because what you don't want is to not get married and then get pregnant.
So when you're saying a young couple to get married, it depends.
What is the alternative?
Is the alternative that you are sleeping together and living together and then getting pregnant without being married?
Because this seems a lot more irresponsible to me.
If the alternative is that you don't get married and you're not sleeping together until you are financially prepared, then that seems fairly responsible to me that you should be able to have money, but I also, if you have any level of income, if you're living on your own and your potential spouse is living on their own and you both have jobs, it's cheaper to live together than it is to live separately.
You're saving on rent.
So I've never really understood the argument that it is expensive to get married.
Not unless you have a big wedding, it ain't.
My wife and I spent less money after we were married than before we were married.
So I'm not sure that I buy the argument.
That marriage is some sort of financial burden unless one person intends on not working.
And if one person intends on not working, then maybe you should wait to have kids until you can financially afford it.
Joel says, Hey Ben, I really love the show and value your insights.
If you had to guess, how probable do you think it is we could have a crash of the US dollar at some point over the next 10 years or so?
If this happened, what do you think things would be like considering that world markets are so much more connected now than they were before the Great Depression?
Thanks.
Well, I think it's unlikely that the U.S.
dollar is going to crash over the next 10 years.
I think over the next 30 years, the chances are fairly good.
But the fact is that over the next 10 years, I do not see an economic power that is capable of rivaling the United States.
The faith in the U.S.
dollar and in the full faith and credit of the United States, which is what the dollar is backed by, that faith is going to remain extremely high because there is no near competitor.
China is not a competitor to the U.S.
dollar in terms of a backup currency.
The euro has been falling apart.
That is not a competitor to the U.S.
as a backup currency.
In fact, the greatest challenge to the dollar as a global currency is probably crypto.
If that starts to gain a foothold, then you could see faith in the U.S.
dollar start to wane.
But over the next 10 years, the answer is no.
Over the next 10 years, the U.S.
dollar will remain the global basis of commerce.
Well, yeah, I mean, I'm always concerned when a Republican president doesn't win the popular vote, when a Republican candidate doesn't win the popular vote.
Why is this the case?
Because Democrats can easily run up big numbers in cities.
That's the answer.
And Donald Trump is very likely to lose the popular vote in 2020.
He lost it by nearly three million votes in 2016.
I think there's a good shot that he loses the popular vote in 2020, simply because I think Democrats in California and New York are vastly concerned with him being elected and are going to show up in massive numbers.
In fact, I think there could be a wider popular vote gap and electoral college gap than there was last time.
I think it's quite possible that Trump wins the same states that he did last time, but loses by more popular votes because people in big cities on the coast show up to vote.
But Trump already lost those states.
He doesn't care.
Electoral College is not a popular vote system.
I think that as the gap grows between the popular vote and the Electoral College, there will be a lot more kickback against the Electoral College, just practically speaking.
But it's more concerning that the Republicans seem not to be able to make inroads.
In big cities, especially, because population seems to be moving more and more from rural areas to urban areas.
Randolph says, hey, Ben, what is your take on hormonal birth controls, which don't prevent fertilization, but do prevent the egg from embedding in the uterine wall?
Do you take the stance that this is the same as abortion?
Well, it is a form of abortion.
And so if there is a pill that does not stop fertilization, this is the argument that I have with Newt Gingrichson.
So, Newt Gingrich says that life begins essentially at implantation.
That fertilization is not when life begins.
Implantation is that when the egg implants in the wall of the uterus, that is when life begins.
So, that would allow some types of Plan B, for example, because that just stops the egg from being able to implant.
I don't hold that view.
I don't see how you could hold that view, scientifically speaking.
Life doesn't begin with the location of the life.
It begins with the life.
So, yes, I think that Plan B is a problem, morally speaking.
So, that's that.
Alrighty.
Let's do some things I like, and then we'll do some things that I hate.
You know what?
Let's skip things I like today.
No more things I like.
Time for a quick thing that I hate.
All right, so I am less than enthused about Stephen Colbert, as you may have noticed from every show ever.
So Stephen Colbert used to be a funny human.
And then he decided that he was going to be, he was going to rival Jimmy Kimmel as woke pope.
And now we have a pope battle like they did in like 13th century, in 13th century Catholicism.
We have like a pope and an anti-pope.
So Stephen Colbert is the anti-pope.
So he is also completely and wildly unfunny in terms of his politics and completely non-self-aware.
So let me give you an example.
Stephen Colbert said on his show the other night that President Trump would look great if our next president were a single-celled organism, meaning that Donald Trump is terrible.
He will always be terrible.
He actually said this on Anderson Cooper.
President leaves, he's not popular, and then, you know, George W. Bush left with low ratings, I guess you would say, or opinion polls, and now is viewed much more differently, you know, at least differently.
I question your research on that one.
I don't think George W. Bush is actually compared to Trump.
Compared to Trump?
Yes.
Well, sure.
Well, sure.
I mean, if our next president is a single-celled organism, then Trump's going to look great.
You know?
Some sort of slime mold.
Oh, yeah, so obviously, Donald Trump, he's only great compared to slime mold or single-celled organisms.
Why do I point this out?
I mean, it's typical nonsense from Colbert.
Because then Colbert seems perturbed that there are people who want the president to be a complete jerk.
There's a large group of Americans, and I don't even think it's necessarily Democrat or Republican, there's a large group of Americans who think the president should be a complete jerk.
He shouldn't be somebody that you necessarily admire.
It should be like, look, a guy who's willing to work on the dark side and get things done.
Well, I also think there's people who just like the fact that he's... that you're upset about him and that, you know, that we're covering him and... Sure, I'm familiar with the term drinking liberals' tears, but that seems like a huge price to pay to get to see guys like he's upset.
It's drinking leftist tears, not liberal tears, by the way.
Like, we have a whole Tumblr just for it.
But let me explain, Stephen Colbert.
Yes, there are a lot of people who have a gut-level reaction to jerks like you being jerks.
And their answer is, we should also be jerks to you.
Right?
And it's not something of which I approve politically.
I don't think that people should elect a president just to drink leftist tears.
I think it is.
It is the job of conservatives to make leftists cry with good arguments and good policy.
I don't think it's the job of the of the right to make the left cry simply by trolling them.
However, do I understand the the The emotional response to Stephen Colbert, you bet your ass I do.
The fact that Stephen Colbert says the kind of stuff he says on a nightly basis, is excused for it by the media, is brought on Anderson Cooper to laugh about it, the fact that he does that sort of stuff, and then he is perturbed when people react to him, is supremely disingenuous.
Because this is what Stephen Colbert is.
Let's be real about this.
Donald Trump was elected to be a late night host.
Okay, that's exactly what happened.
Donald Trump, we can talk about policy all day long, and yes, some people voted based on judges, and some people voted based on pro-life positions, and a lot of that is true.
But the chief appeal of Donald Trump, as opposed to any other Republican, was that he is a late night host who is going to slap Stephen Colbert.
That was the feature, not the bug.
And that is because when you crap from great height upon a huge majority of the American people, It turns out some of those people are not going to like it very much and they're going to want someone who slaps at you on a regular basis.
You cannot simultaneously suggest that Donald Trump is comparable to a single-celled organism or slime mold and then be like, well, why are people so angry at me all the time?
Why do people constantly want to comment?
Why do they care if Trump rips at me?
Because you're featured in the media.
Because you are, in fact, a person who gets an awful lot of media attention.
It's amazing to me that the left has no self-awareness about this.
Like, none.
Maybe you're part of the problem, guys.
Maybe you're part of the problem.
Did it ever occur to you that after spending eight years trolling Republicans as racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes, and calling Mitt Romney the most boring person who has ever lived, a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, that the right might say, you know what?
Screw those guys.
Elect the middle finger.
That's exactly what happened here, and the fact that Colbert doesn't even understand this is part of the continuing problem.
Okay, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours.
Otherwise, have yourself a wonderful, relaxed, nice weekend, and then we'll be back here on Monday to go over whatever the hell happens this week, and I'm sure it'll be great, given the last few news cycles.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Robert Sterling.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.
And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
Edited by Adam Sajovitz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
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