A massive debate breaks out about pornography among conservatives, impeachment plows ahead, and the Inspector General of the Justice Department shreds the FBI.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Okay, so there is this, don't worry, I'm going to get to all the news.
I'm going to get to impeachment, I'm going to get to the Inspector General of the DOJ who is Who is attacking the FBI.
We're going to get to the 2020 race like all of it.
We'll get to it.
But there is this fascinating and I think important debate that's now happening among conservatives over pornography, which is weird, right?
It's weird because pretty much all conservatives agree pornography bad, right?
If you are a moral human being, I think that you agree.
Pornography is not an inherent good for human beings.
There are good scientific studies showing the effect of pornography on the human brain.
It does have a drug-like effect on the human brain because there is a release of serotonin, because it does prompt certain brain activity that is addictive in nature.
Pornography is indeed a major addiction problem, particularly for young men.
It is enervating for the sex life.
It is degrading to women.
I wrote an entire book on pornography.
It's my second book, all the way back in 2005, about the evils of pornography in American society.
So I am very much on board with the idea that pornography is an evil.
And that consuming pornography is a moral bad.
But there's a big debate that is broken out among conservatives about how involved the government should be in regulating pornography.
And the debate isn't really over pornography.
The debate is really over what the role of government ought to be generally.
And it's turned into this broader debate, conservatives versus libertarians.
In which conservatives basically argue now many conservatives are arguing that the government ought to be engaged in promoting what they call the common good and libertarians are arguing the government needs to completely stay out of this particular business.
Now I've been saying for pretty much my entire career that when it comes to matters governmental I tend toward libertarianism.
And when it comes to matters cultural, I'm very conservative because I believe that the founders predicated the notion of a small government, of a government that is there to protect your rights, on the idea of a moral and religious people, right?
This is John Adams' famous line that this government was only constructed for moral and religious people, otherwise the dark side of human nature would tear through the bonds of the Constitution like a whale through the cords of a net.
So the entire presupposition of the founders is that you would have a moral and religious people.
And if you read Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, he talks about how that social framework already existed.
That social framework long preceded the founding of the United States, how Americans were apt to join associations, how Americans were apt to be member of churches, how Americans were broadly religious and personally liberal in terms of how they approached economics and regulations on other people.
Because when you have a baseline level of social fabric and trust in people, Then you don't feel the need to regulate them as much, right?
So you need one to support the other.
In other words, you do need a moral and religious fabric in the United States in order to support a small government.
Well, one of the things that has happened over the past 50 years is the complete fraying of that social fabric.
The morality and the religiousness of the American people, obviously when it comes to matters sexual, but also in matters like drug use and matters like family formation.
All of these things have declined pretty markedly.
And so this has led to a really fascinating debate among conservatives.
What's the first step here?
Do you restore the culture or do you simply do what the left would do and try and grab the commanding heights of government and then cram down from above?
And I am firmly on the side of you have to grab the culture first.
And if you want to work on the culture, you require the government to remain small.
Because the fact is that you are not operating in a vacuum.
You are not operating in a world where you can simply grab the auspices of government and teach the people the right thing to do.
Nor, by the way, do I think that it is moral to use the force of government to teach people the right thing to do.
Because I think that that completely overrules the idea of a representative government.
If the people don't believe a thing and you're going to use the government in order to cram down the thing, that is inherently immoral, whether you're doing that on the left or whether you're doing that on the right.
Now, even if the government is doing something I think is moral and they are cramming it down on the people, that is not what the government is designed to do.
Because then the government is basically dictating to the people what a cadre of people at the top think is right.
Now, I may believe that there is an objective moral good.
I do believe that.
But I also don't believe that I get to be the dictator over people.
I think that completely defeats the notion of representative government.
You may as well go back to the philosopher kings of Aristotle and Plato.
Really, Plato.
So where exactly is the limiting principle when it comes to the involvement of government in promoting quote-unquote justice and the common good?
And you're seeing a lot of folks, people who write for me, right?
People who write over here at Daily Wire and this is why I think it's an interesting and fascinating and necessary debate that's breaking out among conservatives because it doesn't only have social implications and issues like pornography.
I think the argument starts at pornography, but very quickly, it ends up in the realm of economics, where you have people like Tucker Carlson suggesting that it's the job of the government to promote the common good, economically speaking, which is starting to sound indistinguishable from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a lot of ways.
And once you get to a common good government, what you're really talking about is a select few people who know best for the rest of us how exactly we ought to live our lives.
Now, that sounds good if the select few is you, but if it's anybody else, it doesn't sound so good.
In other words, we're all fighting over one government gun.
The bigger the government gun is, the more it matters who controls it.
The smaller the government gun is, the less it matters who controls it.
And so, what I have been promoting my entire career is that the government gun should be particularly small when you're talking at the federal level.
I wanna get into the specifics of this, because again, I think that the argument is being made about pornography, but really the argument isn't about pornography, it's about economics, it's about the role of government in life generally, and it is an argument between conservatives with regard to government, meaning they wanna promote conservative goals using the government, and libertarians who say, no, no, no, you can't touch the government this way, even libertarians who have conservative moral values like me, who believe that you have to rebuild that social fabric outside of government, the sort of James Madison view, that if government gets involved with religion, it ends up actually hurting religion rather than helping religion.
We'll get to all of that in just one moment.
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Okay, so Jane Koston over at Vox actually has a pretty good article.
on the debate that is broken out among conservatives over pornography and the regulation thereof today.
She says social conservatives are ready to launch a new national war on pornography.
It's been nearly 50 years since the Nixon administration's war on porn, more than two decades since the signing of the Communications Decency Act, the first major federal effort to regulate online pornography.
But pornography continues to be a target of Republicans at the state level, In addition, the 2016 Republican Party platform stated that pornography with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions.
And by the way, I agree with every word of that.
I do believe that pornography is a public health crisis that affects children in disproportionate ways.
If you talk to teenage boys, it is really screwing them up in serious, serious ways, which is why I do believe in regulation of the distribution of pornography to people under 18.
Once you're an adult, that changes.
Hey, this fall, Republican members of Congress asked the Department of Justice to declare prosecution of obscene pornography a criminal justice priority.
Conservative commentators also argue that government power can and should put a stop to pornography for the benefit of the so-called common good.
By doing so, social conservatives argue that they can alter American culture itself.
Okay, and this is the part where you start to shade over from the argument about pornography into the argument about the role of government generally.
Is government there to quote-unquote promote the common good or is government there to protect rights that pre-existed government?
This is particularly at the federal level.
Is government there to protect rights that pre-exist government and it does not have the ability to step into other areas no matter how morally you think the government is acting?
When it comes to individuals.
Now, again, I'm going to make a distinction between federal and local.
Because in local government, you have a lot more room to move in terms of what the government can regulate.
Why?
Because people can move.
Once the federal government takes something over, then nobody has a choice anymore.
This is why I famously suggested that if Beto O'Rourke got control of the auspices of government, of the federal government, and started to outlaw religious practice, basically, you'd have a civil war in the country.
And if you go back and listen to the podcast where I talked about this, I said, okay, if it's outlawed in California, I move to Texas.
If it's outlawed in Texas, I move to Idaho.
And if it's outlawed across the United States, then you have a civil war.
This is why there's a difference between the federal government and local governments.
There's more homogeneity in local governments.
There's more generalized agreement in local governments.
And so you can more easily agree on how to regulate the public spaces.
Okay, so, Terry Schilling, executive director of the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank, argued in October in the Catholic magazine First Things that efforts to regulate pornography are part of a broader phenomenon.
He said, in our time, a new conservatism is being born, one less interested in managing our nation's decline than in using political power to promote virtue, public morality, and the common good.
And these are the kinds of words that actually put a chill up my spine when you're talking about the federal government because the left uses exactly that same sort of language, of course, that the government is going to promote virtue.
How?
By banning churches.
The government is going to promote public morality.
How?
With hate speech laws.
The government is going to promote the common good.
How?
By withdrawing...
Excessive amounts of wealth from the system and then redistributing them or regulating business into the ground, right?
As soon as the government is in the business of promoting the common good, the obvious question becomes, okay, and who defines the common good?
Now, conservatives will say, well, the left's been doing this all along.
Why shouldn't we do it?
And the answer is, because the left shouldn't be doing it.
And even if you agreed with what the left was doing, the left shouldn't be doing it.
This is not the role of government.
The founders did not set up the government in order to quote unquote, inculcate virtue.
To promote virtue or the common good.
The idea was that the Lockean idea behind the founding of the United States is that there were individual rights that pre-existed government.
And government was enshrined at the federal level to protect those rights.
And that's why the government was made weak.
That's why the government has checks and balances.
If it were just about promoting the quote-unquote common good, why not have a monarchy?
Why not have an aristocracy that decides?
Why not have the Supreme Court simply decide all social policy in the United States?
Schilling says conservatives need to overcome their fear of governing the nation that elected them.
Well, okay, so let's be clear about one thing.
The same nation that quote-unquote elected conservatives also elected Barack Obama in an entirely Democratic Congress in 2008.
So, would Barack Obama have been justified in using the government the way that he did?
Because obviously, he's governing the way that they asked him to.
And the answer, of course, is no, because the federal government was designed not to do these things.
Jane Koston writes, So, here's the thing.
The reason I keep saying that pornography is a weird place to make this stand is because I think that, on a libertarian ground, there are plenty of places you can regulate pornography.
So let me take a couple of quick examples.
It should be criminal to exploit women.
And it is.
Right?
Sexual trafficking in women?
That is criminal.
It should be criminal to distribute pornography to minors.
And it is.
It should be left to local principalities to determine how the public square works.
If you live in a town, and your town decides that it's going to be a porn-free town, that's their prerogative.
There's no fundamental right that is invaded there.
Contra the hardcore libertarians who say that pornography is protected by the First Amendment, the founders would have been shocked to discover that wood carvings of naked ladies would have been protected by the First Amendment.
That's just nonsense.
It's not true, okay?
The First Amendment was designed to protect political speech.
It was not designed to protect obscenity.
The Supreme Court has recognized as much.
That's not just me.
That's the entire history of the United States.
Okay, so yes, certain types of criminality of pornography, totally acceptable on a libertarian basis, because again, libertarians do acknowledge that there are such things as externalities, right?
I am not allowed to pour toxic sludge into a river upstream of you, and I shouldn't be allowed to post a giant billboard outside of my business in the public square that has a naked lady on it, right?
Regulation of that, not at the federal level, again, I don't think the federal government has the power to do that, but the local government, not only am I fine with that, I agree with it, and I would prefer to live in a community that did that.
Okay, but that's not what the argument is.
What you're seeing is so-called conservatives, and they're conservative, but they're not conservative with regard to conserving the original founding purpose of government.
They would consider themselves Burke-ian conservatives, preserving tradition through use of government.
I think even that is a misread of Edmund Burke.
But that's how they characterize themselves, this sort of Russell Kirk-ian We're preserving tradition by use of government and shying away from using the government to protect tradition is a betrayal of the purpose of government.
That really is not in line with founding thought in very serious ways.
But, with that said, conservatives who are making the case that the government ought to be promoting the common good by, for example, regulating the use of pornography inside your own house, or the production of pornography among consenting adults, Like there you start to get into the territory of the government doing what's best for you.
And I am not in the business of the government doing what's best for you and reshaping you as an individual moral human being.
That's for your church.
That's for your family.
That's for your social fabric.
That is not for the government to do.
And by the way, I feel this way consistently across the board.
It's not for the government to do on an economic level.
The government doesn't get to step into consensual economic exchanges.
It's not for the government to do even with regard to things I don't like, right?
I've said before that I think that the government's overreach In the Civil Rights Act is not with anything regarded to state action.
I think the government had a perfect right and perfect ability and perfect moral duty to step in and stop states from enshrining segregation.
But I have serious problems with the aspects of the Civil Rights Act that dictate that private businesses ought to be prosecuted for discrimination.
Why?
Because they're private businesses and you have a right to do wrong in the United States.
Things that are bad.
You have a right to do.
And then, presumably, you go out of business.
I mean, that would be the hope.
The hope is that you then go out of business if you discriminate, for example.
And we'll get to more of this in just a second, because it is a deep and fascinating debate.
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Okay, so there are so many questions that are implicated in this whole thing.
One is the role of government.
There's a big debate now between quote-unquote common good conservatism and conservatism that protects fundamental rights.
And that debate has serious consequences, as I say, for a wide variety of human activities.
I am firmly on the side of government is not there to promote the quote-unquote common good other than regulating the public space, which, again, somebody is going to regulate the public space, but people who are trying to outlaw pornography are also trying to regulate the private space.
And this is where you start to get into very, very dicey territory.
And again, I don't even think you need to do this to regulate pornography, right?
Again, I think that pornography is not a fundamental right, so it's not protected by the Constitution.
But let's just talk about if it were, right?
If it were a fundamental right to have pornography in your house, for example, well, then presumably the government would have no role in going in there and common good conservatives would say, no, no, no, they do.
They have a role to go in there to teach the American people things.
We gotta teach the American people.
And so this is broken down into libertarian versus conservative lines.
Reason Magazine editor-in-chief Catherine Mangu Ward told Jane Koston, what you're seeing now is this rise of a much more authoritarian and state-oriented variant of conservatism.
And it says, you know what?
Actually, never mind.
Let's take away the bad choices.
Let's make some bad choices illegal.
This has long been a characteristic of the American left.
Matt Walsh, who writes for us over at Daily Wire, he says, we say we're conservatives.
What the hell are we trying to conserve?
Maybe that question really is the central question of this whole debate.
Okay, and this goes to a deeper question.
And that is, if you're trying to conserve conservative principles, moral principles, free markets, all of these things, if you're trying to conserve all of this, what is the best way to conserve all of this?
Is the best way with a big intrusive government that is able to overrule the will of the people on social issues where you don't like what people are doing, But then you can turn that gun over to the bad guys in terms of morality you don't like every four years or so and then they do it back to you.
Plus, they take over the economy.
Or, is the government a blunt force instrument?
Is the government incapable of separating these issues out?
I'm of the belief that the government is not capable of separating these issues out.
And furthermore, I don't think that the government is in the moral right when it crams down moral values that the American people have not accepted.
This is why, again, localism is a great thing.
Subsidiarity, localism, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Because you get local governments where more people agree.
And there, you don't have to worry so much about cramming down on people who disagree because, of course, they are all local and they can leave.
Okay, so this has become a big issue in the area of economics as well.
What you're seeing is a crossover between the so-called common good conservatives on pornography and common good conservatives on economics who say that it's time to regulate the free market economy, make the market work for us.
Make the market, the government has the ability and should have the strength to take the markets and put them under heel and make sure that they are working for the quote-unquote American people.
Now that sort of language has long been the area of the left.
So how do you separate off the role of government in promoting cultural conservatism from the government role in promoting economic conservatism?
And the answer is it's very difficult to do so and I think frankly impossible in this day and age.
So what exactly is the baseline argument underneath all of this?
This is the real key.
Is politics upstream of culture or is politics downstream of culture?
So, one of my mentors, Andrew Breitbart, was famous for saying that politics is downstream of culture.
In other words, the country changes culturally, and then the law changes to reflect the country's culture.
And this is obviously true.
It is obviously true.
Now, the law can help accelerate cultural shifts that are already taking place, but the law cannot provide a final bulwark against a culture that has left it.
If the law is promoting something that the people do not believe in, then the law eventually becomes non-enforced and then just dies.
That's what happened, for example, with regard to sodomy laws, to take an example.
So for hundreds of years in America, there were sodomy laws on the books, and then the American people were like, really, we're not gonna enforce this stuff.
Like, this is none of our business, what people do behind closed doors.
And then, the laws were non-enforced, but on the books, and there were cultural conservatives saying, well, you know, those laws, they're important, they should remain, just to show that we don't like this kind of activity.
And the answer is, that's not the role of government.
If you don't like that activity, good news, you got a church.
You should go talk about that at church.
Right?
Good news.
You can say that in the public sphere.
That it's bad for people to engage in this sort of activity that you don't like.
But it is not the role of government to set out the Ten Commandments.
That one's for God.
Right?
It's not the role, and I don't mean like the government to post the Ten Commandments in a public place.
The government can do that.
What I mean is that the government is not your moral teacher.
And as a religious person, if you believe that the government is your moral teacher, I wonder about the status of your actual religious belief.
I don't trust the government to be my moral teacher.
You think I want Barack Obama as my moral teacher?
Shining rainbow lights on the White House?
He's not my moral teacher.
Donald Trump isn't my moral teacher.
I have moral teachers.
They're my parents.
They're my rabbis.
There are many non-Jewish moral teachers in a variety of areas.
But I don't get my moral teachings from government simply because they can point a gun at me.
So there is this common good conservatism that says that the government is there to teach you.
I do not think that the government is there to teach you.
And in fact, I think that that has been mainly used by the left in order to cram down their own particular view of social policy.
I think it's quite dangerous to create a tool in the government where you give the government the power to do that.
Do you think they're going to own that forever?
There's this weird divide among people on the right where they're like, well, this is the last election that ever matters.
It's flight 93 election, right?
This is the last election.
It doesn't, after this, if we don't win, it's all over.
And at the same time, no, we're in the upswing.
We own the means of government now.
Let's cram through our viewpoint.
Well, which is it?
Is this your last chance ever?
And if it is your last chance ever, then do you really believe that you promoting the quote-unquote common good, your version of the common good, that that's gonna last for five minutes beyond your term?
The problem with eternal moral principle is that it has to remain eternal.
And the problem is once you tie it, to running the government.
In other words, only the government can instill moral principle.
It's not in the cultural realm we should put our work, it's in the governmental realm.
Once it's only government that can instill moral principle, well then, as soon as the bad guys take over government, your job here is done, right?
You got nothing more to say.
You've lost.
The answer is that if you actually want a serious culture shift in America, you have to make it a culture shift.
It can't just be a government shift.
And this is why.
You want local governments to reflect local circumstance?
Totally agree.
You want the federal government to get in the business of promoting the quote-unquote common good?
Good luck with that.
Not only good luck with it, on a pragmatic level, it ain't gonna work.
On a moral level, you're gonna end up with a federal government promoting policies that the vast majority of the American people don't like.
And then back to the pragmatic level, you are also going to, and the moral level, you're gonna be expanding the ability of government to crack down on morality so that when people you don't like take over, they can now point that government gun at you.
And they can do it not just in the realm of social policy.
They can also do it in the realm of free speech.
They can do it in the realm of economics as well.
And in a second, I want to talk about the realms of free speech and economics.
Because, again, I think that you're seeing conservatives take certain things they don't like and basically say there's no right to do that, not recognizing that, again, you're growing.
There's only one gun and we're fighting over it.
Okay, so if the gun is bigger and it can do more damage, just recognize that the bigger you grow that gun, it's going to be turned against you in the next moment, like really in one minute.
We can get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so why does this debate matter?
This debate matters because it's actually broader than just the pornography debate, obviously.
When it gets to the realm of economics, it becomes the clearest, but it is also true in the realm of free speech.
So, we've had this big debate that's broken out on the right over so-called drag queen story hour.
Drag queens reading to kids at libraries.
Egregious stuff, right?
Possibly child abuse.
I mean, I would argue likely child abuse.
Bringing your kid in front of a sexualized, cross-dressing adult to teach them about children's books.
And confusing them, it's just a moral evil, a tremendous moral evil.
And what you've seen is a lot of conservatives be like, well, libertarians are fine with Drag Queen Story Hour.
Well, no.
The question is, how do you propose to achieve a regulation of things like Drag Queen Story Hour without giving power to the library to determine what is and is not allowed?
And if you give that power to the library, What makes you think that the library is not going to first ban Bible Hour before they ban Drag Queen Story Hour?
Given the prevailing winds of our culture, it is pretty obvious that the first people who are going to get banned from the library are cultural conservatives, not Drag Queen Story Hour.
You're already seeing this in Canada.
You've seen this in Seattle.
There was a big story yesterday out of Seattle where a feminist group that wanted to do an event on why women are different from men was nearly banned.
It's right now under consideration being banned from the public library there.
So once you give power to an institution, understand that that power can be used against you.
It's Lord of the Rings here.
Okay, that ring that you think is going to defend you against Sauron eventually is going to corrupt you.
And it can be used by Sauron again.
Retaining it allows Sauron to regain the ring.
The more powerful the ring, the worse it's going to be when somebody you don't like gets a hold of that ring.
And then you get to the area of things like hate speech.
Really, in the end, what this comes down to is do you have a right to do wrong?
Do you have a right to do things that are morally wrong?
Now, on the local level, you can say, well, not as much as on the federal level, right?
Because we all have to live in a community together, and because we all generally agree.
And also, if you and I disagree on the nature of right and wrong in a local community, then you can take off, right?
You can leave.
Mobility is a predicate to this.
What's amazing is that many of the same conservatives who argue that mobility means that you should be able to more heavily regulate at the local level, an argument with which I agree, will also say that people do not have the ability to move from their hometown when the factory shuts down.
So that's ideologically inconsistent.
But, if you are making the argument that when it comes to free speech, for example, you have no right to do wrong, now you're in the realm of the hate speech left.
So if you're saying that Drag Queen Story Hour should be banned because you believe that Drag Queen Story Hour is damaging to children, and you're not making the case, right?
You're not bringing a sociological case, a secularly-based case.
You're basically just saying, I don't like drag queens, and therefore, Drag Queen Story Hour is banned.
Okay, and you're doing that at the federal level.
Let's say that you promote that policy.
Do you really believe that the government getting involved and cracking down on what is effectively political speech is going to end well for you?
You think that's a good idea?
See, the founders did believe in this idea of rights.
Why?
Because the right was against government.
It wasn't against your fellow human being.
It was really against government.
Your rights, so-called negative rights, are rights that exist prior to anyone else.
Your right to life means that I can't kill you.
But really, it's my right to life.
It's not an imposition on you that you don't get to kill me.
I'm saying you don't get to interfere with me.
That's a negative right.
The right to liberty.
The right to economic liberty.
You do not get to interfere with my consensual transactions.
Those are individual rights.
Now, I can misuse those.
I can be bad.
I can do things that are immoral, bad for myself.
I can do things that damage me, but that's my prerogative in a regime of rights, because what is the other choice?
The other choice is the idea of this high-handed government that is going to dictate to you what is best, changing the fundamental nature of man, changing his behavior from top down.
Well, what monarchies have shown for several thousand years is that, let's say, best of all possible worlds, you get a King David, two generations later, you get a bunch of bad kings and things suck.
The fact is that monarchy is a bad system.
Aristocracy is a bad system.
Rule from above is a bad system.
And at the same time, you don't want a full-on democracy because majorities are not great at protecting rights either.
You can't have dictatorship of the mob.
And that's why the founders constructed exactly this system, checks and balances, the prevention of dictators of the mob or dictators from above and encroaching on fundamental individual rights.
But once you get to common good conservatism, you actually end up in the realm of French Revolution views of rights rather than American Revolution views of rights.
The French Revolution view of rights is that yes, you have individual rights, but in the end, the common good trumps.
In the end, the common good can run roughshod over those.
The American view of individual rights is that those rights pre-exist government, and you have the right to do wrong, but they are also connected with a social fabric and a duty.
So, we've done a fairly good job in America of quote-unquote retaining the rights, but increasingly, we've been using the rights to do wrong.
Increasingly, we've been using the right to free speech to engage in pornography, right?
We've been using the right to do wrong.
Increasingly, we have been engaging in The right to personal activity, to engage in drug use.
We've been engaging in the right to sexual freedom, to have kids out of wedlock, right?
Increasingly, we've been using the right to do wrong.
The answer is not to abolish the right.
The answer is to abolish the wrong through the force of culture.
This is where church always mattered.
This is where social fabric always mattered.
So if you wish to retain economic freedom and freedom of speech, you have to recognize those things can be used to do wrong, but you also have to recognize that the greater evil is abolishing the right.
And that using the government in order to re-instill a sense of duty by quashing the right itself is a very, very large-scale mistake.
Because again, that government can be used against you just as easily as you wish to use the government against others.
Okay, so I think it's a really fascinating debate.
We'll get to impeachment now, get to the news of the day, but I think that this is, again, the consequences are very big for economics.
They are very big for free speech.
They're very good for a lot of these things.
And again, the idea of government as teacher, like the lines that are being used with regard to government as teacher, the law as moral teacher, a little scary.
John Schwepp, the Director of Government Affairs at the American Principals Project says, quote, And one of the examples that people who say this cite is the Civil Rights Act.
They say, well, the Civil Rights Act said racism was wrong until racism declined.
No, there was a movement against racism that led to the rise of the Civil Rights Act.
It didn't arise in a vacuum.
And this is one of the great lies of American government is that the Supreme Court dictates from above what morality is, even though Burge fell.
You know, a decision that abolished the idea of traditional marriage in America as the sole form of marriage sponsored by government, even though Birchfield, which is an awful, awful decision, did not actually accelerate the process by very much.
And it was the result of a broad cultural movement in American thought.
It was not just the result of the Supreme Court declaring one day that they were going to do X, Y, or Z. That really is not.
An honest take on what happened there.
Culture does continue to precede politics.
Change the culture.
Focus on changing the culture and allowing yourself the freedom to do that.
Because, again, as government expands, your freedom to change the culture is going to contract.
This is what people on the right need to understand.
The same government you are using to crack down on things you don't like is going to be used first and foremost within the next 10 years.
It's happened in California.
It's already happened here.
It's going to be used to go after your church, your synagogue, all the institutions that build the social fabric.
Family, all of those will be the first target, not the last.
Pornography will not be the first target.
Your church will be the first target.
So be very wary of growing that government gun.
Okay, we'll get to impeachment in just one second.
First, let us talk.
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Number two, it's super easy to be hacked and celebrities get hacked all the time.
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They can sell it.
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Okay.
We're going to get to all of the news in a second.
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Alrighty, now to national politics.
So, the impeachment effort for the Democrats continues to move forward.
It really is quite boring to talk about, honestly, because we all know where this is headed.
We know that it's going to pass in the House.
We know that it's not going to pass in the Senate.
There is a little bit of kickback in the House.
You've seen some House Democrats suggesting that they're going to defect.
House Democrats are apparently bracing for the possibility of defections from moderates.
This is according to Rachel Bade and Mike DeBonis over at the Washington Post.
Predictions about some defections come as a core group of centrists from District Trump 1 in 2016 are apparently having second thoughts.
While many new impeachment would never be popular in their GOP-leaning districts, some have been surprised their support hasn't increased despite negative testimony about Trump from a series of blockbuster hearings last month.
Except they weren't blockbuster, and no one cares.
So that's just silly.
The fact is that the ball has not moved anywhere in here.
And because the ball has not moved anywhere in here, there are a bunch of moderates who are saying, well, I'm not going to put my name on that dotted line.
That's not a thing that I'm going to do.
And by the way, nobody also believes that the Democrats are doing this more in sadness than in anger.
People have the right idea.
They understand that this is all a setup.
They understand that Democrats do not have the goods and are moving forward anyway.
So when Jerry Nadler... It's very tiring and irritating when Jerry Nadler says things like, with a heavy heart, I move forward.
Sure.
Yeah, your heart looks very... You look very sad to have to do this thing.
We have each taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I hope to be remembered for honoring that oath.
I hope you feel the same.
And so, with a heavy heart, but clear in my duty to our country, I support these articles of impeachment.
Doesn't that heart look heavy?
I urge my colleagues to support them as well.
Look how much heaviness of heart there is right there.
I mean, he can barely keep from breaking into it.
With the heaviest of hearts.
I feel so upset on the inside, guys.
Like, really upset.
So this is just not selling.
It's a dog that won't hunt.
The Democrats do not have the goods.
Senate Republicans are looking forward to a short trial.
I think that in the end, that's probably the right move.
The Senate Republicans are saying, why do we want to delay this or prolong this?
It's not a big win for Trump to have a long hearing.
Instead, let's just go where everybody knows this is going to go, move on to the 2020 elections and be done.
And that is the direction that all of this is moving.
Meanwhile, Democrats keep maintaining that if Trump is not impeached, That Trump is going to steal the 2020 election, which again, is an extraordinarily dangerous position.
According to the Washington Post, lawyers for Congress, meaning the Democrats, urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday not to delay House Committee's access to President Trump's financial records, saying the information could be crucial to investigating foreign involvement in American politics and legislative protections for next year's elections.
House General Counsel Douglas Letter said in a filing to the court, nothing is more urgent than efforts to guard against foreign influence in our systems for electing officials, particularly given the upcoming 2020 election.
There's bipartisan agreement that such interference is an imminent threat.
So the Democrats continue to maintain that if Trump is not impeached, then he might win.
And if he wins, it's going to be illegitimate.
So they're already saying that the election is illegitimate well in advance of the election.
We all know what this is about.
They don't think they can defeat Trump at the ballot box right now, or at least they are very scared that they cannot, and therefore they are pushing forward impeachment.
That is why support is not rising.
They have not made the case.
In fact, they've not really even attempted to make the case.
Okay, in other news, it is amazing.
I predicted that the Jersey City Shooting that happened at a kosher supermarket would be out of the news in 48 hours.
Absolutely correct, of course.
The media don't care.
Nobody cares.
There is no widespread national conversation about anti-Semitism in America.
There's no and there's no widespread conversation about anti-Semitism among black Hebrew Israelites or The sad fact that unfortunately anti-semitism is more common among black Americans than it is among general Americans.
I mean, this has been true in ADL polls going back 20, 30 years.
There is this serious strain of anti-semitism that does exist in certain parts of black America that ought to be talked about in the same way that white supremacism ought to be talked about.
I mean, the fact is the Jews who are being beaten on the streets of Williamsburg are largely being beaten by people of minority origin.
That is not connecting race to the hatred of Jews.
It is saying there are subsections of culture in the Black community that really are rooted in anti-Semitism.
And that includes people who are associating with Louis Farrakhan.
It includes people who are associated with Jeremiah Wright, who was a blatant anti-Semite, said anti-Semitic things from the pulpit, and Barack Obama sat there for 20 years.
20 years.
Anti-Semitism is not foreign to many parts of Of black communities in places like Brooklyn, which again is why Jews are being beaten on the streets.
Like let's say for example that I'm about to play you a video of some footage from right outside this kosher supermarket.
Okay, this is video by a group called Americans Against Anti-Semitism.
They took this video directly outside the supermarket where this hate crime took place, which was again performed by two black Hebrew Israelites, which is an anti-Jewish hate group that says that Jews are fake Jews and that because Jews are fake Jews, they are the real Jews.
Really terrible stuff.
Okay, so there is this video that was put out by Americans Against Anti-Semitism.
First of all, you can see this video here of these two guys.
Well, it's actually a guy and a woman.
Literally just getting out of their car, deliberately targeting the kosher market, walking in with guns and starting to shoot people.
And you can see people rushing out.
But that's not the video I'm talking about that's troubling.
Okay, the video I'm talking about that's troubling, obviously, is a shooting video, so that's always troubling.
But the video that's really troubling is people in the aftermath members of the local black community who are spouting open anti-Semitism directly as the shooting is taking place.
And now let's say that there were a shooting at a historically black church by a white supremacist.
And then there were a video that came out within a day of white members of the local community saying those black people deserved it.
That would prompt a widespread national conversation about the extent of racism.
I mean, shooting alone does, but if there had been an additional tape of people, white members of the local community, talking about that in glowing terms about how the people deserve to be shot, that would be used as an indicia of a serious racism problem in the United States.
And probably it should, right?
Okay, well, this video actually came out and no one is covering it.
It's not appeared on mainstream news.
Nobody cares about it.
Why?
Well, because in the intersectional hierarchy, Jews do not rank.
So the intersectional hierarchy suggests that if you are a member of a minority, you are victimized by mainstream American society.
But Jews do not count, despite the fact that Jews are by leaps and bounds the group most likely to be targeted for hate crimes in the United States, like far more than blacks, far more than Muslims, but not close.
Jews don't count in the intersectional hierarchy because they're disproportionately wealthy successful and educated and so they are considered part of the quote-unquote white community by the intersectional community and so it does not so if somebody who's lower down on the intersectional hierarchy if black people in Jersey City If there are some black people in Jersey City who are saying that Jews deserve to get shot, that is not newsworthy because that is a more victimized group talking about a less victimized group in the view of the intersectional hierarchy.
Again, this video is quite disturbing and quite stunning and again has appeared nowhere in mainstream media because the mainstream media do not wish to acknowledge that there is a serious anti-Semitism problem in parts of the black community.
The New York Times said openly this.
Last November, November 1st, 2018, they had a piece where they said, well, there's been this big spike in anti-Semitism in New York, and it's largely coming from minority communities.
But we're not going to talk about that.
It openly says in the piece, we won't talk about it because there doesn't seem to be the common thread of white supremacy.
The New York Times has an editorial today, by the way, that basically says the same thing.
Only one type of anti-Semitism matters.
Here is the tape that you won't see on the media.
There's a black woman saying there was no shooting like this before they came.
I understand that you're frustrated.
They're drilling us right now.
Look how black people act.
We can't do it to them.
Yes, my chair is not in school.
I'm sorry.
Because of two shenanigans.
I understand that you're frustrated.
That would be too.
Ain't all the problem.
Because they ain't come to Georgia City, this will never go on.
They was dead.
They got shot dead.
New shots at the That's great.
Okay.
Again, imagine that there was this video of white Americans after the Charleston, South Carolina shooting.
Imagine that.
National news.
This happens in Jersey City.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Not a word.
Anywhere.
No one else going to play this tape.
Why?
Because, obviously, this runs counter to leftist narratives that the only people victimized in America are victimized by white people in America.
Victimized by the white hierarchy.
That is not true.
Racial politics are more complicated than that, unfortunately.
Anti-Semitism spans lines.
The New York Times doesn't care, though.
The New York Times has an entire piece today in which they condemn not anti-Semitism with regard to the Jersey City shooting, but Trump's executive order that he just promulgated in order to crack down on anti-Semitism on campuses.
They come out against the executive order, not on free speech grounds.
You want to come out against the executive order on free speech grounds?
First of all, the executive order itself says, where this conflicts with the First Amendment, it doesn't apply.
But second of all, I don't see any of these people saying that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which deals with college campuses having their federal funds withdrawn if there's discrimination on campus against protected groups.
I don't see any of these people saying, well, isn't that violative of the First Amendment, the entire Title VI?
You want to make that libertarian argument?
I'm actually kind of sympathetic to that libertarian argument.
But that's not the argument anybody's making.
They're just saying it shouldn't apply to Jews.
And the New York Times basically says the same thing.
They have an entire editorial today, a long editorial, called Trump's Executive Order and the Rise of Antisemitism.
The president's campus intervention ignores the bigger threat of antisemitism and threatened speech.
So what, in fact, is the bigger threat of antisemitism than antisemitism on college campuses, or antisemitism in Jersey City, or Jews being beaten on the streets of New York?
According to the New York Times, wait for it, wait.
White supremacy.
Always white supremacy.
Only one type of anti-Semitism matters to the New York Times.
Now, white supremacy is a threat.
It is anti-Semitic.
It is evil.
I've sat here, I've condemned it for full episodes.
I've talked about the evils of the alt-right.
I've talked about the evils of the white supremacist movement.
I've talked about how they are growing.
I've been personally threatened by the white supremacists.
I have 24-7 security because of the white supremacists.
But to pretend that anti-semitism is only coming from the side of the aisle where it is convenient for you, means that you don't give a damn about anti-semitism.
And the New York Times does not give a damn.
This New York Times editorial is an absurdity.
They say, last year, anti-semitic attacks killed more Jews around the globe than in any year in decades.
Okay, so first of all, when they say killed more Jews around the globe than any year in decades, They do not, at any point in this article, talk about Muslim anti-Semitism in Europe, which is one of the reasons why Jews are being murdered in Israel, one of the reasons why Jews are being murdered in Europe, probably the chief reason Jews are being murdered in both Israel and Europe.
Okay, so in any case, the New York Times says, anti-Semitic attacks killed more Jews around the globe than any year in decades, and then they mention Tree of Life, and they talk about the German Jews being cautioned not to wear skull caps or Stars of David on the street, and attackers killing Jewish college students in California.
And by the way, antisemitism remains rife.
Like, I went to a kosher restaurant yesterday, and right outside on the curb, somebody had spray-painted antisemitic graffiti.
for services at charlottesville's congregation beth israel they found men with semi-automatic rifles at the synagogue doors offering protection they didn't know that they'd need and by the way anti-semitism remains rife like i went to a kosher restaurant yesterday and right outside on the curb somebody had spray painted anti-semitic graffiti like it's it's a thing that happens okay but it happens to come from a variety of sources The New York Times only cares about one of those sources.
Listen to this shift.
It's amazing.
On Tuesday, two gunmen, including one said to have published anti-Semitic posts and to have been a follower of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, which is hostile to Jews, killed four people in a rampage in Jersey City that appears to have targeted a kosher market.
The tides of antisemitism continue to rise higher, and more government action is sorely needed.
The Department of Homeland Security's recent strategy shift to focus on the growing threat of white nationalist terrorism was an important step.
On Wednesday, President Trump stepped in himself, but he did as much to stir the waters as he did to settle them.
Why?
Because he added Jews to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 64, which, by the way, had been Department of Education policy under Barack Obama as well.
The New York Times recognizes similar congressional legislation has had bipartisan support.
Previous administrations have taken similar actions to prevent hate and discrimination.
But, while Mr. Trump's action might seem like a gesture of real concern, it does little to target the larger source of violent antisemitism.
Okay, and then they say that BDS on campus is not antisemitism.
BDS is that Muslim anti-Semitism on campus, which is extremely rife.
When I was attending UCLA, the Muslim Student Association had a publication called Al-Talib, in which they joked about making Osama bin Laden editor-in-chief.
And the MSA would hand out publications openly fundraising for front groups for terrorist groups.
Okay, but I love this.
Here's the shift from the New York Times.
Ready?
Such incidents are frightening.
But the larger threat to American Jews goes beyond college students sparring over Israeli policy.
Violent anti-Semitism is being fomented most significantly by white nationalists in the far right.
In other words, Trump should not even pay attention to anti-Semitism on campus.
And the New York Times should not pay attention to anti-Semitism in New York City.
They'll overtly ignore it.
They should only pay attention to white supremacist anti-Semitism.
Do I take these bastards seriously on anti-Semitism?
No, I do not.
Because they obviously do not take anti-Semitism seriously.
It's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
If you're only taking anti-semitism seriously so you can bash one side of the political aisle and falsely lump in conservatives with the white supremacists, by the way, then you are doing decency wrong.
And the New York Times is famously doing decency wrong these days.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I like and then a quick thing that I hate.
So, Quick thing that I like today.
So I had the opportunity to go to screening for the movie 1917 by Sam Mendes.
It's coming out in January and the movie is terrific.
It's really, really good.
It's incredibly well directed.
I mean, the entire movie is basically following these two soldiers who are designated to try to move through German held territory.
In World War I, up to a British position where the British commander thinks he's going to charge the German lines, he's under the mistaken impression that the Germans have actually withdrawn, and the Germans have not withdrawn, and so these two guys are tasked with telling them that they shouldn't attack.
It's beautifully shot.
I mean, the direction of it is really great.
It's done in basically one continuous tracking shot for the entire movie.
There's only one point where it actually flashes to black the entire film.
Now, they're playing some camera tricks, but it's pretty incredible.
The cinematography is just spectacular, and the acting is quite good as well.
It's based, apparently, on the experiences of Sam Mendes' grandfather in World War I. Here's a little bit of the trailer.
You have a brother in the 2nd Battalion?
Yes, sir.
Is he alive?
And with your help, I'd like to keep it that way.
But they're walking into a trap.
Your orders are to deliver a message calling off tomorrow morning's attack.
If you don't, we will lose 1600 men.
No brother among them.
It's a very intense film.
It's really...
It's really well done.
Again, I recommend it.
You should go see it in theaters when it comes out.
And I have to say, it feels like the quality of filmmaking has really improved this year.
There are a few really good movies that came out.
Ford vs. Ferrari, which you've heard me recommend on the show, is really first rate, and so is this film, 1917.
Looking forward to seeing a few more of these sort of Oscar-rated flicks, even if I didn't like The Irishman or A Marriage Story.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
So apparently the New York Times editorial page, when it's not defending anti-semitism coming from particular sources, is also a place for people to spill their feelings about their childhood struggles with sexuality.
It's amazing.
Half of editorial pages on the left wing are now dedicated to people telling their personal stories about coming to grips with their own orientation.
And it's like, why?
Okay, so?
What?
So here's the example.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, who is a transgender woman, meaning a man who believes that he is a woman, has a piece in the New York Times called Rudolph the Queerest Holiday Special.
It gets better for Misfit Reindeer 2.
So now we are to believe that a holiday special constructed in 1964 is actually a secret decoded message about being gay in America.
And so we have a long piece about why Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is an inspiration to gay kids the world over.
I'm sure the conservatives who love this old holiday chestnut will be infuriated by this suggestion that it is the queerest holiday special ever.
Not infuriated, just puzzled why you would think that a holiday special constructed in 1964 is about gay rights.
And also why I would care how you interpret Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
I mean, this is like a trite entry from your journal diary in your intersectional theory class.
But Jennifer Finney Boylan says, Well, I don't know what show you're watching.
Well, what if that's just a general message that applies to anyone who's ever been bullied?
I was viciously bullied in high school.
That had nothing to do with sexual orientation.
A lot of kids are.
But apparently everything is now about sexual orientation.
Conservatives seem to miss the point of a lot of things having to do with Christmas, actually.
Is it really possible that anyone can watch or read Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol without understanding its fundamental critique of capitalism?
Well, no.
That, like, A Christmas Carol is not really about capitalism so much as it is about the idea that capitalism doesn't solve the problem of the need for charity.
Again, this goes back to the fundamental point of the show, which is that free markets and liberty are wondrous, wondrous things, but you also have to have an underlying social fabric in order to promote those things.
As for Rudolph, the whole movie feels as LGBTQ friendly to me, says Jennifer Finney Boylan, as any episode of Queer Eye or Steven Universe or The L Word.
Well, except for the fact that Rudolph doesn't, you know, like, have sex with any of the other male reindeer.
So, aside from that, and the fact that it's a children's special, I'm particularly tired of the hijacking of children's literature and children's special in order to promote...
political viewpoints on sexual matters.
Like, it's a piece of children's literature.
Cut it out.
The left likes to play this game a lot when it comes to TV.
So what they will do is, for example, some members of the LGBTQ community will start saying that Spongebob Squarepants is like a gay metaphor.
And then people are like, what are you talking about?
It's ridiculous.
Like, stop it.
And they'll say, aha, you're upset because we said, you're upset by a children's cartoon?
It's like, well, no, you're the ones who are hijacking a children's cartoon to make a point about your own sexual orientation.
Like, what, what are you, what?
I remember this was a big controversy in the early 90s when some members of the LGBTQ community were suggesting that some of the Teletubbies were gay.
And so Jerry Falwell made a comment about, well, the Teletubbies aren't gay and it's silly to try and hijack children's characters unless it's like, aha!
Trolled you, troll!
How about this?
How about you just leave the children's literature alone?
Especially because you have a whole wing of children's literature, we've talked about it on the show, that is specifically designed to promote these sexualized viewpoints for children.
Can't you just leave Rudolph alone?
Like, he's got enough problems without you putting your own issues with sexual orientation on his fragile flying back.
Really.
The whole article.
And it goes on and on and on and on.
It's... Just... Come on.
Come on.
Okay.
Well, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours of content.
So, hope to see you then.
Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow as we conclude the week.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Rebecca Dobkiewicz.
Directed by Mike Joyner.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Senior Producer Jonathan Hay.
Supervising Producers Mathis Glover and Robert Sterling.
Technical Producer Austin Stephens.
Associate Producer Colton Haas.
Assistant Director Pavel Wydowski.
Edited by Adam Sijewicz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Production Assistant Nick Sheehan.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
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