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Sept. 18, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:07:41

Teaching American Kids That America Doesn’t Suck | Ep. 1098

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	On Constitution Day, President Trump pledges to renew patriotic education.
	Joe Biden stumbles his way through a softball town hall with CNN.
	And we may be at the beginning of a population exodus from blue states.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
	Surf the web with peace of mind.
	Sign up now at expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	Alrighty, so yesterday, I think the president actually did something quite important.
	And I understand that the news cycle is so fast these days that everybody's attention span is about half a second long.
	But what the president did yesterday in talking about the miseducation of America's children at the highest level is really, really important.
	It actually is a very important thing because the great battle that we are in as a country is whether the country really deserves to survive based on the principles upon which it was founded.
	There are a lot of people who believe, as I discuss in my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, there are people that I call disintegrationists, who believe that America really does not deserve to survive based on the philosophy upon which she is founded.
	That the principles of the Declaration of Independence, that there are inalienable rights that pre-exist government that are given by God or by nature, and that government is instituted to protect those rights, that those principles are bad.
	That basic principles like freedom of speech, freedom to bear arms, freedom of religion, what these really do is they re-institute and re-inculcate hierarchies of power.
	That freedom itself is simply a way of cementing current hierarchies of power because freedom of speech really is mostly set up because it's freedom.
	It's set up to benefit those who are most capable of taking advantage of the freedom, namely people who are wealthy or people who have access to the press.
	That freedom to bear arms mostly advantages people who have guns.
	That freedom of religion, mostly advantages people who want to go to church. And thus, if we just got rid of those freedoms, and we look for equal outcome instead, this would be a better world. This is the perspective of much of what they call critical race theory.
	It is the perspective of the 1619 project. It is the proscriptive perspective of so many on the radical left these days, and they have gained a lot of power.
	I mean, there's no question about this.
	Ibram X. Kendi is considered a real thinker in American life today, which is fairly incredible because he has openly suggested that there be, at the federal level, in the executive branch, something called the Department of Anti-Racism.
	This is an actual suggestion that there be legislation creating an executive department of anti-racism at the federal level That actually has the power to strike down and rewrite any law in the United States, federal, state, or local, that does not achieve equal outcome between racial groups.
	Which is an insane contention.
	That is fascism.
	Okay, that is overt fascism.
	That there is an executive body that is unanswerable to the people whose sole job it is to ensure that all laws achieve equal outcome, not that they are based on rights.
	In fact, rights must be violated.
	Kendi is perfectly clear about this.
	He says the solution to injustice yesterday is injustice today.
	And the solution to injustice today will be injustice tomorrow.
	And what he means by that is that people's rights have to be violated to fix historic ills and that we have to recalibrate the entire system.
	Now, he's not the first person to make this contention.
	LBJ made this contention back in the 60s when he suggested that it was not enough to simply set a level playing field.
	Instead, we had to make sure that everybody was at the starting line in the same place.
	What he said is, you know, there are people who have been disadvantaged by American history, and there are certain people who are starting behind the eight ball.
	We need to move them out from behind the eight ball so you can have an equal race.
	Well, that is emotionally compelling, but extraordinarily difficult to achieve without violating the rights of individuals.
	As it turns out, the best that we can do as human beings is to simply set a level playing field.
	We cannot redress all historic wrongs.
	The historic wrongs that ought to be redressed are the ones where the person who has harmed another person pays the person they have harmed, right?
	That would be normally how you redress wrongs.
	But to make somebody who has never harmed anybody pay historic redress to a person who has never been harmed by this person is actually a violation of rights.
	It is a wrong.
	Well, critical race theory teaches that America was rooted in these hierarchies of power, and that all of America's philosophies are designed to cement those hierarchies of power.
	They're very clear about this.
	They believe that enlightenment principles, things like reason, things like individual rights, that these are merely a guise for reestablishing those hierarchies.
	Derrick Bell is extremely clear about this.
	That's what critical race theory is, and it has infused large parts of the university.
	The philosophy of the 1619 Project, which is that America was rooted in slavery, that all institutions of the United States are rooted in slavery, and racism, and bigotry.
	What that really is arguing for is that everything that is good about America is fruit of the poisonous tree, and we gotta burn it all down.
	Burn it all down is the underlying factor that unites these ideologies.
	And all they have to do is point to the historic gills of America and say, that wasn't a bug, that was the feature.
	That the system was designed this way.
	And because the system was designed this way, we have to destroy the system.
	And again, this has become sort of in a soft way written into the culture in a variety of ways.
	When people talk about systemic racism, what they mean is that all the systems of the United States are inherently racist and unfixably racist, so you have to destroy the system from within.
	This is why it's always been bizarre to watch somebody who's an establishmentarian like Joe Biden talk about systemic racism, because he never offers any solutions.
	Systemic racism is merely a formula for, if you give me power, I will fix.
	But of course, he has no power to fix systemic racism because if it's embedded in the institutions, the only solution is to tear down the entire institution.
	This is the case made by Isabel Wilkerson in her book, Cast.
	And she has suggested that the problem with the United States is foundational.
	It is not a problem with structural insecurities in the walls of the United States.
	Instead, it lies right at the foundation.
	The only way that you can fix that is to raise the house completely.
	R-A-Z-E.
	Raise the house, right?
	Destroy it.
	And so this is the philosophy, and it is being taught increasingly across the country.
	It has infused the teaching of American history.
	Howard Zinn, obviously a very, very popular Historian who's become in vogue with the jet-set glitterati out here in Hollywood, which is why he's name-checked about eight different times in Google hunting.
	Howard Zinn was an actual Marxist who suggested that every good that America had ever done was shot through with historic evil, including the victory in World War II.
	He actually says in A People's History of the United States that the American victory over Nazism was marred by the fact that America took Nazism into its bones.
	He says this in his book.
	America took all of the lessons of the Nazis and integrated them.
	It was in America's bones.
	We fed off of the evil ideology of the Nazis.
	America is always and inevitably historically wrong.
	It is true that for many decades in the United States, there was a willingness to overlook the dark spots in American history.
	And that's wrong.
	We shouldn't overlook the dark spots in American history.
	I've given entire speeches about this.
	When I spoke at Boston University last year, I...
	overtly talked at length about the tremendous horrific evil of American slavery and the tremendous horrific evil of Jim Crow.
	I talked about the heroism of people who fought both, the heroism of the leaders of the civil rights movement and the heroism of everyday black Americans who fought in defense of the American flag that in many cases was still held by people who wanted to subjugate them.
	I end my book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, by telling the story of a member of the Red Tails during World War II.
	A black American who came back to a segregated America, but fought on behalf of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in the skies above Germany.
	There's tremendous heroism in the American story, and there's tremendous darkness, but the heroism outweighs the darkness.
	And the philosophy of the United States is what has allowed us to grow.
	It's what has allowed us to take universal evils and destroy them in the United States.
	See, the way that people who really don't like the United States think about the United States is that all universal human evils are unique to the United States and all unique American goods are universal.
	So this is why you'll see from the left the idea that the landing on the moon, the moon landing, was not an American achievement.
	It was a human achievement.
	We got a lot of this last year when it was the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.
	It was a universal human achievement.
	It wasn't an American achievement.
	It was a human achievement.
	The growth and prosperity of the United States, that's not an American achievement.
	That's a world achievement.
	That the natural state of man is to be prosperous is something Nelson Mandela once said idiotically.
	The natural state of man is to live life of chaos and privation.
	That is the natural state of man.
	It takes civilization to prevent that from happening.
	We've developed entire civilizations to prevent all of us from living in the wild.
	That's what civilization was designed to do.
	And it took thousands of years of development to get here.
	The level of ingratitude toward America that it takes to look at the things that make America great, our level of freedom, our level of prosperity, spreading that freedom and prosperity to billions of people abroad over history.
	And to say, well, you know, that was universal.
	But what's unique about America is American slavery.
	It's historically ignorant.
	It is wrongheaded.
	And it is designed to disintegrate the bonds that tie us together.
	If the thing that makes America exceptional is American slavery, you know, leaving aside the fact that some 12 million slaves were brought from Africa to the Western Hemisphere, the vast majority of whom never saw American shores, most of them actually ended up in South America and the Caribbean.
	To ignore the fact that slavery was an evil human universal for nearly all of human history up until the last five minutes or so, historically speaking.
	And then to say that America was unique in this way, but that prosperity was universal and America is not unique in that way.
	You have to be blind or you have to be motivated to destroy everything.
	And that's really what is going on here.
	Unfortunately, the 1619 Project is now being taught in a lot of public schools.
	Howard Zinn is being assigned in nearly every college classroom that I'm aware of.
	And it's not being taught as a corrective to whitewashed history.
	That would be one thing.
	It'd be one thing if you read a patriotic history of the United States that sort of glossed over problems in American history and said, OK, and now you should also read this chapter of Howard Zinn that reminds us of all the bad stuff in American history.
	That's not how this stuff is taught.
	It is taught as a replacement for American history.
	It is an instead of, not an in addition to.
	The 1619 Project openly stated this.
	They said that America's true founding was 1619.
	Not that America's founding was in 1776.
	But we have to take into account the legacy of 1619 in looking at the history of the United States.
	That'd be fair.
	Because obviously slavery has a lot to do with the history of the United States.
	That's not what the 1619 Project contended.
	It contended that the actual founding of the United States, the values upon which the United States was founded, were the importation of African slaves to the United States.
	Or to the pre-United States, since the U.S.
	didn't exist yet.
	To the British colonies in Virginia.
	That is an absolute overt lie.
	So yesterday on Constitution Day, President Trump spoke overtly about this and people lost their minds.
	Which shows the gap that has emerged in American public life.
	When I say there's a gap between people who want to disintegrate American history and people who believe in American history, I've never seen it quite as clearly exposed as what happened yesterday online after Trump suggested that maybe we ought to teach American children that America is good.
	People literally compared him to a Nazi.
	They compared him to Vladimir Putin.
	They suggested that when he said that Americans should be taught to be patriotic about the greatest country in world history, which they should be, that somehow this amounted to jingoistic Nazism.
	If you believe that teaching American children that their country is exceptional and good is a sign of Nazism, it's because you are both historically ignorant and malevolent.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so yesterday, President Trump gives this speech on Constitution Day in which he says we need to stop teaching critical race theory and 1619 project nonsense and Howard Zinn in our public schools.
	And people just, they threw a bleep fit.
	I mean, they just went nuts over this.
	Now, here is the basic rule that I have when it comes to federal education.
	I think that the federal government should not be involved in education.
	I think the Department of Education should be abolished.
	The reason I believe this is because the same federal Department of Education capable of telling states to teach good history is similarly capable of telling the states to teach quite bad history.
	Or to teach Common Core.
	It seems to me that education should be devolved to the lowest level, meaning that you should be able to control education in your local community or at the state level.
	I mean, in an ideal world, obviously, you would have community schools that are directly funded by parents and by members of the community.
	Whether it's parochial schools, or whether it's private schools, or whether it's charter schools.
	But in any case, if the federal government is to be involved in the business of education, certainly it has a stake in people not learning false history and pseudo-history, and history directly designed to undermine the foundations of the United States, because then we lose all commonality.
	So here was Trump going after critical race theory and the 1619 Project.
	The left is attempting to destroy that beautiful vision and divide Americans by race in the service of political power.
	By viewing every issue through the lens of race, they want to impose a new segregation, and we must not allow that to happen.
	Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, And the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that Not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.
	Fact check.
	Absolutely true.
	I mean, someone could write a book about it.
	Oh, wait, I did.
	How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps, if you want the long version of Trump's speech with a full chapter on a more accurate history of the United States and what that would look like, including all of the dark spots in American history, including the mistreatment of black Americans, the mistreatment of American Indians and all the rest.
	He is correct about this.
	This is toxic stuff, suggesting that America has no foundational principles, which is what CRT says.
	That all the foundational principles are basically just a pasteboard fabric that is designed to obscure deeper, evil attempts to install racial and class hierarchies.
	It's disgusting, and it destroys the country.
	And he's exactly right about this.
	Any country that hopes to survive has to share a philosophy, has to share a history, has to share a culture.
	CRT, 1619 Project, they're aimed directly at this.
	Now it used to be, by the way.
	That Nicole Hannah-Jones of the world would fully admit this.
	Nicole Hannah-Jones literally tweeted this out about the 1619 Project back in July.
	In other words, we want to shift how Americans think about America.
	Dramatically.
	is not a history.
	It is a work of journalism that explicitly seeks to challenge the national narrative and therefore the national memory.
	The project has always been as much about the present as it is the past.
	In other words, we want to shift how Americans think about America, dramatically, right?
	We don't want to shade it.
	We don't want to remind them of bad things.
	We want to completely shift the narrative.
	I mean, she's a radical.
	It's an incredibly negative thing.
	The fact that she won a Pulitzer for a project that is so bad it was fact-checked and she refused to change the facts.
	She is just, she's awful.
	And the fact that they made her the de facto editor of the New York Times demonstrates where our media are at and where the far left are at.
	Or the mainstream left, I should say, at this point.
	Okay, so Trump continued.
	He said it is child abuse to teach critical race theory to kids.
	This is 100% true again.
	Teaching a child of any ilk That in a free country, you are a victim.
	And that you are inherently a victim because the systems will victimize you.
	The systems are out to get you.
	There is no greater act of viciousness you can visit upon a child than teaching a child that no matter how hard you work, you are bound for failure.
	That is a vicious thing to teach a child.
	I have three children.
	Last I checked, we all live in the United States.
	My kids are Jewish, as it turns out.
	And it turns out that the number one group in the United States targeted for hate crimes are Jews.
	Do you think that I'm telling my six-year-old that no matter what you do in the United States, you will not succeed?
	First of all, I can't tell my kids that because it's an overt lie.
	But beyond that, it is an act of deep, abiding immorality to teach people that they are victims of systems they cannot see, especially when that is not true.
	It turns out that when people are victims of systems, you typically can see it.
	Right?
	Jim Crow is a system where you can point at it and say, you know, you're a victim of the system because they literally will not allow you to go to that school across the street because of your race.
	That is a fairly obvious situation in which you're a victim of the system.
	Even in that situation, the most successful people are people who don't think of themselves as victims.
	Being a victim is not being a hero.
	Overcoming victimhood is heroism.
	Revelling in the fact that there are obstacles in life is the least likely thing to lead you to a successful life.
	And it happens to be an over-lie in modern America.
	So here is Trump saying that CRT is effectively child abuse.
	This is ideologically correct.
	Critical race theory is being forced into our children's schools.
	This is offensive and outrageous to Americans of every ethnicity.
	And it's especially harmful to children of minority backgrounds who should be uplifted, not disparaged.
	Teaching this horrible doctrine To our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.
	Okay, so Trump moves on and he calls for patriotic education.
	This is what drove everybody nuts.
	The minute you say patriotism to the left, the fact that the word patriotism is anathema to the left should tell you something about what the left believes about the country.
	Do you want to live in a country where the entire governing system, the entire intelligentsia believe that being a patriot makes you a bigot?
	Because this is what people believe.
	I am not joking.
	Online, as soon as Trump said patriotic education, Hitler Youth trended yesterday on Twitter because he said that he thinks that Americans should be patriotic about the country and that kids should be taught to be patriotic about the country.
	Hitler Youth.
	That's insane.
	He's not saying that you should be patriotic about all of America's evils.
	He's saying you should be patriotic about America's founding documents, about our ideology, about our history.
	You should be patriotic and recognize the evils of American history.
	In the speech, he mentioned some of the evils of American history, but the media deliberately overlooked that in order to declare that he was some sort of uber nationalist Deutschland, Uber, Alice, it's insane.
	It's insane.
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	Okay, so Trump yesterday calls for patriotic education.
	This should not be controversial.
	Of course, Americans should believe America is good.
	How this is in any way controversial is absolutely beyond me.
	Frankly, I think that you have to be mentally deficient to believe otherwise.
	That American children should be taught that the country that they inhabit is good.
	And that it has historically provided incredible good for the world and that its founding ideology is good.
	What, you want them taught that America's evil?
	I mean, the answer is yes.
	That is the actual answer.
	There's a huge cadre of Americans who believe that children in America should be taught that the country is evil and must be torn down to the root.
	Here's Trump yesterday.
	The only path to national unity is through our shared identity as Americans.
	That is why it is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools.
	Today I'm also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an executive order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education.
	It will be called the 1776 Commission.
	Okay, this is not a bad thing.
	So people went nuts over this.
	They went totally crazy.
	Yamiche Alcindor, who's a quote-unquote reporter over at NPR.
	She's not a reporter.
	She's a propagandist.
	Paid for with your tax dollars over at NPR.
	She tweeted out, Trump just announced he will soon be signing an executive order establishing a quote national commission to promote patriotic education called the 1776 commission. It is unclear what that means but he has been trashing the 1619 project which aims to educate the nation with facts. No, the 1619 project is a pseudo-historical piece of garbage. Historians agree on this.
	There are five separate Pulitzer Prize winners who went to the 1619 Project founder and said, you guys are screwing up the facts, and she ignored them.
	Julia Jaffe, who's an idiot, and she tweeted out, you know who else is really into using the government to promote patriotic education in schools?
	I feel like I don't even need to say it anymore.
	Her answer?
	Putin!
	Putin!
	Because Putin loves patriotic education.
	Putin!
	Yes, I'm sure Vladimir Putin also likes to eat a hamburger from time to time and breathe human air and drink water.
	The Hitler also had a dog argument is getting pretty weak here, guys.
	How about you argue exactly what you want taught in American schools?
	Because it turns out that what a lot of these people want is not American history taught in an accurate way with all of the great and glorious founding ideology of the founders, not with the full history of the United States with all of its downs and all of its ups.
	Instead, what they want is an unending litany of America's evils And the underlying argument being that all of those evils are a direct result of America's constitutional governmental system and the false principles of the Declaration of Independence.
	This is the argument that is taking place.
	This is exactly the argument that's taking place.
	It was amazing.
	Some people I was friendly with, I was tweeting with yesterday, online people were getting very angry at Trump over this.
	Saying, well he's, Trump's patriotic education is just going to whitewash history.
	I said, do you think that Donald Trump is actually going to sit there and write the curriculum?
	Like, really?
	Donald Trump is going to sit there and write?
	These same people who believe that Donald Trump has no attention span and is an idiot, think that he is simultaneously developing the vaccine so as to kill everyone, and also he's going to write the entire educational curriculum for every young child across the country.
	Alternatively, he will have exactly what he said he will have, a national commission that takes a look at educational standards and says, we are not going to teach pseudo-historical neo-Marxist garbage about how America is inherently evil.
	That's a good thing.
	Again, you want to make the argument on a systemic level the federal government should not control education?
	I'm with you.
	Let's do it.
	I don't think you want to have that argument.
	I think what you actually want is to force the federal government to sponsor and subsidize your anti-American bullcrap.
	Adam Serwer, who writes for The Atlantic, sometimes intelligently, sometimes not, he tweeted out yesterday, it's political correctness to say that the federal government should stop the teaching of 1619 Project or critical race theory.
	That's political correctness.
	No, it's political correctness to demand that the federal government subsidize that stuff.
	If you want to make the argument that the federal government should not be in the business of subsidizing education and attaching strings, join the libertarian side, gang.
	But if you're arguing that the federal government gets to make the rules, Then, of course, the federal government has somewhat of a stake in ensuring that people do not learn that it would be a good thing to tear out all the institutions of the federal government.
	And by the way, they would be right, especially when you're talking about pseudo-historical nonsense.
	In just a second, we're going to get to what is the greatest troll move I think I may have ever seen in politics.
	It's pretty spectacular from the Trump administration.
	Then we'll get to Joe Biden stumbling and bumbling around a drive-in stage.
	He thought it was 1965.
	It was great for him.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so I will say that calling the left on their BS is extraordinarily fun to watch.
	It really is.
	So the entire educational system of the United States, higher educational particularly, has decided to imbibe deeply, drink deeply from the narcissistic, disassociative Wellspring of critical race theory.
	What I mean by that is that there are a bunch of people in higher education who want to say, yeah, America's racist, but we're not.
	We're not that.
	So we will acknowledge our own racism.
	We will provide we will do the malice struggle sessions where we announce our own guilt and that and thus we shall have alleviated our guilt and we have reestablished our moral bona fides.
	And now we get to make the new rules.
	We will have expiated our white guilt and reestablished our moral authority over everyone to restructure the system from within.
	And this is why you see all these major corporations sending out letters talking about the evils of capitalism and how America's racist and they're racist.
	Do they really believe any of that stuff?
	Of course they don't.
	Of course there's not one of these major corporations Twitter now runs the universe.
	truly believes that America is deeply and inherently systemically racist, that their company is deeply systemically racist, or that capitalism is bad.
	Not one of these companies believes that.
	The NFL does not believe that.
	The leadership of the NBA does not believe that.
	No one believes this.
	This is all kowtowing to a particular narrative, so people will leave them alone.
	It is so they can buy the allegiance of the wokesters in the media and the woke schools online.
	Twitter now runs the universe.
	Okay, so Princeton University decided to do this recently.
	On September 2nd, according to the Daily Wire, Hank Barian reporting, the president of Princeton University, whose name is Christopher Eisgruber, issued a mea culpa in a letter in which he argued that Princeton still evinced racism, writing, quote, racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society. Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the university itself. Right. This is the systemic racism argument.
	I've talked about it a million times at this point.
	The argument on systemic racism is not the same as the argument that racism still exists.
	Of course racism still exists.
	Of course there are still racists.
	People do racist things.
	That is a condition that is inherent to being a human being.
	It just is.
	Racism exists in all societies, at all places, at all times.
	If you want to see truly racist societies against black people, you might want to take a look at some of the countries over in Europe or in Asia.
	Seriously, they've done polling data on people across the world and how comfortable they would be living with somebody who is not of their race next door.
	And the United States ranks super high on the list of people who are comfortable living with somebody of a different race next door.
	That's true also for Canada and the UK, it is very low other places.
	Okay, in any case, the argument is not about racism, it's about structures of racism.
	Structural racism, a term, institutional racism, first coined by Stokely Carmichael, who later became a criminal.
	Stokely Carmichael, I made the argument that because history matters, all of racism is embedded in structures.
	And the way that you can tell if a structure is racist is if the result of the structure has racial differentiation.
	So it's just early stage Ibram X. Kendi.
	And the only way to get rid of that racism is therefore to tear down the structures.
	So this is what Princeton means when they say that racist assumptions from the past remain embedded in structures of the university itself.
	And so they issued this letter, right, Christopher Eisgruber, to the entire Princeton community.
	This is the- you ready for this?
	This is the greatest troll of all time.
	Honestly, Betsy DeVos deserves a medal as Secretary of Education for this.
	She deserves, like, the full-on- the full-on weird face meme from Twitter, like, engraved in gold.
	Here's what you did.
	On Wednesday, the Department of Education fired off a letter to Princeton declaring that the university would now be federally investigated, stating it was, quote, concerned Princeton's nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its program participation agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false.
	The letter, obtained and published by the Washington Examiner, continued, based on the fact the Secretary of Education may consider measures against Princeton for false program participation agreement nondiscrimination assurances, including an action to recover funds.
	Also, she may consider measures against Princeton for making substantial misrepresentations about the nature of its educational program, including a fine proceeding.
	The serious, even shocking nature of Princeton's admissions compel the department to move with all appropriate speed.
	The Examiner noted that an admission from Eisgruber about the systemic racism of Princeton raises concerns Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars in federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 64, which declares no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
	So basically what happened here is the Department of Education is now taking Princeton at its word.
	Okay, you guys say you're systemically racist?
	Good, we're investigating you.
	You say that all of your institutions are shot through with racism?
	Well, you know that's illegal in the United States.
	You receive federal dollars.
	So we're gonna look at you, and maybe we'll just take back our tens of millions.
	So now Princeton is gonna be forced to argue privately to the federal government that they are not racist, but publicly that they are racist.
	Or that if they are racist, it's not manifesting an actual mistreatment of black people.
	It's just kind of out there.
	Good.
	Call the bluff.
	Seriously, call the bluff.
	I love it.
	If you're going to go out there as an entity receiving public dollars and claim that you are the result of a racist system and that your systems themselves are racist, that's illegal in the United States.
	It's been illegal for 50 years in the United States.
	So, all right, let's do this thing.
	Slow clap for Betsy DeVos, man.
	Slow clap.
	Department of Education, woo!
	This is the only reason I have ever seen for the Department of Education not to be abolished.
	That is, this is the only reason in history.
	So, good.
	Honestly, by the way, this should be your tactic in everyday conversations.
	When someone says America is systemically racist, you should say to them, are you a racist?
	Because they will usually say yes, and you say, well, I don't talk to racists.
	And if they say no, then you say, well, if you're not racist, why are you imputing racism to everybody else?
	What have I done that's racist?
	What have you done that's racist?
	If they say, well, we are all racist, then you say, okay, well, how do you expiate your racism?
	And they say, well, you admit it.
	You say, yes, but now you've admitted you're a racist.
	So why would I lie to expiate your racism simply by admitting that you're a racist?
	You've literally said that racism is unalterable.
	It is a facet of being white in America.
	So you can't expiate your own racism.
	And it doesn't matter how many times you mimic the slogans of BLM and how many stupid lawn signs you put on your lawn.
	It's inherent in your whiteness.
	You can do a Maoist struggle session, but the demands never end.
	So I'm not going to take you seriously.
	You shouldn't take anybody seriously who makes these sorts of contentions.
	Or if you do take them seriously, then go ahead and take them literally and ask them to prove their own racism.
	Should be a fun conversation.
	Meanwhile, Joe Biden got the softball treatment from CNN.
	Who could have predicted?
	Who could have predicted?
	We'll get that in just one second.
	First, Let's talk about sleep quality.
	So, last night, I go to bed.
	It's like 1045, feed my baby, I get in bed, and I am out like a light.
	Why am I out like a light?
	Because I'm on bowl and branch sheets.
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	Okay, in just a second we're going to get to Joe Biden's sterling performance in which he did not physically fall over, but also did not really say a lot of sentences that made sense.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
	First, it is that glorious time of the week when I give a shout out to a Daily Wire member.
	Today, it is amateur MMA fighter Bang Bang Sandy Chang on Instagram who understands the need for proper hydration after a grueling workout.
	In the pic, Sandy is donning her purple belt and G, while proudly clutching the world's finest and most elite beverage vessel.
	The caption reads, I'm always so thirsty after 7 a.m.
	jujitsu.
	Hashtag good morning, hashtag leftist tears tumbler, hashtag America.
	Well done, my friend.
	Thanks for the pick.
	Continued success in the octagon.
	And yes, there is no question that this person can absolutely kick my ass.
	By the way, if you're watching on YouTube on September 28th, all of my show's content will be moving to my channel.
	YouTube.com slash Ben Shapiro.
	The link is in the description below.
	There will still be content on The Daily War channel, but my daily show will be on my channel.
	So I'm telling you, if you don't want to miss it, you need to like, pause what you're doing right now.
	Takes five seconds.
	Search Ben Shapiro on YouTube, go to the channel, hit the little bell, you're subscribed.
	We're making room for some new exclusive content over on Daily Wire.
	But I'm also making a lot of new content you can only find on the channel belonging to me.
	So subscribe to YouTube.com slash Ben Shapiro.
	Ring the bell.
	Make sure you never miss out on a new video.
	Also, I recently sat down with Matt Iglesias of Vox.com for the Sunday special.
	This is a great Sunday special.
	It was really fun.
	We discussed a bunch of stuff ranging from cancel culture to how you can have cross aisle political discussions.
	One of the things that was really fun about this is Matt and I have been sniping at each other on Twitter for years and years and years.
	And we still had a friendly conversation because it turns out that people can still have friendly conversations.
	All they have to do is not be jackasses.
	Give it a listen this Sunday.
	If you can't wait until then, go subscribe at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
	And you can watch the episode a day early.
	Take a bit of a listen to the trailer.
	Probably not the Ben Shapiro show audience, but you know, my progressive friends will want me to acknowledge that some bad things happened across the settling of the West and all that kind of stuff.
	But you know, it was done for a reason.
	And I'm basically arguing for a continuation of that kind of vision that, you know, the United States is great and should want to be great and powerful, and that that means having more people.
	I know, actual patriotism from a person who is a liberal.
	It turns out that I think, again, I think that the gap in the United States right now is not even really between everybody who is kind of left-leaning and everybody who's right-leaning.
	I think it's between liberals and conservatives on the one hand, and wild leftists who want to destroy the country on the other.
	And that is their fundamental ideology.
	Okay, well, you are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	Alrighty, so Joe Biden had a town hall last night.
	So remember, a couple of nights ago, Donald Trump had a town hall on ABC.
	And it basically amounted to George Stephanopoulos asking him why he's a bad, orange, mean man, and then a bunch of members of the audience who were undecided, in that they were undecided whether to vote for Bernie Sanders as a write-in, or undecided whether to vote for Joe Biden.
	That was really, like, the entire audience.
	Like, look at these undecided voters who have to decide whether or not to cast a vote for the Marxist Party or for the Neo-Marxist Party.
	It was amazing.
	Joe Biden does a town hall on CNN and he has not asked a single really difficult question during the entire time.
	He still manages to sort of bloviate his way through it.
	Now, understand that Joe Biden's entire campaign is, I'm a nice old codger.
	I mean, that's really what I am.
	I'm just, I'm a nice old man and I have caring and empathy and...
	He sort of falls over, but he hasn't fallen over.
	And that's really the key to his campaign.
	The minute he falls over, he's got a real problem on his hands.
	And I mean, let's face it, we've had two presidential candidates in the last 30 years who have literally physically fallen over.
	I mean, Bob Dole fell off a stage in 1996, and then Hillary Clinton fell into a van in 2016.
	So it could happen.
	I mean, it could happen.
	I'm not hoping for it.
	You want everybody to remain healthy.
	But Joe Biden is obviously not cognitively with it.
	And so you can, it's hard, honestly, it's kind of hard to watch because just as a human being, you're kind of rooting for him to finish his sentences.
	You're rooting for him to somehow come up with a cogent thought because it's hard to, I mean, it's like watching The Office, except not funny, right?
	The Office, the awkwardness is the funniness.
	Here, it's actually not funny because he's kind of like struggling to get the sentences out and struggling to get the paragraphs out.
	And it's really not good.
	But according to the media, it was a masterful, brilliant, edifying performance by Joe Biden.
	The reason that it was brilliant and wonderful and edifying is, of course, because it was, in fact, Joe Biden talking.
	And the fact that he was not asked, like, a single difficult question, that's normal.
	According to CNN, Brian Stelter suggested last night, not kidding, Brian Stelter put in his newsletter, why is it that Joe Biden is basically getting treated with kid gloves?
	His answer is because Donald Trump is a big, bad, orange, mean man.
	Quote, of course they are treated differently.
	The notion that Trump should be interviewed in the same fashion as Biden is absurd.
	Trump has no allegiance to the truth.
	It shows every single time he's in front of a camera.
	He lies, misleads, and promotes conspiracy theories at an unprecedented rate in modern American politics.
	So in other words, Trump should be asked difficult questions because Trump is a very bad, orange, mean man who says things that I don't like.
	But Joe Biden is a wonderful man who never lies and has never bloviated and has never prevaricated, never committed plagiarism, never exaggerated.
	Never been insulting about Indian Americans?
	Never done any, like, okay.
	So the media have now justified their own failure of journalisming by suggesting in true journalismic fashion that they really can't ask questions to Joe Biden that are tough because Joe Biden is just too wonderful a human being.
	Still, Joe Biden does this town hall last night and it gets awkward.
	So, for example, he was asked specifically about the Green New Deal.
	He randomly lost his train of thought in the middle of the answer and talked about ventilating schools, which is a weird thing to do.
	There's so much we can do and still make it better for people.
	We're going to invest close to a trillion dollars over time, in the near time, for infrastructure.
	We're going to build green infrastructure.
	For example, I propose that we spend $100 billion on making sure our schools have the right ventilation.
	Making sure schools, in fact, are safe.
	Making sure schools are in a position where they are not generating the Okay, so he loses track in the middle, obviously, and then he realizes, oh wait, this was a question about the Green New Deal.
	I probably need to... Ventilating schools?
	Making them safer?
	That's a COVID thing.
	That's not a Green New Deal thing.
	He just loses track in the middle.
	And there's a lot of this.
	He was asked by a woman who was a farmer about over-regulation.
	His answer was, something having to do with chicken bleep in Delaware.
	Not kidding.
	Literally, he gave an answer about chicken manure in Delaware, and the lady is staring at him like, I don't know what you're talking about, Joe.
	Here's the question and answer.
	Unbelievable.
	In the United States, in my state of Delaware, we have a $4 billion industry.
	Chickens.
	Chicken and poultry.
	And all the manure, quite frankly, that is a consequence of chickens.
	And so it's polluting the Chesapeake Bay.
	What we found out, we've invested a lot of money, we found out you can pelletize this and take out the methane so you're in a position where you can use that fertilizer without the damage that was being done before.
	The same way with horse manure and cow manure and pig manure.
	He is definitely an expert in types of manure and slinging them around.
	That lady's expression, they just need to close in on her face and then go directly to the curb, your enthusiasm credits.
	Because she's like, what in the F?
	I was just asking about like, please don't shut down my farm through your crappy over-regulation and your Green New Deal nonsense.
	And he's like, let me tell you about this time I saw s*** on the side of the road.
	Let me just tell you about this time where I saw, like, there was poop, and I don't know whether it was, like, from a beaver or a dolphin, but it was on the side of the road, and I picked it up, and I said to Corn Pop, why is there poop in my leg hair?
	Why?
	And everybody's like, woo!
	Joe Biden, look at that performance, woo!
	That man is going to be our president for 32.7 seconds before Kamala Harris is the president of the United States.
	Joe Biden also unleashed a bit of radicalism that the media immediately covered up.
	So you said he backed the Green New Deal, but then he backed off it, right?
	This is the way that Joe Biden does it.
	He has asked specifically about the radical policies of his own party, and then he says he backs them, but I've also provided an alternative plan that's not quite as radical.
	And that way, when Republicans say he backs the Green New Deal, the media fact-check them and say, oh, but he also said that he has his own plan.
	OK, you can't have it both ways.
	If you back the Green New Deal, you want $93 trillion in new spending.
	Trillion!
	With a G!
	But watch Joe Biden split the baby here.
	She was asking about the Green New Deal.
	Do you back that or do you think it's too much?
	No, I don't think it's too much.
	I have my own deal.
	I've laid it out in great detail.
	It was the Democratic Party's adopted as a platform.
	It requires for us to move in a direction to fundamentally change the way in which we deal with the environment.
	Okay, and then he was asked about China, and he was repeatedly asked whether he'd call China an opponent.
	He would not.
	So, you know, the fact that Joe Biden says that, again, you want to talk about media malfeasance?
	The intelligence community came up with a report.
	It said the Russians would try to interfere in the election again, and they would do so on behalf of Trump.
	They also said Iran and China would attempt to interfere with the election on behalf of Joe Biden.
	Which one of those things have you heard from mainstream media?
	Infinitely.
	Which country is more powerful and has more propagandistic arms in the United States?
	The Chinese government or the Russian government?
	There's no question.
	in 2020, which country is more powerful and has more propagandistic arms in the United States, the Chinese government or the Russian government?
	There's no question.
	And the Chinese government is apparently attempting to interfere on Biden's behalf, but you never hear about it.
	Here is Joe Biden saying that he won't call the Chinese an opponent.
	They're more like a competitor, you know, they're not really an opponent, even though they're actively engaging in human rights abuses.
	They're actively subjecting formerly free states like Hong Kong to abject tyranny.
	They are clearly attempting aggressive action in the South China Sea directed at Japan and Taiwan.
	They're creating a Belt and Road program designed to minimize Western influence and to maximize their own.
	But Joe Biden won't call them an opponent no matter what.
	But don't worry, he's going to be strong on China, guys.
	Do you view China as an opponent?
	Because the president says you've been too cozy with China, too accepting of them in the international community.
	I'm not the guy.
	Look, China, we now have a larger trade deficit with China than we've ever had with China.
	And in our administration, when the World Trade Organization he keeps going on about, just ruled that his trade policy violate the World Trade Organization.
	We sued, we went to the World Trade Organization 16 times.
	Do you view China as an opponent?
	I view China as a competitor.
	Oh, a competitor, is it?
	A competitor.
	And then, of course, he futzed on fracking because he doesn't want to lose Pennsylvania, but also he has pledged to basically end fracking.
	He says no new licenses, which, of course, means pretty quickly the end of fracking.
	Here was Joe Biden trying to split the baby once again.
	You said you won't ban fracking, but that you wanted to gradually move away from it, ultimately.
	It sounds like, to some, you're trying to have it both ways.
	Well, fracking has to continue because we need a transition.
	We're going to get to net zero emissions by 2050, and we'll get to net zero power emissions by 2035.
	But there's no rationale to eliminate, right now, fracking.
	Okay, so don't worry.
	We're not going to get rid of your fracking job right now.
	We're just going to make sure that nobody can ever get a new fracking job, and then we're going to regulate it out of existence.
	Now, the truth is that Joe Biden's campaign really relies on two things.
	One, orange man bad, and the other is orange man responsible for everybody dying from COVID.
	And this is the case where Biden is going to have the strongest case, mainly because he's not in power.
	See, the thing about being in power when there's a massive pandemic is that pretty much everybody gets shellacked, or at least they should be if the media weren't completely full of it.
	Apparently, Andrew Cuomo escapes all censure despite the fact that his state got just reamed.
	Apparently, the governor of New Jersey gets away with it, even though his state got absolutely creamed.
	But bottom line is that you can blame Trump for everything.
	And that's what Biden proceeded to do last night.
	He said that the virus is costing us our freedoms.
	Well, actually, right now, it's lockdowns that are costing us our freedoms, not the virus itself.
	Because if people wore masks in public places and they are young and they are not sick, we could all be back at work right now.
	And in fact, that is what we should be pursuing.
	In fact, that is what most places in Europe are pursuing right now.
	But according to Joe Biden, it's only the virus.
	The virus is the only reason.
	I would tell you what takes away your freedom.
	What takes away your freedom is not being able to see your kid, not being able to go to the football game or baseball game, not being able to see your mom or dad sick in the hospital, not being able to do the things.
	That's what costs our freedom.
	And it's been the failure of this president to deal To deal with this virus.
	And he knew about it.
	He knew the detail of it.
	He knew it in clear terms.
	Imagine had he at the State of the Union stood up and said, when back in January I wrote an article for USA Today saying, we've got a pandemic, we've got a real problem.
	Imagine if he had said something.
	Okay, if he had said... Well, you know, you wrote that editorial in USA Today, Joe, in which you said coronavirus could be bad.
	Then you proceeded to hold in-person rallies up until the first week of March.
	March.
	At no point did you call for universal masking in February.
	At no point did you call for lockdowns in February.
	At no point did anybody do any of that stuff.
	This revisionist history, whereby Democrats just don't exist in the narrative, is truly incredible.
	Joe Biden actually made the claim yesterday that if Trump had done his job, every single human being who has died from COVID would still be alive.
	That is patently nuts.
	I mean, like, there's no evidence this is the case at all.
	If the president had done his job, had done his job from the beginning, all the people would still be alive.
	All the people would say, I'm not making this up, just look at the data.
	Look at the data.
	You are making that up.
	There is no evidence that that is the case.
	None.
	If the president had done his job since the beginning.
	You held rallies until March, you doof.
	But of course, again, it's very easy to sit outside because when a bad thing happens and the person in power is in power, you can easily blame them.
	And if you're the media, you just go right along with it.
	Then, of course, Joe Biden jumped on William Barr.
	So William Barr is the attorney general, of course.
	And yesterday, Barr gave a speech talking about, at Hillsdale College, talking about the DOJ.
	And in the middle of his Q&A, he was talking about the COVID lockdowns, and he said they were a radical intrusion on liberty.
	So let's actually play the clip of Bill Barr so you get the full context as to what he's saying here.
	Stay-at-home orders is like house arrest.
	Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.
	We have epidemics and pandemics.
	This is a very serious one, a grave one.
	But they come and, you know, just because something is a medical crisis, it doesn't give a complete blank check to executive rule.
	So it was the slavery reference that, of course, he's getting hit over.
	He was not comparing the moral quandary of slavery and the moral evil of slavery to the morality of lockdowns, you idiots.
	He's explicitly denouncing that.
	He's explicitly taking that and saying slavery to the side, which is a whole different issue because of its inherent moral evil.
	Putting that issue aside, if you're just talking about restrictions on daily movement by Americans, this is the greatest restriction on daily movement by Americans in American history, which by the numbers is essentially true.
	He's explicitly saying it's not like slavery.
	And so the media go, well, he's comparing it to slavery.
	And then they ask Joe Biden.
	It's like, Joe, what do you hear?
	Here's a brick.
	Would you like to hit William Barr with it?
	And Joe's like, well, I can't swing it very hard and I can't lift it very high, but but I guess.
	All right.
	He's sick.
	He's a bad man.
	Do you think the comments by the Attorney General contribute to people, I mean, encourage people not to wear masks?
	Sure, I mean, quite frankly, they're sick.
	Think about it.
	Did you ever, ever think, any of you, you'd hear Attorney General say that following the recommendations of the scientific community to save your and other people's lives is equivalent to slavery?
	People being put in chains.
	You lost your freedom because he didn't act.
	I have a question.
	In that sentence, he said you lost your freedom because he didn't act.
	You lost your freedom.
	He's saying that it's a restriction.
	You lost your you lost your freedom.
	Seems like a restriction on liberty.
	Also, he deliberately did not compare it to slavery.
	He explicitly took slavery and put it to the side.
	And so Joe Biden, who apparently doesn't speak English or is wildly dishonest or both, is like, no, he was comparing it to slavery.
	He was absolutely 100% not comparing it to slavery.
	If I say to you that other than this thing, this is a really bad thing here, like other than, here's a really bad thing that's happening.
	And other than this much worse and very different thing, this is a very bad thing.
	That is not me saying the two things are equivalent, it's me deliberately disassociating the two things, you morons.
	Okay, but again, Joe Biden, he was treated with kid gloves.
	By the way, Politico, Politico put out an actual tweet In which they admitted this, right?
	Here's Politico's tweet.
	If ABC's event with President Trump was an icy grilling, CNN's drive-in conversation with Joe Biden yesterday was more like an affable reunion of old acquaintances.
	Yeah, no bleep.
	That is pretty damned obvious.
	Affable acquaintance between old friends.
	Yeah, I got that.
	I got that, CNN.
	The most trusted name in news.
	Meanwhile, I do love the Democratic take on COVID, which again is the focal point of their campaign.
	Their take is vaccines are bad, if they're developed under the Trump administration.
	Also, Republican governors are extremely bad.
	Also, blue governors are extremely good, and if you distinguish between red and blue and you're a Republican, you're also extremely bad.
	So that is the line right here.
	So, the pro-science crew, here's Joe Biden yesterday saying that he doesn't trust Trump on the vaccine.
	No one's asking you to trust Trump on the vaccine.
	Trump ain't the one handing out the vaccine or developing the vaccine.
	You know what we're asking you to do?
	Trust all of the departments inside the federal government whose absolute task... Do you trust Redfield?
	Do you trust Fauci?
	Do you trust Birx?
	Do you trust the doctors who you've been lighting votive candles to?
	for months at this point. Here's Joe Biden talking down vaccines. It's amazing. This is the party that says that they are all in favor of the science and all in favor of ending the problems of COVID as soon as possible, talking down one of the chief ways we're going to end that problem, which is the development of a vaccine.
	First of all, I don't trust the president on vaccines.
	I trust Dr. Fauci.
	If Fauci says the vaccine is safe, I take the vaccine.
	We should listen to the scientists, not to the president.
	Okay, so who do you think is going to be making the vaccine?
	But here's the problem.
	When you say you don't trust the vaccine as long as Trump is in office, what you really mean is you don't trust the vaccine until Trump is out of office, right?
	Because your implication is that Trump is pressuring the scientists to botch this thing.
	Meanwhile, Democrats went nuts yesterday because Trump, during a presser, he pointed out that if you don't count the blue states and how they've handled this thing, that the numbers are actually a lot better.
	Now, that's true.
	It's not supremely helpful.
	Right, because again, nobody really knew how to deal with the pandemic very well in the beginning.
	The only real activity you can fault people for is what should have been obvious from the beginning, which is protect the people in nursing homes, protect the elderly, protect the vulnerable, which everybody failed to do in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, et cetera.
	But let's be real about this.
	The division between red states and blue states on COVID has been pushed by the media and pushed by the Democrats since the very beginning.
	Ron DeSantis was evil for not shutting down Jacksonville beaches.
	Doug Ducey was evil for not fully shutting down the economy of Arizona.
	Kirsten Ohm in South Dakota is still evil for not having shut down South Dakota, which, by the way, currently has a 4.8% unemployment rate and not tons of death.
	So it was Democrats who decided to make this a red-blue issue.
	I've said since the beginning, I don't understand why this should be a red-blue issue.
	You should actually follow the best scientific procedures, and then you should alleviate lockdown when it appears that lockdown is no longer achieving what it was originally supposed to achieve, namely, avoiding the overwhelm of the hospitals.
	I'm the one who's been saying since the beginning that you should follow the actual recommendations of people who are examining the data.
	It was Democrats who immediately went to, red states are mishandling this and blue states are being, they were saying that while Ron DeSantis had no cases in Florida.
	Okay, but meanwhile, Democrats are very angry that Trump mentioned the difference between red states and blue states in terms of deaths per million.
	And by the way, out of the top 11 places in the United States, including DC, deaths per million, I believe eight of them are blue, just for the record.
	Here is Chuck Schumer saying that Trump is monstrous and demented for distinguishing blue states, which is weird because I'm old enough to remember when the Democrats were saying that all the red states were monstrous and demented for even opening.
	The Atlantic ran a headline about Georgia saying that it was Brian Kemp's experiment and human sacrifice to reopen Georgia. Here is Chuck Schumer.
	What kind of person looks at the number of dead citizens in the country he is supposed to lead and in an attempt to glamorize himself dismisses every American who died in a state that didn't support the president politically.
	What a disgrace!
	It's monstrous!
	Not a shred of empathy.
	What kind of demented person would say that those American lives don't count?
	No one said the American lives don't count.
	No one did that.
	I mean, if anybody has degraded American lives in places like New York, by the way, it was Andrew Cuomo who built a paper machine mountain of death as tribute to himself to show how wonderfully he had handled it.
	He made a poster to himself with a curve showing dead people.
	Making light of death.
	Also, do you remember the DNC?
	It wasn't that long ago.
	They literally took a woman whose dad died of COVID and voted for Trump and said he was an idiot and it was his own fault he died because he listened to Donald Trump.
	They degraded the value of every Trump supporter who died of COVID by basically saying they brought it on themselves.
	Meanwhile, James Clyburn makes a completely unbased accusation saying that Trump refused to act on COVID because it was hitting blue states.
	Like, I'm going to need some evidence that it was specifically because Trump hates the blue states that he was not acting on COVID.
	By the way, he gave all the ventilators that New York needed to New York.
	Gavin Newsom said he gave us all the resources we needed.
	Jay Inslee in Washington said he gave us all the resources we needed.
	But here is James Clyburn suggesting that Trump just allowed people in blue states to die.
	Oh, well, if you say so, James.
	Back in April, The administration considered implementing a national strategy, but decided not to do so.
	Because at the time, the virus was primarily spreading in blue states.
	Just yesterday, we saw the president still employing this political strategy, boasting that there would be fewer deaths, and I'm quoting him here, If you take the blue states out.
	Okay, again, the reason that they didn't implement a national strategy is because America is a nation with lots of states and not all the states were being hit equivalently.
	And so a national strategy would have forced states that were not being hit to shut down, which would have been very silly.
	You should not shut down states that don't have any cases.
	Okay, now this doesn't mean that the White House handled everything with regard to COVID properly.
	There's a story yesterday that I think actually is probably the most damaging story that I've seen on the Trump administration's handling of COVID.
	It's from Business Insider, talking about how the White House scuttled a plan to partner with the U.S.
	Postal Service to send every American a face mask.
	The Washington Post found a draft press release showing the Postal Service was preparing to send out 650 million face masks in April to supply every household with them.
	That would have been a good idea, by the way.
	That would have been a very good idea, because I've always been very baffled by the sort of conservative notion that in order to reopen, we have to take off the masks.
	It was sort of the opposite.
	If you want to reopen, then people should have been wearing masks.
	I've been saying that since the beginning.
	Do the social distancing and wear the mask so we can reopen and get back to normal.
	And then the virus slowly works its way through the community and then you're done.
	And in fact, that's kind of what happened in places like Florida and Arizona and Texas and Georgia.
	The masking rate went up as the virus went up.
	So that was a mistake, obviously.
	And mistakes clearly were made by the Trump administration.
	But again, the notion that Democrats would have handled this tons better, I'm waiting to see any evidence of that at all.
	At all, at all, at all.
	Okay, so I do want to make a quick note here that tonight is Rosh Hashanah.
	So Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of the Jewish New Year.
	And so I want to talk for just a minute about Rosh Hashanah because it is a very meaningful time in Jewish life.
	And frankly, I think it has some things to teach everybody about the nature of the universe in which we live.
	So the Jewish New Year happens starting tonight.
	It carries on for two days.
	It's sort of different from the American New Year or the World New Year in that during the American New Year, you're drinking, you're merry, and then you sort of make resolutions for the New Year.
	The Jewish New Year is about two things.
	It's about celebrating God's creation of the universe, and it's about leading off what are called the Asar Yom Kippur, which are the 10 days of repentance.
	So you have 10 days to sort of get your life straight before Yom Kippur, which is the day of repentance, which, yeah, I'll be taking off a day in 10 days to fast and pray for repentance.
	And the idea here is that you have basically, on the repentance side, you have 10 days to sort of demonstrate to God that you would like to fix your problems.
	And, you know, it's a beautiful idea, but gee, we'll get to, maybe I'll talk about Yom Kippur, near Yom Kippur, but when it comes to Rosh Hashanah, the idea of God's creation of the universe being celebrated, the Bria, as it's called in Hebrew, right?
	The beginning of Genesis.
	That in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
	Why is that an important idea?
	Well, it's an important idea for a variety of reasons.
	First of all, it means that man is central to the universe.
	That doesn't mean that we are literally living at the center of the universe, as pre-Copernican theory sort of suggested.
	It doesn't mean that man is completely disconnected from the animal world.
	What it does mean is that human beings create meaning in the universe.
	This is why when people say, you know, that the Earth would be better off without us.
	What does the Earth care?
	The Earth has no sentience.
	What does it matter whether the trees feel better without human beings?
	Human beings are meaning-creating creatures.
	And thus, meaning in the universe springs into existence with the creation of sentient human beings.
	So, God's creation of the universe, in that way the universe was made for man to provide meaning in the universe.
	And so God's creation of man lends meaning to the entire creation itself.
	God's creation of the universe culminates with man.
	See, there's something beautiful about the biblical story of creation.
	It does two things.
	One, it reminds human beings that they are nothing.
	And two, it reminds human beings that they are everything.
	It reminds human beings that they are created from the earth, and back to the earth they will return.
	Human beings in the creation story in Genesis are created on the sixth day of creation.
	They don't have their own separate day of creation, right?
	God creates the animals and He creates human beings at the very end of the sixth day.
	Meaning that we are innately wrapped up in our own animal instincts, but we have the capacity to look up to the stars.
	Meaning rests in us, and if we fail to take advantage of that meaning, then we are degraded to the level of animals.
	The importance of God creation, and we should be grateful for the fact that God created the universe the way that he did.
	We should be grateful for this universe, which is not always easy to be.
	I mean, it's a tough universe to live in sometimes.
	But we should be very grateful for the fact that God fine-tuned the universe.
	This is the argument that religious people often make.
	For the existence of God and trying to evidence God in the universe is that the conditions had to be incredibly precise in order for human beings to arise.
	In fact, there was a recent study showing that of 10 million stars that have been surveyed that we've seen essentially no signs of any other form of anything like sentient human beings or sentient creatures literally anywhere.
	The conditions for the creation of life have to be extraordinarily precise.
	Atheists will say, well, you know, If you run the same game over and over and over, then eventually you come up with life.
	And so they posit things like multiple universe theory, that there's tons of universes, an infinite number of universes, actually.
	And so if there are an infinite number of universes, then every possibility is possible in every universe.
	The evidence for multiple universes is zero, because you can't get outside your own universe to actually examine whether there are multiple universes, which means that that's an act of faith as well.
	The fine-tuning of the universe for human life is indeed proof that something wants us to be here.
	And that is something that is worth noting.
	Now, the counter argument is that, you know, if you're the one guy who wins the lottery, then you think that the lottery picked you out.
	Okay, but that assumes that there's a winner in the lottery.
	There didn't have to be a winner in the lottery.
	Whenever there's a lottery, you assume there will be one winner.
	It just happens to be you this time.
	But in this universe, there's no reason why there has to be life.
	It could be a coincidence.
	When you have this many things lining up this way, it tends toward the conclusion that it is not.
	Now, put aside sort of the religious arguments for a second.
	What is the value of believing on a human level that God created the universe?
	A few things.
	One, if you are a scientifically minded person, then you tend to believe that the universe operates by understandable rules.
	You also tend to believe in things like objective truth.
	That outside of you, there is a truth.
	That not all truth is about your subjective perception of the truth.
	And that your mind can grasp these truths.
	There's nothing in simple materialism that suggests any of these things.
	Objective truth does not exist in a world of pure materialism.
	You're simply an evolved creature who is capable of adapting to your environment.
	That doesn't mean that the way you adapt is true.
	It means that you adapt in the most adaptable way.
	But if you believe there is such a thing as objective truth, you have to explain why there is such a thing as objective truth outside of you.
	Why are there rules that we, as human beings, very, very limited creatures, can actually understand and utilize to our advantage?
	And it's not just that we are utilizing them to our advantage in ways that are sort of practical, it's that we can understand objectively true things.
	How do you believe in an objective truth if you don't believe that there's anything setting that objective truth?
	Adaptability and environmental adaptation do not equal objective truth.
	So the idea that God created the universe with certain understandable rules leads inevitably to the idea that the human being has the capacity to understand many of those rules.
	So it leads to the impetus for science, Because science is about the investigation of those objective rules and objective truths.
	It suggests discernible rules in the universe.
	And on a human level, it also suggests that human beings have incredible worth.
	The biblical account of creation, I've said this before, the single most important verse in the Bible is that God created human beings in his image.
	It doesn't mean that God looks like human beings.
	What it means is that God created us with the ability to reason.
	God created us with the ability to create.
	And that we owe each other recognition that we are each made in God's image.
	You can't enslave somebody if you believe that they are made in the image of God.
	You can't mistreat somebody if you believe that they are made in the image of God.
	Enlightenment values of individualism and individual rights spring directly from the idea that you are made in the image of God.
	Because on a pure materialistic level, who cares?
	You're just a ball of meat wandering through the universe.
	So the idea of God's creation lends weight to the To the statements of the Declaration of Independence, which is of course why Jefferson, who had a sort of complicated relationship with organized religion at the very best, suggests that our rights lie inevitably in a creator or nature.
	Now, what that means in the end, and this is how it connects to the ten days of repentance, is that we do have responsibilities to the one who created us.
	Just like you have responsibilities to your parents, you have responsibilities to the one who created us, who gave us a mind to comprehend the universe around us.
	He did that so that we could seek truth and act morally.
	God created us with a moral sense, right?
	This is the Kantian statement, that the best evidence of God is the starry heavens above and the moral sense within.
	We have the capacity to understand the universe.
	We have the capacity to intuit moral laws from looking at the universe around us.
	It's the idea of natural law, which inevitably, well not inevitably, eventually gives rise to the idea of natural rights.
	The rights lie within you.
	The birth of the Enlightenment, the birth of science, the birth of all the things that you believe in, whether you're a secular humanist living in the United States or whether you're a religious person, lie in the basic idea that God created the universe, and that's what we're celebrating here on Rosh Hashanah.
	So with that said, Shanah Tovah U'metukah, meaning a sweet and happy New Year to you, and we'll see you here a little bit later today for a couple additional hours, or we'll see you here next week.
	I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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	You know, the Matt Wall Show, it's not just another show about politics.
	I think there are enough of those already out there.
	We talk about culture, because culture drives politics, and it drives everything else.
	So my main focuses are life, family, faith.
	Those are fundamental, and that's what this show is about.

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