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Sept. 6, 2017 - The Michael Knowles Show
38:06
Ep. 22 - Everything You've Always Wanted To Know About Ben Shapiro (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

Michael gets personal with Ben in the old Shapiro broom closet. Plus, Roaming Millennial, Amanda Prestigiacomo, and Jacob Airey join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss Hillary's latest finger-pointing, Facebook claiming more data than the U.S. Census, and the white Christian minority. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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On today's episode, which is the same backward as it is forward, we are joined by the big boss himself, the slayer of leftist arguments, the repository of data, the firer of Piers Morgan, the one and only Ben Shapiro.
Then roaming millennial Jacob Berry and Amanda Prestigiacomo join the panel of deplorables to discuss Hillary's latest buck stops everywhere but here finger pointing, Facebook's claiming to have more data than the US census, and the latest minority in America.
White Christians can't wait for my affirmative action.
I am Michael Knowles.
This is the Michael Knowles Show.
There is plenty that we could talk about today.
There's so much news.
There's the DACA stuff.
There's always the latest Trump shenanigans.
And I don't want to talk about any of it.
Because we are joined in studio, in the broom closet of The Ben Shapiro Show, by the one and only Ben Shapiro.
God help us, man.
Ben.
Ben, I want to go back to the very beginning.
I want to go all the way through.
I want everything that you've always wanted to know about Ben Shapiro, but we're too afraid to ask.
And so, to start at the very beginning, I think we need to begin with this clip.
Ladies and gentlemen, Benjamin Shapiro.
*laughs*
I'm sorry, it's just so beautiful to watch that.
For those who weren't watching, that would be, what, six or seven-year-old Ben Shapiro?
No, I was little, man.
I was like 11 or 12.
There's an 11 or 12-year-old Ben Shapiro.
Playing violin, playing Fiddler on the Roof over sobbing Democrats.
Schindler's List, technically, yeah.
That's right.
Schindler's List, perfect.
The Holocaust movie is perfect, yeah.
Over these sobbing Democrats.
Really beautiful stuff, really heartbreaking stuff.
Thank you, I appreciate it, yeah.
So, in there, you're as little as you can be.
Mm-hmm.
You've always been a conservative.
You popped out of the womb a conservative.
Yes.
Yes.
I was never a neocon, right?
Except that I'm Jewish.
But aside from that...
I thought neocon just means Jew.
That's what I thought as well, but it turns out not.
So I was never on the left.
I was always very conservative.
I mean, I had my syndicated column on conservative politics when I was 17.
I started UCLA when I was 16, and the first thing that...
I thought I was going to major in biology and music because of that.
And then I walked up...
Because of the tiers to study.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
That's a good combination.
And then I saw a newspaper on campus.
I opened it up.
There's an editorial comparing Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi.
So I walked into the office of the Daily Bruin and I said, I'd like to write a piece rebutting that.
And they said, sure.
And so that turned into me doing a point-counterpoint column and then a regular column.
And then I sort of applied cold to Creator Syndicate, which syndicated at the time...
Like Molly Ivins on the left and David Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin on the right.
And they called me back like three weeks later and said they wanted to do a weekly column with me.
They didn't actually know how old I was.
So they were surprised that my parents had to sign the contract because I was underage.
Wow.
So that was cool.
So what is, you come out of the womb playing for Larry King and making leftists cry.
What are the primary influences on your politics?
Obviously, I know your family.
There are not a lot of Democrats there.
That's right, yeah.
Is it mostly the family?
Is it reading you did?
Is it just a disposition that you have?
There is something dispositional.
I mean, I'm by nature a pessimist, but I think that my parents obviously played a very heavy role in my politics, particularly social politics, but as far as economics, that's just reading.
That's self-education.
Foreign policy, I was always very hawkish, but I think it really is that I have a very moralistic streak, and it's very difficult to be a lefty and have a strong moralistic streak, a belief in personal responsibility.
When you think about sort of deep beliefs, that's sort of the root of my entire philosophy rests on personal accountability and responsibility.
Very difficult to be a member of the left and believe that that is the core of your goal, is to be personally responsible for your own conduct.
And you bring up a key phrase, which is self-teaching, because presumably you're not reading Hayek in high school or any of these other thinkers.
Same thing for me, same thing for most conservatives I know, because we got reading lists outside of a regular curriculum.
Who are the writers who most affected your thinking?
So on economics, the number one book I always recommend, and it's great for high school students, is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.
That's great.
It's just a beautifully short read.
It's like 170 pages and very well written and very clear.
And then Sowell on economics.
And then Sowell on issues of general cosmic significance.
I mean, The Quest for Cosmic Justice is an excellent book.
So Sowell's thinking.
I think later Hayek and some more sophisticated writers.
But those were the earliest iterations.
But it depends topic by topic.
Right.
So those are mostly economic, although Sol writes about everything.
Right, exactly.
What about on...
Political philosophy writ large, you know, the Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, that whole crew.
Yeah, so I'm actually not a huge Russell Kirk fan, believe it or not.
I think conservative mind is more dispositional than it is positional, meaning that it's more about your disposition toward politics and you sort of want to keep things where they are as opposed to change.
It's very Burke-ian.
I mean, obviously, Kirk based his work on Burke.
Mostly because they rhymed.
Yeah, exactly.
A few people know that.
I'm less a Burkean guy than I am a revolutionary theorist guy.
So Burke is much more of a conservative case against the French Revolution, and I'm much more in line with sort of Lockean political philosophy.
And Burke was sort of lukewarm on that, as opposed to being a thoroughgoing Lockean.
That is interesting.
There was this book by Yuval Levin comparing Burke and Payne.
And the answer for any American conservative is you have a little bit of both.
Right, exactly.
Locke is sort of halfway in between those two.
And that's where the founders, I think, lived.
They spend most of their time with Locke and Montesquieu, and Burke was a little bit later, and Payne was considered radical by most of the founders.
So in terms of political philosophy, that's where I started.
And if you want to show your kids a movie that will actually get you in that mode, then watch 1776.
Great movie about founding philosophy, where they actually discuss these sorts of ideas and enshrine them.
So you're young, you know what you think, you're super smart at this young age, you're playing for Larry King, you're doing all these things.
How do you survive on two levels?
One, just interpersonally, you're clearly ahead of your classmates, let's say.
Yeah.
And then in this culture, in a culture that perhaps does not encourage the sort of thinking that you have and the sort of activities that you pursue and the religiosity that you have.
So I think that there are a few things that play into that.
The first is that I had to grow a thick skin pretty young because being Orthodox, being a lot smaller than everybody, because I was a lot younger and smaller than everybody, and I was in and out of public school.
So it wasn't like I went to private school my entire life.
I spent...
All the way through fourth grade in public school.
In seventh and eighth grade, I was in public school.
And then I was in private school for high school.
But when I was in seventh and eighth grade particularly, that was a time when my parents had already become orthodox and we were already orthodox.
And I was a lot shorter than everybody else.
Were you always orthodox?
No.
My parents became fully orthodox when I was like 11.
So I remember eating a KFC. Oh.
That's the thorn in your side that St.
Paul would write about.
The kosher eating is difficult.
I mean, I can't tell you how many great restaurants I've gone to and just looked at the food.
It happens all the time now.
And, like, I went to dinner at somebody's house the other night, and this is a very, very wealthy person.
They had their own chef in their house.
And I said, well, I can't eat any of your food, and we're going to pick up dinner beforehand.
So they're eating, like, some filet mignon.
And I bought, like, a burger from the local kosher stand meeting on a paper plate at their house.
So there's some of that.
But, you know, I was...
I was shorter than everybody in middle school, which some would say that hasn't changed.
That's Twitter.
Twitter, what do you think?
That's exactly right.
We're sitting down.
We're not going to stand up.
Four foot three.
And so that started, I was bullied a little bit in public school.
I was actually relentlessly bullied in high school because I had skipped two grades.
So I was now much younger than all the other kids.
And so I was brutally bullied in high school.
And you can react one of two ways.
You can either sort of crawl into your shell or you can basically say F you.
Yeah.
Yeah, you did not crawl into yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
And grow a thick skin.
And so I think it was actually a good testing ground for growing a thick skin because in this business, you better have a thick skin.
And so by the time I got to college, this was cake.
I mean, I was treated better in college than I was in high school.
You know, like I was regularly physically abused in high school.
So once you got to college, it was like, wow, everybody's leaving me alone.
We can actually talk about things.
This is nice.
I kind of like this.
You get beaten up much less frequently when you're in a university setting.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So, not without occasion.
Yeah, well, now I have to risk it more than I did when I was in college, but yeah, that's exactly right.
Now, it's interesting to bring up the religiosity, the conversion to orthodoxy for your family, because I think there's a prevailing ethos that religious people are a little stupider or naive or unthoughtful or intentionally unthoughtful.
In my own experience, I find people who are not educated or necessarily intelligent can be quite religious.
And I've found that people who are extraordinarily intelligent or educated can be quite religious and often are.
And then there's this middle ground of total atheism.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And I think the reason that's right is because a lot of people who are hardcore atheists, I'm not talking about agnostics, because I think the only evidence-based position on God is agnosticism.
Sure, we can.
Because there's no other evidence of anything.
You can go either way.
But as far as kind of hardcore atheists, a lot of atheists who are very hardcore and very vocal about it, they seem to think they're the first people who ever figured out that a virgin birth is kind of unlikely or that God speaking from a mountaintop is kind of weird.
They're the first people this ever occurred to in the history of humanity.
It's brand new.
No one's ever thought of this.
Or they'll talk about the problem of theodicy and they'll sit around going, well, you know, I had a friend who died of cancer when they were young.
How could a good God allow this?
I'll bet you no religious thinkers ever talked about that.
It's like there's 2500 years of religious thought on exactly this topic.
It is incredible that people will bring up this question as a trump card.
Right.
They'll say, well, why would a good God let bad things happen?
And you think, you're not asking me that.
You could Google it, and you would get eternal books about this.
Right, and they may not satisfy you, but the idea that there's no sort of explanation for that, that any religious person has ever thought, like, they expect me to convert on the spot.
You're right, now I'm an atheist because you dropped that on me.
No, I mean, most religious people have doubts.
Most religious people understand there's a difference between faith and knowledge.
That's why it's called faith.
That's why it's called belief.
You're a believer, right?
You're not a knower.
You're a believer.
And there's a clip of me saying that I know in God.
But I didn't say I know God, right?
I say I know in God because no human being is capable of knowing God.
I know the place of humanity in the world because I believe there is a God.
But I think that that is a different standard than religious person who never even thinks about whether God exists or what God wants from us.
I think that It's written right into the Bible.
I mean, I think that the key moment in biblical history, there are a bunch of them that people sort of point out in the Old Testament anyway.
The key moment for Christians is very easy, but for Jews, there are a couple.
There's just one.
I guess two.
There's the birth and the death and resurrection.
Right, exactly.
It really boils down in the sequel.
In the sequel, they really boil it down.
But in the original, there are a few different sort of points that people use as inflection points.
Sacrifice of Isaac, the exodus from Egypt.
But I think that the real key moment is a quieter moment because this is the moment when Israel is actually founded, and that is the wrestling match between Jacob and the angel.
That's when Jacob's name is switched to Israel.
That's the first time that Israel is used in the Bible, and that becomes the foundation of all of religion.
And Yisrael literally means struggle with God.
It says right there in the Bible that this means, and you struggled with God and overcame.
That's what religious people do every day.
We struggle with the goodness of God, the presence of God, the imminence of God.
We struggle with that all the time.
If you're not struggling, you're not thinking about it.
And God wants you to struggle with that because if you're struggling with it, then it means there's a baseline level of belief.
You don't struggle with things that you think are imaginary.
You don't struggle with Santa Claus or the Easter money.
But you struggle with your wife.
You struggle with your family.
You struggle with people that you love that you have a relationship with.
Exactly.
Do you think, because all the time we hear, especially from young conservatives, well, I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal.
Well, I just want to focus on policy that works.
And there seems to be a metaphysical ignorance or a neglect of metaphysics.
I agree.
Do you think that there needs to be...
A metaphysical basis for conservatism?
I think that if you want to think it through for more than five minutes, yes.
Because I think that you can live in the political world and not really think about the bases of your thought.
But, I mean, it's fascinating always when you talk to people who aren't religious or who disparage the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this entire culture was built.
And they'll use Judeo-Christian terms, right?
They'll use Judeo-Christian definitions of good and evil.
They'll use Judeo-Christian notions of rights that don't exist in the absence of Judeo-Christian culture, right?
They don't exist anywhere else on planet Earth for all time.
Right.
And the idea that you haven't really thought these things through, it's dangerous.
I mean, every political philosophy is based on a certain conception of human nature and humanity's place in the world and human value more than anything else.
I mean, the foundational statement for all of Western civilization is the very beginning of Genesis that man is made in God's image.
Right.
Once you do that, you can talk about the value of man, the rights of man, what is man put here to do.
But if you don't believe any of that, if you just believe that man is sort of a random assemblage of atoms that happened along, you know, because the universe is random, there are lots of iterations of it, then I find a hard time making the moral argument against, for example, things like, Slavery, or abortion, or tyranny, or murder even.
Right, or capital punishment on the flip side.
Capital punishment.
I mean, if you are basically just an ant, unless you're a Jainist and you believe all forms of life should equally be protected, but that's a religion too.
If you believe like a secular version of that, then okay, I guess I buy it.
But otherwise, you have to explain what makes human beings special and why is that specialness worthy of protection.
It does lead to this, what seems to me, disingenuous determinism.
That seems to be the logical conclusion of that materialist thinking.
And disingenuous is the right word because I think that what ends up happening, it's very weird, is when you talk to a lot of people who are atheists, like I read Sam Harris' books and I've met Sam and I think Sam's a smart guy, and when I read what Sam has to say, A lot of what he has to say is based on just an assumption of free will.
There's an assumption that you can choose otherwise, that you are in control of your own life, and that you should live a moral life, that he has constructed for you his version of what morality looks like.
Alan Dershowitz sort of has a similar model.
And the problem is, where are you getting this free will stuff in a materialistic universe in which you're just a random assemblage of atoms?
Where is this free will coming from?
Where do you get that and how do you square that with a materialist version of reality?
I think that the best proof of God, I've always said this, I think the best proof of God to me is our own, is sort of a Cartesian notion that you are a thinker, you are a being.
I can acknowledge myself.
Right.
You are a self, right?
You're not just a random assemblage of stuff that wakes up new every morning and that if you have a hamburger, you're a different person than you were one minute before because you just put some new stuff in your body, right?
The notion that you are a coherent human being with the capacity to think and the capacity to control your behavior and the capacity to change, that's the basis of all civilization.
Take away that basic Augustinian notion of free will and it's all over.
I couldn't agree more.
So you've read all the books.
You've read St.
Augustine and Descartes and all these people.
Most people haven't read all the books.
If you're a young conservative, either you're on campus or you're in high school or something, you want to join the vast right-wing conspiracy.
You want to get your card.
I keep mine in my wallet all the time.
What should you do?
What should you...
And I don't just mean what books you should read.
Obviously, you should do that, too.
But what should the would-be young conservative be doing right now?
Well, I mean, I think the first thing you should do is work hard.
I think working hard is basically the first notion in any conservative philosophy.
If you are willing to work hard for your own betterment, then you're already moving in the right direction politically because you're an individual who feels you need to better yourself.
You're not just...
A piece of garbage in a collection.
So if you value yourself enough to work hard, then I think that you're going to move in a conservative direction sort of automatically.
I think that in terms of reading, obviously you should read the same texts that were good enough for Lincoln.
I mean, if you read the Bible and Shakespeare and follow that up with the Federalist Papers, I think you start with those three and you'll be in pretty good shape.
A root respect for Western civilization lies at the core of conservative philosophy, which is why we There is something we want to conserve, and something the left wants to tear down.
So if you have a respect for these institutions of Western civilization, and you say, yes, they were flawed, and yes, it's our goal to perfect them and make sure that the original aspirations are fulfilled generation over generation, improved over time, then we can make purer what we were given.
But that's not quite the same thing as what the left is saying, which is that what we were given is garbage, and if we just discard that, we can build something brand new.
Just wait until I get my hands on it.
I'm going to do great.
Yeah, exactly.
The last couple centuries, as someone said to me on Sunday night, the last couple centuries have been very poor proof of the idea that secular humanism has a great record in remaking man in a positive direction.
That argument would have swung a lot better in 1788, right?
Absolutely true.
Before the French Revolution, it works a lot better.
Mm-hmm.
We have to talk a little bit about politics before I get to the lightning round, the Ben Shapiro lightning round, which is what I'm most excited for.
Only someone of Ben Shapiro's linguistic speed and thoughtful speed could answer all 25 questions this quickly.
But before we get to that, I'm frustrated at all these DACA headlines because I think a lot of people are missing the point.
Some of the politicians making decisions about this are missing the point.
The implication, I think, from the left is that any decision to reduce either legal or illegal immigration is racist, but certainly to reduce legal immigration.
And we hear the alt-right guys making fairly racist points themselves on this topic.
What is the non-racist argument to reduce legal immigration?
So the non-racist argument is less about reduction than who's coming in the country.
So there's an economic argument that some people make.
They suggest that we would raise American wages if we limited the amount of labor.
I'm not a big fan of that argument because it's basically the same argument as minimum wage.
If you want to limit the amount of labor, all you have to do is create a legislative bill that limits the amount of labor.
You'll raise the wage, but you'll put a lot of people out of work and you'll destroy the basis of the economy.
Other than that, it's great.
But the legal immigrant restrictive argument is we have a culture worth preserving.
It's a Judeo-Christian culture.
You have to be prepared to assimilate into that culture to even be looked at.
And we as a society have no necessary responsibility to take in everybody who wants to get in unless they also...
Service that civilization unless they are willing to be participants in that civilization have demonstrated evidence that they're willing to be Participants in that civilization.
That's the that's the principled argument and it's the it's the argument the alt-right constantly gets wrong They equate they say it's about race and it's not about race.
It's always about culture.
They equate race and culture They're not the same thing at all.
I mean of course there are a bunch of there a bunch of savages running around Britain Before before Julius Caesar invaded they were exactly the same ethnic material like a hundred year old Right, exactly.
It's quite ridiculous, actually, to suggest that race is the fundamental precursor to civilization when, again, Italians were being discriminated against when they came to the United States in the 19th century.
I'm pretty swarthy.
I am a fairly swarthy guy.
I don't know that I meet their criteria.
And yet a lot of the people who presumably would have been quote-unquote alt-right in the 19th century and were discriminating against Italians were talking about the glories of Roman civilization.
It's really not about race.
It's a real cognitive dissonance.
Okay, we've got to get to this lightning round.
I bet we can do it in like two minutes.
Really?
Okay.
Here are the dichotomies, just the first thing that comes to your mind at the superhuman Shapiro speed.
Favorite novel.
So I'll go with, I have like four or five of them actually.
So Moby Dick is my favorite.
If I have to pick one Take to a Desert Island, it's Moby Dick.
Best American novel.
Then there are a bunch that nobody's ever heard of.
There's one called Every Man Dies Alone, which is a terrific book about a couple who are living in Nazi Germany and they decide to basically They put out leaflets.
Their son has been killed in the war.
They're Germans.
Their son has been killed in the war as a brown shirt.
And they have decided to put out leaflets resisting Hitler, knowing it's not really going to do any good about their relationship.
It's a terrific book by a guy named Hans Valada, who was writing at the time in Germany.
So that's a really good book.
There's another little-known book that's really enjoyable, just a fun book.
It's called The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton.
They made a movie out of it that I don't think is particularly good, but the book itself is a really great read.
And then, of course, you have to add some of the Russians, right?
Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina.
But yeah, those would be at the top of the list.
All right.
Favorite philosopher?
So, I would say either Kant or Locke.
Which is a real dichotomy.
Yeah, you can smash them both together and try to make sense of that, I suppose.
Kind of difficult, but it's hard to root against Kant.
Kant is pretty spectacular.
Although, reading Kant is brutal.
Just read a summary of Kant.
You'll be better off.
It is awful.
It took me so long and so much masochism to get through the critique of pure reason.
You could literally just have somebody summarize it for you and get as much out of it as trying to slog your way through 800 pages of badly translated German.
Favorite color?
Yellow.
Athens or Jerusalem?
I mean, that's both.
Lepanto or Tours?
Neither.
L.A. or D.C.? L.A. L.A. or Lepanto?
L.A. Batman or Superman?
Oh, that's hard.
That's the hardest one you've given me, Batman versus Superman.
If Batman killed people, Batman...
Perfect.
Favorite musical?
The one that's closest to my heart is 1776.
The one that's the most brilliant is Sweeney Todd.
Favorite movie?
Again, I would have to go top ten, but the Lord of the Rings trilogy is fantastic.
The Dark Knight trilogy is fantastic.
There's A Man for All Seasons used to be my favorite for a long time.
The...
What's the name of the film now?
They made a remake.
All the King's Men.
The original with Broderick Crawford was up there on my list.
Truman Show is a great movie.
I have a list of...
I'll have to do my list of top 100 movies because I've seen every Oscar-nominated film since 1930.
Oh, my God.
Of course you have.
Virtually all of them, anyway.
Spirit Animal.
Spirit Animal?
God.
My Spirit Animal is Ben Shapiro, actually.
What is Ben Shapiro's Spirit Animal?
I don't buy into this spirit animal.
I don't even like animals.
Edmund Spencer or Richard Spencer?
Anyone who's not Richard Spencer.
Among whom is Edmund Spencer.
Yeah, good poet.
Democracy or meritocracy?
Meritocracy.
Meritocracy or monarchy?
Meritocracy.
Yale or Harvard?
I went to Harvard Law School, dude.
Yale or Oxford?
Yeah.
Oh, that's pretty good.
I thought I was going to have to go down like ten of those before I got to it.
Yeah, I know.
All right, I'll take it.
My country right or wrong?
My country when it's right.
My country when it's right.
Regular Coke or Diet Coke?
Regular Coke.
Edmund Burke or Thomas Paine?
You have to pick one.
Edmund Burke.
Greatest composer?
Beethoven.
Favorite book of the Bible?
Oh.
That's another hard one.
Although our canon is a lot smaller than yours.
I do have a particular love for Samuel 1 and 2.
All the David and Saul stuff is fantastic.
Note to self, read Samuel 1 and 2.
Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones.
Lord of the Rings.
A hot dog is a sandwich?
A hot dog is not a sandwich.
A hot dog is not a sandwich.
You have to have two separate pieces of bread to make a sandwich.
What about a hoagie?
A hoagie doesn't have two separate pieces of bread.
Also not a sandwich.
Oh my god, this is outrageous.
Final question.
The right to bear arms, the right to arm bears.
What does freedom mean to you?
Well, I mean, what kind of country would we be if we couldn't do both?
That is a great point.
Everybody, Ben Shapiro.
Ben, thank you for coming on.
Thanks a lot.
A real pleasure.
Thank you for everything.
It's been mediocre.
It's been just solidly mediocre.
Edit that out.
Edit it out, Marshall.
Ben, thank you for coming.
Now we have to move to the panel of deplorables.
We have to bring them on.
Roaming Millennial, Amanda Presto Giacomo, and Jacob Airy.
All right, guys, we're not going to comment on anything like that.
How are you going to beat Ben Shapiro?
He just ran through all of the important questions in the world.
So we have to move straight down to news.
And before we get to that, we have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
I know, you haven't even heard from the panel today.
Well, tough, guys.
You have to go to dailywire.com right now and pay either $10 a month or $100 a year to subscribe.
You'll get my show.
You'll get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You'll get the Ben Shapiro Show, one of the biggest podcasts in the whole country.
And forget all that.
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The Leftist Tears Tumblr is so...
It is the finest vehicle for not only Leftist Tears, but any beverage in the whole country.
You can have them hot or cold, always salty and delicious.
Go over there right now, dailywire.com, and we will be right back.
It was my campaign.
Those were my decisions.
That's Hillary Clinton giving her latest excuses in interviews about her new book.
She says, I think it's fair to say that I didn't realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet.
I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans' anger and resentment.
What makes me such a good lightning rod for fury?
I'm really asking.
I'm at a loss.
I think it's particularly, or rather, it's partly because I'm a woman.
That was Hillary Clinton accepting responsibility for her loss.
Amanda, help her out.
What makes Hillary such a lightning rod for fury?
Hillary, she's one of the worst candidates I've ever seen.
She couldn't campaign away out of a paper bag.
But it's just so funny that she just has this...
It's kind of like a leftist mentality where she blames everybody else but herself.
I actually, I think it was in January, I composed a list of everything Hillary's blamed.
So it's basically her book, What Happened, but in list form.
And it was...
I think there were like...
Honestly, at least 35 different entities or people she blamed.
You know, Bernie Sanders, Comey, sexism, the right-wing conspiracy, WikiLeaks, Russia, the DNC, Netflix.
That was one of my favorites.
She was too truthful.
White women.
I mean, there is no real reflection on Hillary.
Anytime there's criticism, it's somebody else's fault.
Something doesn't go her way.
It's somebody else's fault.
We saw this in the 90s as well.
There's, you know, it's everyone else to blame, not Hillary.
Yeah.
You're absolutely right.
That does characterize the Clintons and particularly Hillary just always passing the buck.
But, Roaming, does she have any point?
Did her being a woman play into her loss at all in any way?
I'm, believe it or not, trying to give Hillary a fair shake only because she's my second cousin once removed.
Well, you know what?
I'm not going to say that her being a woman didn't stop anyone from voting for her, right?
I mean, there are sexists everywhere.
I'm sure there are at least some people out there who thought, you know what?
A woman, not for me.
But the question is, was it an institutional part of her losing, right?
Was it something that actually had an impact on the election, you know, in a larger sense?
And I've got to say, no, when we look at the breakdown of demographics, we see, okay, well, across women, won them all.
Obviously, women aren't going to be scared of voting for a woman.
And you know what?
Even across...
You know, male demographics, when it comes to the Hispanic vote, the black vote, it just, unless you're specifically accusing white males of being sexist, then no, it just doesn't make sense.
And I mean, if you look at the campaign she ran, you'd have to be, I guess, willfully ignorant to say, nah, it's probably just because I'm a woman.
Okay.
It's willful ignorance and wishful thinking, I think, on her part.
Jacob, is she seriously confused as to why she lost?
Is she really at such a loss and wondering about this?
Or is she just faking it to get sympathy?
I think she is confused, but for a different reason.
I think that her supporters, I should say her inner circle, they're telling her, you lost because of Bernie Sanders, you lost because of Barack Obama.
When I was at Politicon and I went to a panel where Paul Begala was speaking and he was just regurgitating everything that Hillary Clinton has saying.
So I honestly think that it's her inner circle telling, it's not you, it's them.
It's got nothing to do with it.
So I think that is confusing her and it's forcing her to, or I should say, she's more than happy to go along with it because otherwise it's like Amanda says she's a terrible candidate, which she is.
And if Paul Begala says it, it's obviously a coordinated response because those Clintons are always scheming for something.
Facebook is claiming that its advertising now reaches more people than the U.S. Census say live in the country.
For comment, we have to turn to Mark Zuckerberg.
Be careful of what you say.
Be careful in every way.
Be careful of what you do.
Big Brother is watching you.
He has a lower voice than I thought he would.
I was actually surprised when I heard that take.
Roaming, does this show a weakness in techie tyranny, or is Facebook more correct than the U.S. Census?
You know what?
Government or Facebook, neither are groups where I'm kind of throwing my trust at them, being like, yes, let me take your information out of your word.
This is a hard one, but you know what?
I've got to go with the US Census, and I think It's not like we can't imagine a reason why Facebook would want to inflate its numbers, or it's not like we can imagine that, you know what, maybe this isn't malicious, maybe they just are honestly having tech issues where they're reading things wrong.
Either way, I am not taking this seriously.
I don't think they're right.
And I think it's interesting because, you know, there's been so much hype over Zuckerberg possibly running, at least, you know, in certain corners of the internet.
God help us.
Right?
So this is an interesting thing because if I look at, you know, anything that's critical of Facebook or Zuckerberg at all, it's not really being reported as much by those same, I guess, mainstream media outlets.
So I, you know, yeah, I would like to say that this is something that, yeah, it's great.
Let's look at Facebook's policies a little bit more.
Let's look at, you know, some of the things they're selling to advertisers may be a little bit critical, but I don't think most people will care about this.
Roman, you bring up a great incentive that Zuckerberg would have to inflate his influence, which is that he appears to want to run for president, and he gives us those super cringy photos of him at Iowa lunch counters, which are really wonderful.
They're the best thing on the internet in the last year, probably.
But Amanda, is Facebook intentionally inflating its numbers, either to milk advertisers or to promote Mark Zuckerberg for president, or are they just having a glitch?
Are they just not as all-powerful as we thought they were?
Like Roaming said, you can't imagine why they would want to.
You know, again, for advertisers and such, it would make sense why they wouldn't plate those numbers.
And also, I do think there are a lot of people, this might seem simplistic, but I feel like there are a ton of people who have multiple accounts.
Like, you know, in the Wall Street Journal, they've been saying that was like one of the factors, that there are just like multiple accounts for a lot of people.
So like things like that, I think, can actually contribute.
But yeah, I mean, Facebook is super powerful.
And like Roaming said, I mean, between a choice of, you know, believing the U.S. government and Facebook, it's like, it's basically a toss-up.
They both have so much power.
It's like Sophie's choice.
Yeah, I know.
And then one other thing you kind of touched on, Roaming, is that it is difficult for news companies to criticize Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook because...
They disseminate all the news.
So it is kind of hard to tackle that.
I think there are a lot of news companies who are kind of like, you know, kind of go a little easy on this because they do kind of control everything.
And there have been instances where people have accused the organization of basically having bias.
You know, we've seen that multiple times.
So again, it's like he's not open to criticism, too.
So that's also a little dangerous.
It is Occam's Razor also.
I hadn't even considered that, but everybody has multiple accounts.
I've had several for different political things I've been up to, and so that very well might explain the whole thing.
Yeah, stalk your ex-boyfriends and stuff.
I only use it to stalk my ex-boyfriends.
Now, Jacob.
Will there ever come a time when tech giants are a threat to the republic, when they have more information than the government, when they have more power than the government?
Are we there now?
And what is the implication for our society?
Personally, I think they're already just as dangerous as the government.
I mean, they're already—Facebook and Google and Apple are already colluding with the government in some aspects.
But honestly, I think that there is, private corporations will never be more dangerous than the government, like I said, unless they start colluding with it.
So I don't see this, because we, the consumers, still have some of the power.
You know, it's like, you know, everyone going from MySpace onto Facebook.
Everyone was concerned about this when it came to MySpace, but what happened?
Something, I guess, slightly better came along, and we all jumped ship.
Speaking with the privilege and confidence of a white Christian man.
Speaking of white Christians, white Christians now comprise only 43% of the population.
For the first time ever, a minority, according to the Public Religion Research Institute.
Four decades ago, that number was over 80%.
This is a huge decline.
Amanda and I are obviously a little swarthy, probably, to count, and roaming is slightly Asiatic.
But Jacob...
You are now a minority.
Should you be entitled to affirmative action protections?
Oh, absolutely.
No, I'm just kidding.
I know you'd say that.
But from my perspective as a Christian, I'm not too concerned with this.
To me, it seemed more like it's a label thing.
So people aren't wanting to label themselves as mainline Protestants or evangelicals.
I certainly don't want to label myself either.
Right.
And we're seeing that kind of go away, that labeling system.
Now, as far as is white Christianity in decline, who cares?
As long as me as a Christian, as long as I... As long as white people are in it.
No, I'm sorry.
Well, no, I just mean that.
For me, it's more about spreading the faith.
As a Christian, I'm more concerned.
So if more people are coming to Christ who are not white, what do I care?
To me, it's all about them coming into the faith.
It's all about the Jesus.
Roaming, will this new minority status for white Christians finally throw a wrench into these stupid intersectional hierarchies of victimhood that we've been hearing from the left forever and ever?
Or do their feelings not care about facts?
Well, you know, that's an interesting question.
I've thought about that myself a couple times, too.
And you know what?
I don't think it's going to change anything, because if we look at who the left assigns victimhood status to, it's not really anyone who's necessarily a minority or objectively oppressed.
It's anyone who goes against the Christian right, right?
Even when it doesn't make sense.
Like Islam, right?
They're not a minority on the planet.
They've, for the longest time throughout history, not been oppressed, but rather the oppressors.
And yet, for some reason, they still get victim status.
So, you know, that's an instance of where it's not really about who's actually oppressed or who's being marginalized.
It's just anyone to give the middle finger to the Christian right, right?
So even if the Christian right eventually becomes themselves a minority, that doesn't mean that regressives are going to be our friends.
That the left will all of a sudden start speaking up for our civil liberties?
No, that's never going to happen.
And the smallest minority is the individual, and the left can't stand the individual the most.
Amanda, this is a major demographic and ideological shift.
What are the hazards or potential benefits that it presents in American culture?
Because it is a big change.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen As people get more secular, they look to something to kind of fill that void, and they look to big government.
So I think as we're seeing less, not necessarily just Christianity, but like a monotheistic religion, as there's an absence of that, people are looking for something to fill that void.
And, you know, that's why we're kind of seeing a push towards socialism.
Our health care is, you know, right there.
About to be there.
So I think that's one of the big repercussions that is just inevitable when you have a growing increase of secularism.
Leave it to Amanda Presta Giacomo to cheer everybody up to end on a hopeful note.
Always pessimistic.
Every single time.
Sums it up.
Okay.
Panel, it has been wonderful to have you as always.
Roaming Millennial, Amanda Presta Giacomo, and Jacob Berry.
That's our whole show for today.
The whole show's about Ben Shapiro, and I'm not going to go give a final thought about Ben Shapiro.
So make sure you get your mailbag questions in.
We will be doing the mailbag tomorrow, so send them all in if you're a subscriber.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
Come back tomorrow.
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