Ep. 26 - The Battle of Berkeley ft. College Republican Pres. Bradley Devlin
The Battle of Berkeley is underway as Ben Shapiro makes the snowflakes melt. Michael discusses with Berkeley College Republican President Bradley Devlin. Then Allie Stuckey, Erielle Davidson, and Kassy Dillon join the Panel of Deplorables to discuss some criminal rapper’s stupid music video in which he lynches a white boy, Swedish YouTube gazillionaire PewDiePie’s dropping the N-word, and leftist criminals’ vandalism of New York City’s famous Central Park statue of Christopher Columbus.
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Arms in the man I sing, the latest Battle of Berkeley is underway as UC students demand psychological counseling in the lead-up to the Orthodox Jew they call a Nazi Ben Shapiro's speech at the craziest university in the country.
We'll discuss this year of campus chaos with someone who's been at the center of it all, Berkeley College Republican President Bradley Devlin.
Then, Ali Stuckey, Ariel Davidson, and Cassie Dillon join the panel of deplorables to discuss some criminal rapper's stupid music video in which he lynches a white boy, Swedish YouTube gazillionaire PewDiePie's dropping the N-word, and leftist criminals' vandalism of New York City's famous Central Park statue of Christopher Columbus.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is the Michael Knowles Show.
Shapiro.
Shapiro is making trouble, that notorious Jewish Nazi.
He is going up to Berkeley right now, I think, as we speak.
I imagine they're going to call in the National Guard to prevent a conservative writer from giving a speech on campus.
You know, I am glad that we got him on the show last week because they're going to be out for blood for this guy.
They're going to try to prevent him from giving a speech about how bad political violence is.
Unbelievable, almost beyond parody.
Now, maybe the most incredible aspect of all this is that a New York Times opinion columnist penned an article yesterday supporting Ben Shapiro.
Can we check the weather outside?
It is truly unbelievable, very surprising.
For those who haven't been following, let's go through the timeline of the Berkeley chaos, what people are calling the Battle of Berkeley.
So this actually began in the 60s.
Berkeley was the hotbed of the free speech movement.
Which is incredibly ironic because now they are the op-ed of the anti-speech movement.
They're trying to do everything they can to prevent anybody that they even vaguely disagree with from giving a speech on campus.
This began in February.
February 1st, the conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos went to give a speech at Berkeley.
The funny thing about all this, I have seen Milo Yiannopoulos speak I saw him at UCLA. I wanted to hear what he had to say.
I wanted to see the circus surrounding it.
He doesn't have a speech.
There is no speech.
He plays these people like a fiddle.
A lot of people on the right do.
There isn't anything.
Basically what Milo did is he went up there, he bantered a little bit with Dave Rubin, and then some screaming, hideous social justice warrior stood up, and Milo made fun of him for a little bit.
If they had just calmed down, there wouldn't have been a speech there.
When we're talking about more mainstream, conservative, thoughtful voices, if they just allowed these people to talk on the topics that they want to talk about, there would be no chaos, no one would pay attention, there wouldn't be national headlines, but they simply can't do it.
What did they do when Milo Yiannopoulos went to speak?
Let's take a look.
Well Anderson, what you're seeing behind me is quite a bit of commotion.
This is an event at Berkeley where Milo Yiannopoulos, who is known as an internet troll, a self-proclaimed internet troll, a very provocative speaker, he was invited here to the campus.
And you can see from the reaction, I'm gonna step out of the shot here.
What is happening here is that these are student protesters, some anarchists, from what I can gather, trying to breach the building right now.
They don't look like students to me.
I don't know about you, but some of those guys are in their 30s, I think.
Yeah, they look like students.
That's true.
It depends on the university, I guess.
Maybe at Berkeley, that's what students look like, is just black-clad terrorists.
So in the aftermath of all this, there was $100,000 of property damage.
A Syrian Muslim was actually attacked by a protester who said, quote, you look like a Nazi.
Who knew?
I certainly didn't know that.
So then fast forward, March 4th happens, there's a march for Trump.
Lauren Southern was, oh, this was later.
Lauren Southern's supposed to speak in April.
At the March for Trump, seven people were injured.
April 15th, Lauren Southern's supposed to speak.
Antifa sets off bombs and fireworks.
Eleven people were injured there.
Six were hospitalized.
One was stabbed.
Then you fast forward to April 27th.
Ann Coulter was supposed to give a speech.
UC Berkeley canceled it.
They would not let her speak.
They said, we'll reschedule for a time when there are no students on campus.
Ann Coulter, gotta love Ann, says absolutely not.
I'm going to go.
I'm going to give a speech.
She's not allowed in.
Now, tomorrow, Shapiro himself is heading into the thick of it all, and we can now bring on a guy who has been at the center of all of this.
UC Berkeley College Republican President Bradley Devlin.
Bradley, you are doing God's work over there.
Thanks for coming on.
Hey, thanks for having me, Michael.
You know, I'll tell you, I was a college Republican president not too long ago, back in the good old days of 2012.
And, you know, I, from time to time, found myself at the center of the left-wing vitriol on campus.
But all in all, it wasn't that bad.
I mean, nothing like we're seeing here, certainly nothing like we're seeing at Berkeley.
How are they treating you over there?
Oh, absolutely horrible.
It's laughable almost because this hysteria started long before Milo Yiannopoulos.
It started when I wore my GOP shirt for the first time on campus and I was looked at and called a racist and a bigot by two individuals who engaged in zero conversation.
I moved there on election night, the surprise win of Donald Trump.
My friend got punched in the face at a pizza parlor.
For expressing excitement.
People were in tears in my fraternity house as we watched the election.
You're telling me that guys in a fraternity were in tears?
I really don't understand left-wing men.
I kind of get left-wing women because women are more nurturing.
They're probably more compassionate than we knuckle-dragging men are.
But you're telling me frat boys were upset that Donald Trump won?
Well, this might shock you, but he worked for Pelosi over the summer.
Yeah, there was men and women just in absolute hysteria.
And it escalated from there.
Milo came onto campus and this radicalization that happens in the Berkeley area was bubbling up underground and finally came to the surface.
Finally, Milo gave them You know, Milo is an interesting case there, I think, because he, unlike Shapiro or Charles Murray or Ann Coulter, whoever, Milo specifically doesn't seem to have very much to say.
And I don't even mean that as a knock on him.
He himself describes himself as a performance artist and provocateur and all that.
Is there any hazard to associating ourselves With these kind of provocateurs and carnival barkers, or do they serve an important purpose right now as the left humiliates itself time and time again?
Well, I think Shapiro is filling that gap perfectly.
You don't need to bring someone who is a provocateur on campus to show the left's own insanity.
Milo, when he panders to the alt-right or when Bannon panders to the alt-right and gives them a legitimate platform, and the left does this as well when they call everyone alt-right.
They called Ben alt-right on the news a month ago.
When they call everyone alt-right, it actually gives these people more of a platform.
And associating conservatism with alt-right and the unabashed tribalism that follows the alt-right is very, very dangerous for the conservative movement.
And we can't move forward in the Republican Party without differentiating the two.
And I'm...
I've talked to a lot of these guys, Richard Spencer, and I had James Alsup on the show, and people who are playing around with the alt-right.
It seems to me there are none of these people.
It seems to me they are a really small minority.
Obviously, it's bad ideas, and the bad ideas should be refuted.
But Hillary Clinton, I think, wants to pretend that half the country has suddenly gone Nazi.
Do you think the alt-right has gained ground on college campuses, or is it all a bunch of nonsense?
I think that when you label everyone as deplorable who believes in a certain ideology, they're there's going to be people who fall into the trap of, Oh, the right fights against the scourge of political correctness.
Therefore, I am associated with the alt-right.
I am an internet troll.
I am a goofy kid who stays on Reddit and 4chan.
Yeah, I don't wear Brooks Brothers, but I voted for Trump, so I guess I'm on the alt-right.
Exactly.
I can align myself with the alt-right easily because everyone labels me that.
And that's a very dangerous scenario because we're actually seeing individuals who could become good constitutional conservatives To an ideology that associates your ethnicity with whatever creed you proclaim.
So are these protests, and by protests I mean riots that include tear gas and fires and things like that, are they about the speeches or are they about something bigger?
Who gets to control who gives a speech or something larger?
It is.
It's definitely about groupthink.
It's about, you know, a very Orwellian style of thought that has taken over the mainstream left.
There should be no reason that Brian Fallon, Clinton's spokesman during the 2016 campaign, treats a picture of Allied soldiers invading Normandy and say, left-wing demonstrators violating property by having no permit.
These are completely different scenarios.
And it's repugnant of these individuals who are higher up in left mainstream media mainly to Not condemn Antifa and condemn this violence outright because apparently Antifa I noticed, Bradley, I've looked for video clips of you setting fires and throwing garbage cans through windows, and I haven't found any.
And it makes me notice that we, as conservatives, we don't protest their speakers.
Or even if we protest them, we don't shut them down.
We don't bar them from entering buildings.
We don't create violence.
What is it about the left and the right in America right now that makes them resort to violence to shut us up and has us perfectly willing to let them have a platform?
I think it actually can be traced back to the left's ideology of creating the state as basically your church, as your religion.
And anyone who believes that the state is fallible, that individual communities and individual rights matter more than an authoritarian state, They find that as an assault on themselves and on their ideology that must be combated with violence and absolutely quash dissenters, essentially.
Absolutely right.
The fetishization of government or the replacement of what we used to have as the foundation of our civilization and our society with the state, it does seem that they've become quite tribal.
What do you make of this?
Berkeley was the beginning of the free speech movement, FSM, in the 1960s.
Now they're the opposite of the free speech movement.
Is there some bizarre change that's happened?
Or even in that free speech movement, was it similarly a bit of a misnomer and really just a way to advance left wing goals such as protesting the Vietnam War?
Well, yeah, I actually have this Shapiro Antifa poster that I wanted to show you.
This is the free speech movement in 1964 and in 2016.
So it's a bunch of cops and riot gear in 2016 that apparently guard fascists.
Amazing.
Yeah, it's absolutely incredible.
No, the free speech movement was, yes, to establish free speech for individuals who believed Marxist ideologies in the 60s.
But nonetheless, they were able to espouse their views on college campuses.
Now we're receiving that same pushback by a liberal administration in the present.
And the reason that we filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Berkeley, the Young America's Foundation, in coordination with Berkeley College Republicans, is that they have created policies that they apply to restrict conservative ideologies and speeches on campus.
This is a violation of the due process of our constitutional rights of free speech and Equal protection under the law.
These are incredibly problematic when you are thinking about it in the long term.
What if in the future it's the liberals who are suppressed by a conservative?
Of course.
And that's what I always bring up to liberal students who ask me, why are you suing the school?
Why are you creating this litigation that's going to waste taxpayer dollars?
I always have to report with, well, what if you were in this scenario?
What if you were locked in a second story of a ballroom with M80 fireworks being thrown at you?
What if your friends were assaulted daily?
Well, it's hard to have...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
They always nod their head and they reciprocate and they usually sign up for a mailing list.
We are one of the biggest political organizations on campus.
We have over 1,400 individuals.
Sorry, interested, but only 100 come to our meetings.
And that's what the left has done.
They've made conservatives incredibly ticked.
Well, that's better than us.
Yale, I think we had about 11 members.
We were the most written about 10-person club on campus.
But that is really good work that you're doing, Bradley.
So I appreciate it.
Stay safe out there.
Don't give those left-wing thugs an inch tomorrow, and keep up the good work.
You're doing a great job.
Thank you very much, Michael.
Now it is time to bring on our all-female panel of deplorables.
Bradley, he's a good-looking guy.
He cleans up well, but we've got to get him out of here so we can have an all-female panel of deplorables.
Excited today to introduce Ariel Davidson from the Hoover Institution.
We have Cassie Dillon, and we have the Blazes, Ali Stuckey.
Ladies, thank you for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
We'll begin with the most important news out of YouTube.
A vicious criminal rapper named XXXTentacion just released a music video, if one can call it that, comparing the killing of Michael Brown, himself a criminal, who reached for an officer's gun, to the killing of Emmett Till, an innocent 14-year-old boy who was lynched in 1955.
The video shows the rapper placing a noose around a little white kid's neck, ostensibly to make some sort of point.
XXXTentacion himself was arrested last October for false imprisonment, witness tampering, and aggravated battery of a pregnant victim.
His arrest report reads, quote, Defendant punched and kicked victim.
Victims' both eyes were punched to where both eyes became shut and victim could not see.
A hoodie and sunglasses were put on the victim in order to get her out of the apartment complex, avoiding anyone seeing her.
Victim escaped from new location and contacted the nearest police department.
All of that is background on this video.
Do we have a copy of the video?
Just like the Brandenburg Concerto, isn't it?
Ariel, this criminal possesses no musical talent and he beats up pregnant women.
Why does this video have five and a half million views already?
Well, my first guess would be that this is something that sort of feeds into the identity politics intersection of sort of crazy, radical production of media.
So I'm thinking, I know it's a longer sentence than I intended, but basically I'm thinking of like Kathy Griffin-esque type cry for attention.
So whenever you produce media that's extremely controversial or violent or at all sort of makes people wince, You're immediately going to get the viewership that you're looking for.
So if you're someone that's incredibly untalented, this might be a wonderful tactic in order to get people to pay attention to you.
I think that, you know, someone like Kathy Griffin, whose career was sliding down the tube, it was great for her to hold up a head of Trump in order to garner more attention than she might get on pure talent alone.
So, you know, this to me just signals this person's probably not worth my time just because they're probably extremely untalented.
And this is a way for them to get attention.
It's grotesque.
It's disgusting.
It's despicable.
But this is how, you know, this is how at least modern media is going about ways of, you know, if they don't have talent, this is how they're going to do it.
Well, thank you for the advice on modern media.
Note to self, murder marshal on the air.
Whoa!
Cassie.
He is going to trial this guy, XXX, whatever his name is.
He's going to trial on October 5th for beating up a pregnant woman.
What is a just punishment for someone who beats up pregnant ladies?
Well, it depends.
Are you somebody who believes a child in the womb is a life or not?
Because if it is a life in the womb, then you should be tried first, all battering two different people.
Honestly, he's one of probably the worst people who are alive right now.
It's completely insane that he did that.
And I think you're right, Ariel.
He's just trying to save his failing career.
And by doing so, he's also in the same group of people that call Donald Trump very divisive.
And then he makes a video like this and just makes it even more divisive.
I'm sure he'll be put into some rehabilitation program or something like that.
Allie, where does this terrible culture come from?
CNN's Don Lemon says that specifically among young black men, Where is this terrible culture coming from?
Yeah, I mean, it's a little bit tough to speculate because there's evil, you know, across the races and across the political spectrum.
I think Ariel was right on point when she said that this is just a product of identity politics and also a product of a lack of talent.
I think that intersection explains very well why this video exists.
But yes, of course, anyone's background has something to do with how they deal with certain political or cultural circumstances.
He is choosing to make a false equivalency between two things that are not historically parallel whatsoever just in order to get attention.
Unfortunately, we see this a lot on the left of making parallels, for example, comparing illegal immigrants to slaves, saying that it's the exact same thing and that we should legalize them in the same way.
It's not the same at all.
But if you conflate two ideas, knowing the emotional response that it's going to get, then you trick people into thinking that they are being successful social justice warriors simply by telling history incorrectly.
And that's what he's choosing to do.
Unfortunately, it might be just as effective as he wants it to be.
Apparently it is.
We're talking about it.
And we want to talk about a lot more things, but unfortunately for you, dear viewer, you have to go to dailywire.com right now if you want to see the rest of the show.
We're going to have to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube.
But thank you for everybody who's already subscribing.
You help keep the lights on here.
And if you go to dailywire.com right now, it costs $10 a month, $100 a year.
You get me.
You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
You get the Ben Shapiro Show, assuming he stays safe, hopefully up at Berkeley.
But forget all of that.
None of that matters.
When you consider the leftist tears tumbler, oh my gosh, it is a thing of glory.
It is the finest vessel.
It's going to be overflowing after tomorrow's speech at Berkeley.
It will keep your leftist tears hot or cold, always salty and delicious.
So go to thedailywire.com right now and we will be right back.
Speaking of race relations, Swedish YouTube superstar PewDiePie is in trouble for saying the N-word on one of his videos.
Here is his apology.
It was something that I said in the heat of the moment.
I said the worst word I could possibly think of and it just sort of slipped out.
And I'm not going to make any excuses to why it did because there are no excuses for it.
I'm disappointed in myself because it seems like I've learned nothing from all these past controversies.
Ariel, similar question to what we just asked Ali, but in a totally different cultural sphere.
This guy became famous for making videos of himself playing video games, which seems like the most boring thing ever.
Why does PewDiePie have over 57 million subscribers?
Well, I think, you know, I had to do a bit of research on him myself.
I've heard of him, but I was curious why he has, he does have almost 60 million subscribers.
People love watching his videos and it's not just about video games.
He's someone That delivers heightened commentary.
He talks about the news of the day.
He actually did a segment on the gender wage gap.
So this is, you know, a person that is, it's about video games and maybe at the kernel, but there's more to it beyond that.
So he's somebody that sort of tapped into the younger generation's thirst for content.
And he produces it at a rapid pace.
I mean, every day, his day consists of producing this content.
You know, I applaud him for going on there and being very open with his viewership and apologizing.
I believe the apology video had almost six million views.
So good for him for doing that.
I think, you know, it was necessary to do that.
He's been sort of embroiled in past conflicts.
At least involving Nazi slurs of some kind.
I'm not really sure what else he's been involved in.
But I do applaud him for doing that.
Those are pretty big ones, I guess.
Right, yeah.
He's been involved in some other ones as well.
But like I said, I do applaud him for going on and being very open with his viewers and saying, you know, I screwed up and I'm incredibly sorry.
He has a major influence in terms of how large his viewership is.
It's global.
And again, he's tapping into the millennial thirst for content.
And YouTube has given him a tremendous amount of fame.
And it's also given him an incredible income, too.
I mean, he's earning tens of millions of dollars a year.
I actually didn't know that.
This guy makes over $10 million a year.
That really makes me rethink my life choices.
Even blank book included.
You don't make that kind of money on blank books.
Allie, is it ever appropriate for a white guy to use that word as an insult or even in common speech?
Oh, absolutely not.
However, I will say that the conflicts and kind of the chaos that we have found PewDiePie embroiled in in the past, I've been following him for a while, and I really like him.
I don't even like video games.
But I will say that the chaos that we've kind of seen him in the midst of in the past has been reporters that have gone out I've only made tens of dollars out of not being an expert on anything.
He's doing something right.
I'm here.
And I think that traditional media and traditional journalists don't like these kinds of people that have such big influence and didn't do things the right way and don't say things the right way.
So do I think that what he said was wrong?
Absolutely.
But I do want to take it with a grain of salt because last time they went after him from a random obscure reference that he had already denounced of Of
course not.
No, it seems like a double standard to me.
Should he have said it?
No.
But should he be demonetized and stripped of his influence because of that?
No.
Cassie, is this a question of political correctness, or is this just simply about manners and politeness?
I think this is about manners and politeness in this case.
I think what he said was wrong.
I think there's no need for him to say that.
I think he was playing video games and just said, maybe forgot that he was taking a video of himself and said something that he shouldn't have said.
But I do think that he is kind of like an edgier person, so that makes the media watch him very closely.
I think here we should just let the free market play and just let people who disagree with what he said unfollow him, unsubscribe.
That's what's going to ultimately get rid of his mass wealth that he's getting from playing video games on YouTube.
I guess even if he loses everything now, he could retire like two or three times over.
So good on the guy.
Good on him for apologizing.
Apparently left-wing criminals have vandalized New York City's famous Central Park statue of Christopher Columbus after Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Bolshevik on Bowery, suggested the city might include it in a list of offensive statues set for removal.
How do we fight these bullies who are going to take what they want, democracy, or rule of law be damned?
Ariel.
How are we going to fight them?
That's a big question.
Well, I think we, you know, we appeal to the people who realize or maybe haven't spoken out yet about how sort of crazy this is.
I think there are plenty of people on the left side of the spectrum who think that this sort of crusade against the statues is absurd.
I think that there are plenty of people in the center who would agree with that.
So my, you know, my best tactic, at least in conversation, has been to take the leftist logic to its logical conclusion.
And so I say, okay, great.
Let's say we'll get rid of any semblance of Christopher Columbus.
We'll take away Columbus Day as a holiday.
We should probably get rid of Columbus Circle.
We'll ban meatball hoagies.
Right.
We'll get rid of the District of Columbia.
We should probably rename that, too.
And then let's go further.
Kyle Smith at National Review had a great point.
He pointed out the District of Columbia, but he also said something about how the Duke of York, James II, was very heavily involved in the slave trade.
Okay, so we have to rename the state of New York.
We should probably start off with the city as well.
So you start to see how this kind of cascades into an erasure.
You know, America Vespucci, after whom America is named, he was an Italian.
And I don't know if you've studied what the Italians did to Carthage, but it's absolutely despicable.
And we have to rename the continent too.
Absolutely, we should.
And so my point being here is that, you know, American history is not, it's a beautiful thing, but it's also a very bloody thing, and we have a lot of times in our history where we've done horrible things.
And I say we as a collective, you know, nation historically in the past, not us personally.
But we have to be very careful about when we go about destroying any semblance of American history because we're attempting to erase it.
And for better or for worse, those things did happen, and there were some really horrible things that happened, but getting rid of statues is not necessarily a way to go about it.
Nobody ever talks about the good things.
They always talk about the worst.
They don't talk about the better, the things that came from Christopher Columbus.
This issue bothers me so much because it's so ungrateful and historically ignorant.
Without Christopher Columbus, without that guy's courage, none of us would be here today.
Without that guy's courage and his gumption to get Spain to pay the tab for his trip, a very Italian thing to do to get the other guy to pay for it, Without that, America, which has been the greatest national force for good in the history of the world, for ourselves and for everyone else on earth, would not exist.
We owe it to that man.
Ali, where does this culture of willful ignorance and ingratitude come from?
Is it endemic to our times right now?
Or are conservatives blowing it out of proportion?
Is it sort of always this way?
Is there nothing new here?
I think social media actually plays a really huge part in all of this, just creating the ideological echo chambers that we have and not being able to separate facts from feeling.
I mean, that's pretty much what Twitter is, is just an entire feed of how people feel.
And unfortunately, that's where the majority of people get their information.
And I think that has a lot to do with it with a lazy populace that would rather believe what they already feel and kind of feed into their own preconceived notions of how they think the world works.
Rather than be brushed up against or inconvenienced by facts and research.
And because that kind of emotional rhetoric is so easily available to us via social media and even is created by an algorithm to only feed us the things that we already think and feel, unfortunately, people have to go out of their way to understand what is true and what is not and to be challenged in their preconceived notions.
And I think people just don't want to do that when it's so easy to believe What you want to believe.
That's so true.
The hysteria that comes from being constantly fed your own opinions.
Facebook will not feed me everyday feminism articles, which is my favorite website on the internet, but it won't feed them because it thinks that I disagree with what must be a conservative satire site.
Cassie, where does it end?
Was President Trump correct?
Will this end with us knocking down the Washington Monument?
I think we need to find a middle ground.
Now, if people want to remove statues from their own local community, that's fine.
As long as they're going through the process to remove it, asking the city council, talking to whoever's the board of trustees of the park or whatever, whoever the statue is.
But going and vandalizing a statue in a public place is wrong.
It's a crime.
It's criminal and it shouldn't happen.
I think that, like you said earlier, we'd have to rename a lot of things.
I think what we should do instead is call out the people in history who have done bad things, but also talk about the good things they've done, too, because everybody has done good and bad, and we should look at both sides.
Other than Hitler.
I mean, I don't know if Hitler did that many good.
I don't know.
I guess he was an okay painter.
He was a very mediocre painter.
But your point is absolutely well taken.
We've swung so far in this other direction that all you ever hear about is what a bad guy Christopher Columbus was, this Howard Zinn guy.
Okay, ladies, thank you for being here, especially you, Ariel Davidson, for your first time.
Also, Allie Stuckey and Cassie Dillon.
Can't wait to have you back.
and now it is time for the final thought.
The left-wing violence erupting on college campuses has nothing to do with what conservative speakers have to say.
It has everything to do with who controls what they and therefore you are allowed to say.
There is no alt-left.
There's just the left, which has followed its bankrupt ideas to their logical conclusions and now, bereft of the civilized argument that defines human society and the reason that defines humanity itself, is left only to grunt and scream like the animals that their destructive ideas have made them become.
Chesterton wrote, There is a thought that stops thought, and that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.
Let's wish Ben good luck in his speech and hope that the thought that stops thought doesn't stop him first.