A violent political attack shocks the nation, Joe Scarborough compares President Trump to 9/11 terrorists, and the Washington Post blames President Trump for a hurricane? Ben Shapiro returns to the show to discuss it all. He also talks about a recent attack on a Republican congressional candidate in the Bay Area, an attack that could have been prevented if the two parties were reversed, and calls for the left to do their job and stand up to the violence coming from the far-left. And, of course, there's still time to catch up on the latest news from the past week, including the death of Rep. Steve Scalise, the shooting of a congressional baseball player, and an attack on an anti-Trump Bernie Sanders supporter at a fall festival in the Castro Valley, California, on Sept. 9th, which was a day after a man was arrested for allegedly attempting to stab a GOP congressional candidate with a switchblade. And, a domestic terror group has allegedly threatened to shoot up a Make America Great Again event in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, according to a Daily Wire story from yesterday, by a supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America (D.C. social media account called "Make Great America Again.") According to the Daily Wire, the account used a photo of a MAGA hat with the name "ROSE" on it, which could be a reference to the group's logo. The White House has launched an investigation into the threat, and a tweet about it on its account, which has been deleted since it was deleted from its account. . All of which is not only makes me think of the left-wing pundit Cass Cassie Fairbanks, but also of the right wing pundit Cassandra Fairbanks' account with a picture of a red rose emoji and a black and white arrow pointing to a red heart emoji, which would make me think, "Roses are Red." What's the deal with that? . . . and the fact that the White House isn't paying attention to what's going on, you know what? It's a good one, right? ? Welcome back to the Ben Shapiro Show! - The Ben Shapiro's old radio show on his new podcast, The Ben's back from his long absence. - Ben Shapiro is back, and he's back on the airwaves, safe, safe and sound, and ready to talk about it all!
00:00:00.000A violent political attack shocks the nation, Joe Scarborough compares President Trump to 9-11 terrorists, and the Washington Post blames President Trump for a hurricane.
00:00:15.000Well, glad to be back, saving the world once again from the steaming pile that is Michael Knowles, who apparently took over my radio show for a couple of days in my absence.
00:00:22.000I just cannot believe that such things happen while I am gone.
00:00:26.000We'll get to all of the latest news, but first, let's talk about your sleep quality.
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00:00:56.000I know their mattresses are great because I have one.
00:01:44.000According to CBS San Francisco, a man was arrested on suspicion of felony assault and other charges after allegedly attempting to stab a Republican congressional candidate with a switchblade over the weekend in Castro Valley, according to the Alameda County Sheriff's Office.
00:01:58.000On Sunday, September 9th, at approximately 3.45pm, deputies working at the Castro Valley Fall Festival were alerted to a possible knife attack at one of the vendor booths.
00:02:07.000Deputies arrived at the booth and made contact with the victim, Republican candidate Rudy Peters, who is running against incumbent Eric Swalwell for the 15th congressional district seat.
00:02:15.000The Castro Valley News first reported on the attack.
00:02:18.000According to witnesses, 35-year-old Castro Valley resident Farzad Fazeli,
00:02:23.000It's regional news, and the reason it's regional news is because the guy was cursing about Trump.
00:02:26.000If this had been an acolyte of President Trump,
00:02:50.000Who is instead attacking a Democrat or a member of the media.
00:02:54.000This would be national news because then we'd have a national conversation about the extent to which rhetoric on the left is generating violence.
00:03:01.000And there are some folks on the right who are qualified to speak on this.
00:03:03.000For example, Representative Steve Scalise, the House Majority Whip.
00:03:06.000Steve Scalise, you will recall, was shot nearly to death in a congressional baseball attack.
00:03:11.000They were there playing baseball, a bunch of Congress people, and an anti-Trump Bernie Sanders supporter walked up
00:03:41.000You've got some people on the left that just want this idea of resist and ignore the fact Trump is president.
00:03:45.000They want to interrupt the ability of Congress to do its job.
00:03:48.000And of course, you've got death threats and literal attacks on lives.
00:03:50.000And frankly, I want to see the left stand up to this.
00:03:52.000And of course, Scalise should know, and Scalise is right.
00:03:55.000And this is not the only evidence of violence and violent threats coming from folks on the left.
00:04:00.000Again, in the media, all you hear is people on the right have grown increasingly violent thanks to President Trump's rhetoric and the escalated rhetoric of recent years.
00:04:08.000You never hear this about folks on the left, even as mainstream anchors like Chris Cuomo on CNN defend Antifa, an actual violent domestic terror group.
00:04:17.000According to Ryan Saavedra over at Daily Wire, a supporter of the Democratic Socialists of America has reportedly threatened to shoot up a Make America Great Again event at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.
00:04:27.000Law enforcement officials with the Metropolitan Police Department have opened up an investigation in response to the threat, which was posted to Twitter on Tuesday, according to the Daily Mail.
00:04:36.000The Twitter account wrote to right-wing pundit Cassandra Fairbanks, I'm coming with a gun and I expect to get numerous bloodstained MAGA hats as trophies.
00:04:42.000The account used the DSA logo as its profile photo, added an emoji of a rose to its name, which is common among DSA supporters, and shortly after the threat was posted, the owner of the account changed their Twitter handle as well.
00:04:53.000So that's another story of left-wing threats to violence.
00:04:58.000A Republican party office in Laramie, Wyoming caught fire early Thursday morning just days after it opened, the Daily Caller News Foundation learned.
00:05:05.000This is a bit of an older story, this one is from September 6th.
00:05:08.000The fire appears to have been set intentionally, according to Laramie Police Department spokesman Steve Morgan.
00:05:13.000The local police department is cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in the ongoing investigation, according to Morgan, adding that authorities have not yet identified a suspect or a motive for the fire.
00:05:56.000If it turns out the person was a left-wing environmentalist lunatic, then the story gets virtually no coverage.
00:06:02.000And the reason for this is because while the left does not, in most cases, in the vast majority of cases, agree with violent rhetoric, the left does agree with pretty extreme rhetoric about the right that they would never tolerate from folks on the right.
00:06:14.000And I speak today specifically of a column by Joe Scarborough.
00:06:17.000So Joe Scarborough yesterday put out a piece in the Washington Post
00:06:21.000In which he suggested that President Trump is harming the dream of America more than any foreign adversary ever could.
00:06:27.000His contention is that Trump is basically worse for America than 9-11.
00:06:37.000I have a very simple rule and I've held this rule consistently since long before Trump was president.
00:06:41.000I held it with regard to Barack Obama.
00:06:43.000If you're not overtly calling for violence, you're not responsible for violence on behalf of people who quote-unquote agree with you.
00:06:50.000Because then, it's going to be very easy to malign mainstream political opinions because there are a lot of folks who are crazy who agree with mainstream political commentators.
00:06:58.000So instead, what I've said, and I think this is the relevant gauge, is that you're only held responsible for the violence of people who take you up on your offer of violence or on your urging of violence.
00:07:08.000Then we can fairly say that rhetoric was involved in violence.
00:07:12.000It is true, however, that as we raise the temperature in the country, as we raise the temperature on the rhetoric, there are people who are on the fringe, and those people are more likely to be activated by the extreme feeling that they are getting from the nature of today's politics.
00:07:25.000Think of politics like ripples in a pond, and the epicenter of those ripples, the very center of those ripples, when you throw the rock in the pond, that's a political event.
00:07:36.000And as the ripples move out, they encompass a larger and larger group of people and a more and more fringe group of people.
00:07:44.000So if politics are now reaching a more fringe group of people and making those people more apt to feel extreme, more apt to engage in violence, then that's something we ought to be watching.
00:07:54.000It's one of the reasons we ought to be taking the temperature down at least a little bit.
00:07:58.000Here's Joe Scarborough, though, encouraging at least this sort of extremism and rhetoric.
00:08:03.000Again, this is a guy who it is worthwhile to recall.
00:08:06.000Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and MSNBC spent months pumping President Trump.
00:08:42.000Who could have imagined during their commute home on the night of November 21st, 1963, that an event in Dallas the next day would shake the post-war order guaranteed by America's victory in World War II?
00:08:52.000Even after Lee Harvey Oswald's shots rang out from the Texas school book depository, could anyone have foreseen the collapse of such an ordered age soon overtaken by the anarchy of Vietnam, the murders of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
00:09:03.000and Bobby Kennedy, the race riot Chicago-Kent State Watergate post-industrial rot, and the cultural chaos set loose across the country by these events?
00:09:51.000The reason that we have a massive, massive deficit is not because of the war.
00:09:54.000It is because of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which constitute somewhere on the order of 66% of the federal budget each and every year in mandatory spending.
00:10:01.000But Scarborough then continues, President Trump's Republican Party will create more debt in one year than was generated in the first 200 years of America's existence.
00:10:09.000And it's always fun to watch as people who didn't care all that much about Barack Obama's debts suddenly care about Donald Trump's debts, and vice versa, by the way.
00:10:16.000Republicans don't care about debt anymore.
00:10:17.000They used to care about debt an awful lot.
00:10:19.000But the part that's really astonishing about this Scarborough column is when he gets to the end.
00:10:24.000He says, For those of us still believing that Islamic extremists hate America because of the freedoms we guarantee to people, the gravest threat Trump poses to our national security is the damage done daily to America's image.
00:10:35.000As the New York Times' Roger Cohen wrote the month after Trump's election, America is an idea.
00:10:39.000Strip freedom, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law from what the United States represents to the world, and America itself is gutted.
00:10:45.000Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team 6 before he accomplished that goal.
00:10:48.000Other tyrants who tried to do the same were consigned to the ash heap of history.
00:10:51.000The question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this troubled chapter in history, or whether they will continue supporting a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America than any foreign adversary ever could.
00:11:04.000So apparently Donald Trump has now done more to damage America than, you know, the murder of 3,000 Americans on 9-11.
00:11:10.000And the murder of Americans, by the way, aboard the USS Cole.
00:11:13.000This sort of rhetoric is not particularly helpful.
00:11:15.000I'll give you another example of this sort of rhetoric in just a second.
00:11:19.000Donald Trump apparently responsible for every horrible thing that happens in the universe.
00:11:24.000If the left were to simply restrict their criticism of President Trump to the relevant, if they were simply to say, you know, President Trump, not a supremely competent guy, the people around him may be keeping him on track, but is this somebody who you really want to trust?
00:11:36.000Is this somebody who you really trust to make the right decisions for you?
00:11:39.000They'd have a lot better shot at winning back power than they will just screaming to the sky about how President Trump controls everything.
00:11:45.000And honestly, people on the right who resonate to this and think President Trump does control everything are contributing to a belief that government can solve all of your problems.
00:11:53.000When you believe that government is the only thing that matters, that government can solve all of your problems, or it causes all of your problems, you're more likely to fall into a pit of extremism and extreme feeling and rhetoric about the government that makes the condition of the country a lot worse rather than better.
00:12:09.000I'm going to talk about the latest example from the Washington Post in just a second.
00:12:13.000But first, let's talk about the folks who work at your company.
00:12:15.000So in my absence, Michael Knowles did a radio show for two days.
00:12:19.000And this has made me think, should I replace Michael Knowles?
00:12:22.000I mean, I've been thinking about that for quite a long time.
00:12:23.000If I do decide to replace Michael Knowles, I know I've been urged by others to do so, and only the better angels of my nature prevent this.
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00:13:21.000Okay, so not only is President Trump worse than 9-11, according to the editorial board at the Washington Post, President Trump is responsible for hurricanes.
00:13:50.000Here's what they say, quote, Yet again, a massive hurricane feeding off unusually warm ocean water has the potential to stall over heavily populated areas, menacing millions of people.
00:14:02.000Now, Hurricane Florence threatens to drench already waterlogged swathes of the East Coast, including the nation's capital.
00:14:07.000If the Category 4 hurricane does indeed hit the Carolinas this week, it will be the strongest storm on record to land so far north.
00:14:13.000President Trump issued several warnings on his Twitter feed Monday, counseling those in Florence's projected path to prepare and listen to local officials.
00:14:27.000Apparently, the hurricane calls up the president, and the president's like, listen, I can't help you out, hurricane, but what I can do is I can keep my mouth shut.
00:14:33.000I will be complicit in your sins, hurricane.
00:14:36.000He plays—so it used to be the Democrats blamed the Juden for the weather.
00:14:40.000We got that from that Democrat crazy person in Washington, D.C.
00:14:44.000The Jews were responsible for the weather.
00:14:46.000Now President Trump is controlling the weather.
00:15:22.000So that hurricane would still be a coming down the pike.
00:15:25.000But they say it is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change, which is their admission they have no way to actually attribute this hurricane to climate change, but that's not going to stop them.
00:15:33.000There is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth's systems to produce disasters.
00:15:38.000Well, I mean, there's some reasonable doubt about the level to which humans are doing that and the solutions that can be taken with regard to it.
00:15:44.000In fact, in one second, I'm going to give you all the evidence.
00:15:48.000They say, Atmospheric Research, Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, co-wrote a May paper showing that Harvey's cataclysmic wetness came from the unusual hot Gulf of Mexico water that fed the hurricane before it slammed into Texas.
00:16:03.000Harvey could not have produced so much rain without human-induced climate change, he and his colleagues concluded.
00:16:10.000All of which, by the way, drove the president to say that this hurricane was extremely hard and extremely wet, which was very weird.
00:16:16.000Now Florence is feasting on warm Atlantic Ocean water, says the Washington Post.
00:16:20.000The ocean is warming up systematically, Mr. Trenberth said, explaining that though natural variation can turn surface temperatures up or down a bit, the ocean's energy content is inexorably rising.
00:16:31.000It is the strongest signal of global warming, Mr. Trenberth added.
00:16:34.000It's very weird how everything bad that happens is an effect of global warming.
00:16:40.000If it's bad snowstorms, it's an effect of global warming.
00:16:42.000If it's a bad hurricane, it's an effect of global warming.
00:16:43.000Again, I'm not somebody who believes that humans are not contributing to global warming.
00:16:47.000I think that humans probably are contributing to global warming by all available evidence.
00:16:50.000The question is, what is the climate sensitivity?
00:16:53.000How much are humans contributing to global warming?
00:16:55.000And what can actually be done about that is maybe the best idea, technological progress, as opposed to cap and trade systems that are actually not going to mitigate the effects of global warming in any serious way.
00:17:07.000But the Washington Post, nonetheless, blames the president of the United States.
00:17:12.000They say the Trump administration has now attacked all three pillars of President Barack Obama's climate change plan.
00:17:17.000Except that when Barack Obama had his plan, the hurricanes were still hitting the United States, so this is quite silly.
00:17:23.000Also, it is worth noting that hurricanes, major hurricanes in the United States, are at about their average.
00:17:29.000It's funny, the latest line that you were hearing for a while, what you were hearing from the left was,
00:17:35.000Then the number of hurricanes is increasing.
00:17:45.000According to this guy, James Taylor, who's president of the Spark of Freedom Foundation over at Forbes.com, he actually went through decade by decade to look at the number of major hurricanes hitting the United States.
00:17:55.000So from 2001 to 2010, seven major hurricanes struck the United States, which is the 100-year average.
00:18:23.000So the idea that we are now in the midst of some massive upswing in the number of radical hurricanes hitting the United States, the statistics simply do not bear that out.
00:18:32.000Now, is that a reason to ignore whatever threats global warming is posing?
00:18:43.000And of course, most people are only going to read the headline anyway.
00:18:45.000And the impression they're going to get is that President Trump simply doesn't care about hurricanes or President Trump is somehow forwarding hurricanes or the rest of this sort of silliness.
00:18:55.000I think it is fair to say that media coverage has gone off the rails.
00:18:59.000And it's not just with regard to President Trump.
00:19:01.000It's also with regard to sort of normal Republican candidates.
00:19:05.000So the latest evidence of this is the Washington Post, again, they're the newspaper of the day, going after Ron DeSantis.
00:19:11.000So on Sunday, the Washington Post had two Post reporters put together a story that Ron DeSantis spoke at a conservative conference four times between 2007, 2013, and 2017.
00:19:22.000He spoke at the David Horwitz Freedom Center Conference.
00:19:25.000And these are usually, they usually take place in Florida.
00:19:28.000I know this because this is where I met Ron DeSantis.
00:19:30.000I met Ron DeSantis at this event at the David Horwitz Freedom Center in Florida.
00:19:33.000According to the Washington Post, this means that Ron DeSantis is no longer fit for office because he spoke four times at conferences organized by a conservative activist who has said that African Americans owe their freedom to white people and that the country's only serious race war is against whites.
00:19:48.000Okay, so they're going to pick everything that David has ever said that is wild and they're going to now attribute it to Ron DeSantis.
00:19:55.000As opposed to when Bill Clinton stands next to Louis Farrakhan at Aretha Franklin's funeral and no one has to answer a question about us, now Ron DeSantis goes and speaks at what is by any measure a normal conservative conference with a wide variety of speakers.
00:20:07.000I mean, we are talking about major politicians in the Republican Party who have shown up there.
00:20:11.000It's not all people who agree with David.
00:20:14.000I used to work at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
00:20:16.000I was on the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
00:20:19.000Not everyone who shows up agrees with everything that David Horowitz says.
00:20:22.000I didn't agree with everything that David Horowitz said.
00:20:24.000But the Washington Post ran this long story suggesting that because DeSantis had spoken at this event, therefore he agrees with everyone at the event, which is just ridiculous.
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00:22:04.000So, the culture wars continue in my absence.
00:22:07.000Norm MacDonald, who's doing the only Netflix special that I'm actually interested in these days, he is now being ripped up and down for an interview that he did in The Hollywood Reporter.
00:22:17.000He was uninvited from The Tonight Show on NBC, Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show on NBC.
00:22:21.000Apparently, you're only allowed to go on NBC if you are either an ardent Democrat or a person who worked for a company that actually covered up for Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuses.
00:22:30.000If you're one of those, then I guess you can go on Jimmy Fallon's show.
00:22:37.000But if you express sympathy for Louis C.K.
00:22:40.000or Roseanne Barr, then you're in serious trouble.
00:22:42.000Norm Macdonald is now in serious trouble.
00:23:10.000And the Hollywood Reporter person presses, and swing back toward liberalism, because it's the Hollywood Reporter, and he says, not necessarily.
00:23:17.000He says, I'm happy the Me Too movement has slowed down a little bit.
00:23:20.000It used to be 100 women can't be lying, and then it became one woman can't lie, and then it became I believe all women, and then you're like, what?
00:23:25.000Like that Chris Hardwick guy, I really thought got the blunt end to the stick there.
00:23:28.000And the Hollywood Reporter said, And Norm Macdonald said,
00:23:52.000And here's where he gets himself into trouble.
00:23:53.000He says, well, Louis CK and Roseanne Barr are two people I know.
00:23:56.000And Roseanne was so broken up after the show's reboot was canceled, I got Louis to call her, even though Roseanne was very hard on Louis before that.
00:24:02.000But she was just so broken and just constantly crying.
00:24:05.000There are very few people that have gone through what they have, losing everything in a day.
00:24:07.000Of course, people will go, what about the victims?
00:24:09.000The victims didn't have to go through that.
00:24:12.000And then they asked, you know, what did the two of them talk about?
00:24:15.000He said they had a good conversation, and he said she's not a racist, everybody knows that she's not a racist, but she shouldn't have tweeted the stuff that she tweeted.
00:24:23.000He got all sorts of flack, particularly about the Louis C.K.
00:24:25.000comment, because the implication seems to be that Louis C.K.
00:24:28.000was innocent of any wrongdoing, when of course Louis C.K.
00:24:31.000was basically inviting female comedians back to his room and then masturbating in front of them.
00:24:35.000And then apparently his associates were calling up networks and trying to get them to lose jobs, but there's no actual evidence that Louis C.K.
00:24:43.000was engaged in that particular activity.
00:24:50.000By the way, if you're Jimmy Fallon and you don't want to have Norm MacDonald on for saying this, you will have Bill Clinton on to talk specifically about essentially being accused of rape, and that's totally fine.
00:25:00.000You can't ask Norm MacDonald a tough question.
00:25:01.000That's the part of this that's so crazy.
00:25:04.000Let's say you disagree with Norm MacDonald here.
00:25:05.000Let's say you think what he thinks is unreasonable.
00:25:07.000Why wouldn't you have him on and just ask him about it?
00:25:10.000The reason is because we live in such a ridiculously censorious society that we have to make sure that people like Norm MacDonald are never heard.
00:25:18.000He apologized for it and they're still not inviting him on The Tonight Show.
00:25:22.000Matt Damon made comments about me too.
00:25:24.000He was welcomed back into civil society.
00:25:27.000There are no accusations, by the way, that Norm MacDonald has ever participated in any sort of bad activity with regard to women.
00:25:32.000And yet he's being put on the outs because he expressed sympathy.
00:25:35.000Sympathy for Roseanne Barr or for Louis C.K., people whose careers have been ruined by allegations.
00:25:40.000Roseanne Barr's career was ruined because she tweeted out dumb racist crap.
00:26:06.000Because the court of public opinion is a really nasty place, and destroying people's lives and careers based on accusations that you're not willing to back up in court, you're not even willing to try to back up in court, seems like a difficult business to me.
00:26:18.000It's hard for us to set an objective standard if you're not willing to take this stuff to court.
00:26:22.000Now, that doesn't mean that I don't believe the allegations about Louis C.K.
00:26:26.000I tend to believe the allegations about Louis C.K., particularly since he admitted them.
00:26:30.000But it does mean that we have to have some standard.
00:26:32.000When Norm Macdonald says there's no standard, I don't think that he's completely wrong.
00:26:39.000Well, meanwhile, I want to talk a little bit about the holiday that, you know, before I get to the holiday that I just celebrated, I also want to talk about Hillary Clinton.
00:27:08.000And then she continued by suggesting that Brett Kavanaugh was actually going to overturn Roe v. Wade and he hates abortion and that's really why he said all this.
00:27:18.000It is a lie that has been debunked multiple times.
00:27:20.000Senator Kamala Harris trotted out this lie over and over and over again.
00:27:24.000The Washington Post gave it four Pinocchios.
00:27:26.000The reason that Brett Kavanaugh referred to abortifacients as abortion-inducing drugs is because they are abortion-inducing drugs and were expressed as such in the Supreme Court decision that he was citing.
00:27:37.000Again, when it comes to the culture wars, the reason that so many folks are with Norm Macdonald and frustrated and with President Trump is because the left refuses to call out its own.
00:27:54.000The left refuses to call out Joe Scarborough for saying ridiculous things.
00:27:56.000The left refuses to call out Hillary Clinton for saying things that are obvious lies.
00:28:23.000And more importantly than being the Jewish New Year, unlike sort of the secular New Year, where you party it up and then you make resolutions for the next year, the Jewish New Year is all about atoning for sin.
00:28:32.000So we are now in the midst of the High Holy Days, which is typically used to express Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
00:28:38.000I'm about to explain to you why I'm going to be absent for a bunch of days coming up.
00:28:49.000That's where you fast all day and you stay in synagogue essentially all day.
00:28:53.000And you pray for forgiveness, and then God hopefully inscribes you in the Book of Life.
00:28:57.000And then about five days after that, four days after that, I'm out for another couple of days, and that one is for the holiday of the Festival of Booths, is what it's called in English, called Sukkot in Hebrew.
00:29:07.000And that is the one where we sit outside in these makeshift booths with poem fronds on top to remind us of when we were sojourning in the desert.
00:29:14.000And then we conclude with the last couple of days of Sukkot, which is like a week after that.
00:29:21.000One is concluding day of Sukkot, and the last one is Simchat Torah, which is when we celebrate the completion of the cycle of reading of the Torah.
00:29:28.000So Jews every week read a portion of the Torah, and then over the course of 50 weeks, we go through the entire Torah, the five books of Moses, and then we celebrate.
00:29:36.000Let me explain why I'm explaining all this to you in just one second.
00:29:39.000But first, let's talk about your hair.
00:30:45.000A couple of insane articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, rather, with regard to religion, which is why I'm mentioning Rosh Hashanah.
00:30:53.000I also want to talk about Serena Williams.
00:30:55.000I missed that whole controversy while I was out.
00:32:00.000There's one guest, and we're going to be talking about some things maybe off the beaten path.
00:32:04.000Different side of Ben and myself that maybe you haven't necessarily seen before, and I think he's probably going to try and make me cry because I saw his show prep.
00:32:13.000And we will see whether that indeed succeeded.
00:32:16.000All you'll have to do is watch this Sunday.
00:32:18.000All you have to do is subscribe at YouTube or iTunes.
00:32:20.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:28.000So the reason I mention the Jewish holidays is not just to prove to you that I didn't just take days off for the hell of it, but also because we are living in the midst of a sort of religious schism that's happening in the United States and really all across the world with regard to Western religion.
00:32:44.000There are a lot of folks in the West who believe that religion is what has held back civilization.
00:32:47.000People like Steven Pinker, people like Sam Harris, people with whom I'm friendly.
00:32:50.000And a lot of these folks think that religion is the great curse.
00:32:54.000That if it hadn't been for religion, we would have reached some sort of secular paradise long ago.
00:32:58.000Now that ignores the fact that once you get rid of religion and the notion of absolute morality, it's pretty easy to slide into the secular, relativistic morality that leads down the path to gulags and concentration camps.
00:33:10.000The claim is that religion is basically backward, and that's the reason religion is falling apart now.
00:33:14.000That religion is really falling apart.
00:33:16.000And what you see is folks on the left who want to maintain some semblance of religion.
00:33:22.000What they do is they've started to infuse religion with a bunch of secular humanist nonsense.
00:33:28.000Basically, what they want religion to be is a bunch of secular humanist messaging with some bagels on top if you're Jewish, or with a little bit of wafer and wine if you're Catholic, or if you're Protestant, then with a band, I guess.
00:33:39.000So here is, there are a couple of pieces specifically about the Jewish holidays in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that are pretty astonishing and telling about why this religious schism exists.
00:33:51.000And before I get to these pieces, I want to explain to you why I think religion is important, because this is one of the questions I get most frequently.
00:34:00.000I take my religion extraordinarily seriously.
00:34:01.000And a lot of people say, well, Ben, you know, you're a guy who promotes reason, a guy who promotes facts above feelings.
00:34:06.000Why do you care about religion so much?
00:34:08.000Why do you think all of these crazy things like God spoke to people from on top of a mountain and all the rest?
00:34:12.000Number one, I think that there are real, good, rational explanations for the existence of God.
00:34:18.000On our Sunday special, a couple of weeks ago, we had on Ed Fazer, who is a professor of a Pasadena City College, who makes some very good secular explanations for why he believes God exists.
00:34:28.000But the reason, in reality, that I believe in my religion is because I believe the Judeo-Christian civilization is the greatest civilization in the history of the world, and it rests on twin foundations.
00:34:37.000Those foundations are Jerusalem and Athens, the foundations of Judeo-Christian revelation, the Old Testament, as promulgated to the rest of the world through Christianity as well, and the notion of Greek reason, which provided us the idea that human reason is capable of understanding the cosmos.
00:34:53.000Without those two ideas, there is no science, there is no Western civilization, there is no liberalism, there is no Western morality.
00:35:00.000Get rid of those two key ideas, Greek reason and Judeo-Christian morality, and what you end up with is a hedonistic, deterministic society that is not interested in investigating the cosmos, not interested in bettering life, because what does life matter anyway?
00:35:13.000I think this is one of the reasons that what you're seeing in Europe with the decline of religion is not an upswing in beauty and harmony, but an increase in fracturing, an increase in factionalism, an increase in violence in many cases, the importation of people who are actually having kids, a decrease in the number of children who are being had, economic struggle, the rise of right-wing nationalist groups in a lot of these countries.
00:35:36.000A lot of that has to do with the European decision to abandon religion long ago.
00:35:41.000Judaism and Christianity, by extension, provided the world with certain basic truths.
00:35:46.000Those truths include the idea that human beings are made in God's image, which means that every human being has inherent value.
00:35:51.000That is not something that you can find from an atheistic source.
00:35:59.000I know a lot of atheists who are wonderful, moral people.
00:36:01.000But atheism is not a philosophy that can explain why every human being has value any more than it can explain why every ant ought to have value.
00:36:10.000The idea that God cares about human beings and that what you do in the world matters.
00:36:14.000That's not something atheism can explain because why should what you do in the world matter?
00:36:17.000You're a ball of meat wandering around without any sort of free will.
00:36:23.000The Greeks were very focused on the idea that the apotheosis of human achievement was reason.
00:36:28.000And rationality and using your brain in order to understand the universe.
00:36:31.000Judaism and Christianity, they suggest that, unlike a lot of pagan philosophies, that the world actually has a systemic order to it, created by a rational God.
00:36:40.000And when you combine that with the idea that human beings have the capacity to understand their universe, that's how you get the pursuit of science.
00:36:47.000In other words, religion has eternal truths to tell.
00:36:50.000Truths that are as valuable today as they ever were.
00:36:53.000And yet what you are seeing is an abandonment of traditional religion, an abandonment of the synagogues and the churches, and an attempt to backfill those synagogues and churches with a bunch of secular, humanist nonsense that is not going to bring anybody there.
00:37:06.000So, here's a piece from the Wall Street Journal today.
00:37:09.000It's called, it's by a woman named Shane D. Race, who I actually knew back when I was at Harvard Law.
00:37:45.000For 2,000 years, Jews have spent Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in a synagogue, abstaining from food and drink, fervently praying and beseeching God to forgive their sins.
00:37:53.000This year, some rabbis, eager to woo younger people to high holiday services, are holding programs in a beer garden, replacing deep reverential bows with goat yoga, and celebrating the end of the season with glow sticks in a mosh pit.
00:38:06.000Rabbi Dan Ayn, who started Rosh Hashanah service called Bol Hashanah at the Brooklyn Bowl, a music venue and bowling alley in Williamsburg, New York, says, for the millennial generation, walking into a synagogue can feel like a Civil War reenactment.
00:38:18.000He said, Rabbi Avi Shafran, who actually does public affairs for Agudat Yisrael in New York, which is an Orthodox group, he says, it's a solemn time of year to dispense with the solemnity is to do violence to the very essence of the days, which is, of course, true.
00:38:31.000Traditionalist to sales, Rabbi Aaron Podek,
00:38:33.000who held a Yom Kippur program at a Washington, D.C.
00:38:57.000No, what he means is that Jews who are unaffiliated and aren't interested in leading a Jewish lifestyle are looking for something to connect them back to eternal values and they're not going to find it in beer gardens.
00:39:05.000They're not going to find it in beer gardens.
00:39:06.000Because I'm going to explain to you some statistics about religion in the United States in a second that demonstrates that this attempt by Jews, Catholics, Protestants to run away from traditional religion is actually killing their religious conviction.
00:39:17.000Now, so here are some of these statistics, because, again, the Wall Street Journal is pushing goat yoga, and the New York Times is pushing a piece called Celebrating Rosh Hashanah with Less Oy, More Joy, and a Bit of Gospel.
00:39:28.000It's a long feature piece on Rabbi Perry Berkowitz, who, along with his sister, Rabbi Leah Berkowitz, runs East Side Synagogue, an unconventional congregation on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
00:40:48.000Because there are a bunch of people, left and right, a bunch of people left and right, who keep suggesting over and over, the only way for religion to survive is for religion to change with the times.
00:40:57.000Religion has to not just apply eternal lessons to new evidence, which I think is a good argument,
00:41:03.000But to change the religion utterly, get rid of fundamental conceits about the nature of human beings, get rid of fundamental ideas about the nature of morality and God, and instead basically Judaism, Christianity, these should just bow to the secular idolatry that is being promoted by a lot of folks on the secular left.
00:41:20.000Synagogues should become places where all you do is talk about Black Lives Matter and homophobia.
00:41:24.000It's a DNC meeting center, except it's got a Jewish star at the front or a cross at the front.
00:42:26.000All the people who used to go to mainline Protestant churches are either becoming unaffiliated or they're moving over to evangelical churches.
00:42:31.000In the Catholic church, you're seeing the same thing.
00:42:33.000All of these Catholic churches that you drive by and they have the rainbow flag waving out front because it's a new diverse Catholic church or whatever.
00:42:41.000A lot of those Catholic churches are empty.
00:42:43.000The ones that are still full are the ones that still care about what are considered fundamental values.
00:42:49.000The reason people care about religion, the reason people are willing to sacrifice for religion, is because they feel there's an eternal value to religion.
00:42:55.000And there is an eternal value to religion.
00:42:57.000And it is maddening to watch as the media who hate religion, top to bottom, start promoting this idea that religion can simply be saved as long as it parrots the talking points of Hillary Clinton.
00:43:07.000That's not what's going to save religion.
00:43:09.000The only thing that's going to save religion, and by extension, in my view, Western civilization, is a return to a social fabric that matters.
00:43:16.000A return to eternal, fundamental values that bring us together.
00:43:39.000If you go to a church where everybody believes essentially the same things about the nature of man, about the necessity to care for your neighbor, then diversity helps.
00:43:48.000Then you see diversity across the aisle, but with a common set of principles.
00:43:51.000America is losing a common set of principles.
00:43:53.000They're backfilling that with politics.
00:43:55.000And you're seeing it happen in synagogues, in churches.
00:44:33.000Open, obviously, because she's the greatest women's player of all time.
00:44:36.000Not the greatest player of all time, the greatest women's player of all time.
00:44:39.000And Serena Williams, the reason I say that is because people in ESPN keep saying she should be considered the greatest tennis player of all time, which is absurd, okay?
00:45:02.000She's 21 years old from Japan, and Serena was favored in this match.
00:45:06.000She's coming off of pregnancy, and things are not going well for her.
00:45:09.000Osaka blows her out in the first set, and then they're playing a competitive second set, and Serena Williams starts to lose her cool because she's not playing as well as she wants, and she starts yelling at the chair empire, and here's exactly what it looked like.
00:46:47.000It seems like these people know more about tennis than I do, but I like all the people on Twitter who once saw a tennis match, and now they're like, oh, you know, that's just terrible.
00:47:11.000I was the chair umpire for the fourth round stadium court match between John McEnroe and Slobodan Zivanovic, where I issued a warning point penalty and game penalty against McEnroe.
00:47:20.000The game penalty for a string of obscenities against me came at 4-5, costing McEnroe the set and making the match one set all.
00:47:26.000The memories and scars of my welcome to the job match are fresh.
00:47:28.000For even more than 30 years later, Ramos will be going through much of the same emotions.
00:47:33.000He says that all of this was exactly right.
00:47:35.000He says that Ramos did exactly the right thing.
00:47:52.000All players know that publicly attacking the honesty of the umpire is going to result in an immediate code violation.
00:47:57.000Ramos made absolutely the correct calls as the chair umpire in each of these three incidents.
00:48:01.000Now, if you mention that Serena acted badly, or that when Serena's been losing in the past, sometimes she loses her cool and acts badly, then this makes you some sort of sexist and racist.
00:48:10.000But I'm not the one who's making this claim, okay?
00:48:12.000To other chair umpires, it's Martina Navratilova.
00:48:17.000Mr. Ramos effectively had no choice but to dock her a point.
00:48:22.000This is Martina Navrasilova, probably, if not the greatest women's player of all time, maybe the second greatest women's player of all time after Serena Williams.
00:48:31.000She insisted she didn't cheat, she wasn't coached, and therefore she shouldn't have been docked.
00:48:34.000But she didn't, it doesn't matter whether she knew she was receiving coaching, she was being coached.
00:48:38.000Her own coach admitted it after the match.
00:48:41.000So at this stage, she'd been giving a warning, one that couldn't be dismissed retroactively and had smashed her racket in an automatic violation.
00:48:46.000Mr. Ramos effectively had no choice but to dock her a point.
00:49:32.000Open, Serena was getting beat by Sam Stoser when she yelled in the middle of a point.
00:49:37.000The chair umpire called interference, again correctly, and Serena exploded at her, saying,
00:49:47.000Again, this doesn't change the fact that Serena Williams is the greatest female player ever, but she basically stole the headline from an up-and-comer, and that is really kind of a terrible thing to do.
00:49:58.000The thing that I like about this is that there are some actual tennis experts who are coming out and speaking the truth and not being intimidated by the wave of publicity that has followed all of this.
00:50:30.000The United States will always stand with our friend and ally, Israel.
00:50:35.000And today, reflecting Congressional concern with Palestinian attempts to prompt an ICC investigation of Israel, the Department of State will announce the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization office here in Washington, D.C.
00:50:51.000The United States supports a direct and robust peace process, and we will not allow the ICC or any other organization
00:51:00.000Well good for John Bolton and good for the Trump administration which has been extraordinarily pro-Israel in every aspect as well they should be.
00:51:10.000It's sad that this has become a partisan issue because there is one side here that teaches its children to murder other people and there's one side here that has repeatedly offered territorial compromises in exchange for the other side stopping all the nonsense about teaching their kids to kill people.
00:51:23.000So this is really not a hard issue and the Trump administration gets it right.
00:51:26.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:52:17.000One of the messages of the Jewish High Holidays and of religion in general is that people are sinful creatures and that people are capable of good and people are capable of evil.
00:52:25.000The notion that has become very popular in American society and across the West is that people are naturally good.
00:52:30.000I don't know how you can look at people and possibly think that.
00:53:04.000Well, because civilization progresses, and civilization progresses because of that interplay that I talked about a little bit earlier on the show, that interplay between absolute morality and Judeo-Christian morality and Greek reason, that interplay cast across the ages is what creates a civilization capable of channeling people's selfishness toward best efforts.
00:53:23.000And capable of channeling people's destructive tendencies toward creative tendencies.
00:53:27.000But the minute you stop teaching children this, you're one generation away from all of it collapsing.
00:53:31.000Because a generation that is not educated in morality, a generation that is not educated in decency, will not be decent.
00:53:37.000It takes thousands of years to build a civilization worth keeping.
00:53:40.000It takes one generation to destroy the whole thing.
00:53:43.000All you have to do is not teach your kids.
00:53:46.000And in an age when it's seen as nasty and judgmental to teach your kids things, it seems like that is becoming a probability, not just a possibility, unfortunately.
00:54:12.000He was home alone in his apartment in the Southside Flats complex in Dallas when a police officer named Amber Giger entered and shot him dead.
00:54:19.000The precise chain of events is somewhat disputed.
00:54:21.000The affidavit supporting Geiger's arrest warrant states she believed she was entering her own apartment, which was directly below his, and laid out almost identically.
00:54:28.000She placed her key in the lock, the door pushed open, the apartment was dark, she saw a large silhouette across the room.
00:54:32.000She believed she was facing a burglar.
00:54:33.000She drew her firearm and gave verbal commands, which Jean ignored.
00:54:36.000She fired twice, and only then, she says, entered the apartment, called 911, turned on the lights, and realized she'd made a terrible mistake.
00:54:43.000But apparently, this doesn't square with other testimony.
00:54:46.000One witness reported hearing a woman yelling, let me in, let me in, before the gunshots, and a man's voice saying, oh my god, why did you do that, after the gunshots.
00:54:53.000Police sources are indicating that Geiger may actually try to raise the fact that Jean didn't obey her commands as a defense.
00:55:07.000And this is one of those cases where people should be speaking out across the aisle because the police department apparently took its time about getting to this and the investigation is pretty slow.
00:55:20.000The problems that actually exist in policing, and I say this as a major supporter of American police officers,
00:55:26.000There are two major problems in policing.
00:55:28.000One is the major problem that exists with regard to guilty cops getting off because people give too broad an area of discretion to those cops.
00:55:35.000And the other is a lack of training, not with regard to race, but with regard to proper use of violence in particular circumstances.
00:55:43.000And the second one, I think, is more common among young recruits.
00:56:01.000But when a police officer crosses the line, obviously we need to hold them responsible.
00:56:04.000The problem is we're having the wrong conversation.
00:56:06.000The conversation we're having is about implicit bias and secret racism and all of this.
00:56:09.000The real conversation we ought to be having is about holding people accountable when they actually do something wrong, not about maligning all police officers as incipient racists who want to kill black folks.