Talia Levin was fired from the New Yorker for suggesting that a wounded Marine was a Nazi tattooed with a cross on his elbow. She has since apologized and says she was wrong about the tattoo, but not before she was accused of being a traitor to her own country by the White House and the radical left. Today's episode of The Ben Shapiro Show is a mashup of a bunch of stuff that's going on in the world right now, and it's not even close to as crazy as the headlines have been making it out to be. The Washington Post prints an op-ed coming after me, Media Matters rushes to join in, and Rolling Stones celebrates Notre Dame burning. It's a wild and crazy week, and Ben is here to break it all down for you! Ben Shapiro is a writer, editor, and podcaster based in Brooklyn, New York. He's written for The Daily Wire, The Weekly Standard, Mother Jones, and the New York Times, and is a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard. He's also a frequent contributor to The Daily Caller, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, and NPR. and many other media outlets. Ben's bio on the Ben Shapiro Podcast is linked in the bio below. See linktr.ee/BenShapiro on the website of Ben Shapiro's new book, "The Dark Side of Politics: How to Make It in America's Most Dangerous Places." The Dark Side Of Politics is a new podcast on the intersection of politics, economics, culture, and culture, written by Ben Shapiro and the dark side of the culture and culture of the left-wing press corps. . This episode was produced in partnership with The Daily Beast, edited by David Axelrod, and edited by Alex Blumberg, and produced by Kaitlyn Durand, and published by The Daily Mail, and posted on Medium, and written by David Frum. in collaboration with the excellent research and edited and produced at The New York Review of the Atlantic and The Huffington Post. Thank you for all your support, Ben Shapiro, and your support is greatly appreciated, Ben is a pleasure to do so much so please reach out to Ben Shapiro on social media, and you can be reached at Ben Shapiro at Ben on the show Ben Shapiro: and his bio is on the ground in person at . . . and on Insta: Ben Shapiro s bio is linked here: ,
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00:01:35.000Again, text BEN, my name, Okay, so yesterday, I was minding my own business, covering the news as we do here every day on the Ben Shapiro Show.
00:01:48.000And suddenly, across my feed comes this piece from a woman named Talia Levin.
00:01:52.000She's a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn.
00:02:00.000Well, she was fired from the New Yorker.
00:02:03.000She was fired or resigned from the New Yorker.
00:02:05.000After she suggested that a retired Marine was actually a Nazi.
00:02:09.000We have to go all the way back to, well, actually, it's not that long ago, June 2018, when this happened.
00:02:15.000According to the Tampa Bay Times, Talia Levin, whose tweet about a PASCO veteran's tattoo implied that he was a Nazi, has apologized to him and resigned from her position as a fact checker at the New Yorker magazine.
00:02:26.000But in another tweet, Levin also lashed out at the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, saying it unfairly targeted her in its own tweet about combat wounded veteran Justin Gertner.
00:02:36.000This has been a wild and difficult week, Levin said in a tweet.
00:02:38.000I owe ICE agent Justin Gertner a sincere apology for spreading a rumor about his tattoo.
00:02:42.000However, I do not think it is acceptable for a federal agency to target a private citizen for a good-faith, hastily rectified error.
00:02:49.000Well, you weren't a private citizen when you said this.
00:02:52.000You were a reporter when you suggested that the guy was actually a Nazi.
00:02:56.000Levin tweeted about a cross-shaped tattoo on Gertner's elbow.
00:03:32.000I issued a correction within 15 minutes, long before ICE could have been aware of it.
00:03:35.000I was targeted because I was part of a news organization critical of ICE.
00:03:38.000And then she said she was a useful foil, a fat Jewish feminist with a Harvard education.
00:03:42.000ICE said I baselessly slandered an American hero, artificially pitting me against a disabled veteran, and engineered a conservative news cycle in which I was a villain.
00:03:50.000So she is, you know, a person who is fond of leveling charges against others and then playing victim.
00:03:56.000So naturally she ended up working at Media Matters for a short while before, I guess, she moved on to writing freelance.
00:04:02.000Well, today she has a piece in the Washington Post titled, How the Far Right Spread Politically Convenient Lies About the Notre Dame Fire.
00:04:11.000She says, as the conflagration spread through the ancient timbers of Notre Dame's cathedral attic on Monday, a parallel fire was spreading on social media.
00:04:20.000A series of conspiracy theories neatly slotted into pre-existing cultural biases.
00:04:24.000And soon enough, willing believers were aflame with hate.
00:04:27.000The conspiracy theorizing began almost as soon as the blaze did, right when people saw the shocking, transfixing video of the cathedral's spire toppling.
00:04:35.000While French authorities began to assert almost immediately that the fire was apparently accidental, the brief gap between the startling image's generation and their explication was enough for far-right figures to exploit with their own sinister insinuations.
00:04:48.000Their prevailing view was nearly identical, and apparently completely false, that the fire was deliberate and was probably set by Muslims.
00:04:55.000And then she quotes several people who suggest that the fire might not have happened accidentally, There are certain people who suggested that perhaps this was Muslims.
00:05:08.000Many figures on the right took the opportunity to turn Notre Dame into a metonym for Western civilization as a whole, intimating that far more than a cathedral was in peril.
00:05:16.000Just as the fire had social media, conspiracy theorist and brain supplement salesman Mike Cernovich dramatically tweeted, the West has fallen.
00:05:24.000Shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro, that's the only description that they take of me these days, radical conservative or far-right, The Economist calls me a radical conservative after falsely labeling me alt-right.
00:05:35.000And now, this dolt writing in the pages of the Washington Post suggests that I am a far-right pundit.
00:05:42.000She says, shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
00:05:51.000Now, that seems pretty unambiguous and Pretty inoffensive, right?
00:05:56.000I mean, I said that it was a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
00:05:59.000Yesterday on the podcast, I did a 15-minute segment all about the history of Notre Dame as well as its place within the Judeo-Christian river of history.
00:06:08.000But Talia Levin is very upset about this.
00:06:10.000She writes, Shortly thereafter, fast-talking far-right pundit Ben Shapiro called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization and Judeo-Christian heritage.
00:06:18.000Given the already raging rumors about potential Muslim involvement, these tweets evoked the specter of a war between Islam and the West that is also part of numerous far-right narratives.
00:06:29.000It was a central thread in the manifesto of the alleged Christchurch New Zealand shooter.
00:06:34.000On Tuesday, Shapiro called this article simply gross and said he called Notre Dame a monument to Western civilization because it is, not because of malicious intent.
00:06:41.000She puts this back in in in parentheses.
00:06:44.000That is a late addition to the article.
00:06:46.000She then juxtaposes me with Richard Spencer, an actual white supremacist and white nationalist.
00:06:52.000She says Richard Spencer, professional racist and coiner of the term alt-right, openly advocated for such warfare, stating and misspelling his hopes that the fire would spur the white man into action to seize power in his country, in Europe, in the world, and declaring such an insurgence a glorious purpose.
00:07:07.000And as Buzzfeed's Jane Litvinenko reported, other more oblique figures managed to go even further from provocation in the abstract to more concrete incitement.
00:07:17.000Omar under and then she talks about how Ilhan Omar has been has been slandered and how terrible it is.
00:07:24.000She says, by Tuesday morning, French authorities had declared the fire extinguished.
00:07:28.000The structure of Notre Dame is intact, although its spire in 19th century edition collapsed.
00:07:33.000But the conflagration of conspiracy, a corruption of the natural human tendency to assign meaning to events, rages through our information sphere unchecked.
00:07:41.000It should not take the imprecations of journalists to restrain this dangerous flow of misinformation.
00:07:45.000It is past time that those who stoke inflammatory rhetoric, knowing its potential to catalyze racist violence, were made to stop playing with fire before it's too late to control the inferno.
00:07:54.000So she finishes by calling for censorship.
00:07:57.000So, in other words, I say that Notre Dame is a Judeo-Christian symbol and a symbol of Western civilization.
00:08:03.000She suggests that I'm calling for war with Muslims based on that extraordinarily anodyne tweet.
00:08:08.000And then she suggests that I must be silenced because I am participating in a dangerous flow of misinformation.
00:08:28.000Nowhere in my original tweet thread, or anywhere else, have I suggested that Muslims were behind the burning of Notre Dame, because the evidence suggests that is not the case.
00:08:37.000That is not what the French government has said.
00:08:39.000Okay, all of this prompted Media Matters, the former employer for this not very nice person, Tali Levin, to tweet at me.
00:08:46.000Well, because she had tweeted also that she thanked Media Matters for gathering information so she could write that column, which just demonstrates, by the way, where Media Matters lies in the sort of information complex for the mainstream media.
00:08:58.000Media Matters is a left-wing group founded by David Brock in coordination with John Podesta and Hillary Clinton right before Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000.
00:09:07.000It has long been a font for Clintonista hackery, and its main mission is basically to knock right-wing people off the air, not conservatives off the air.
00:09:16.000Media Matters has for years been funded by members of the Democratic Party left and higher echelon people on the left.
00:09:23.000Specifically, to dig up garbage on people on the right and then to try to initiate fake secondary boycotts against the advertisers.
00:09:34.000They've done it to a... They're a 501c3 group.
00:09:36.000They certainly do not act like a 501c3 non-profit.
00:09:40.000They're a horrible organization designed specifically to smear their own political opponents and the political opponents of people like Hillary Clinton and then to target advertisers who dare to spend their money with those people, even if those advertisers are not actually involved in promoting that show alone.
00:10:01.000So an advertiser can advertise on Tucker and also advertise on MSNBC.
00:10:05.000Media Matters targets the advertisers for Tucker.
00:10:07.000Media Matters, by the way, is so obviously partisan that after Joy Reid was hit with a bunch of allegations and, in fact, proof that she had said some terrible things in her past, Media Matters said that that was a hit job against Joy Reid.
00:10:19.000So Media Matters' only job is to create these long, giant files of supposedly terrible stuff that people on the right have said.
00:10:26.000So Talia Levin thanked Media Matters on her Twitter feed for helping her gather information for her crap column.
00:10:32.000And then I tweeted out that her crap column was in fact a crap column and that she was taking a tweet that was perfectly Innocent and historically accurate, and then trying to link me to violence against Muslims on the basis of that, which is not only a stretch, it is a tearing apart of any semblance of logic or reason or honesty.
00:10:53.000So I tweet that out, and Media Matters tweets back at me, from their corporate account.
00:11:01.000So first of all, man, leave the borough out of it.
00:11:04.000Like, I don't know what the borough has to do with anything, but you leave that borough out of it.
00:11:07.000And I don't understand, honestly, what the reference is supposed to be, too.
00:11:12.000Then, Media Matters tweets this out, trying to justify, so they start getting ratioed, which means people on Twitter point out how dumb this is, and that Media Matters is a garbage organization, because they are.
00:11:20.000By the way, it is well, it is worthy of note.
00:11:23.000Media Matters is constantly quoted as a media watchdog, that's how it is termed, constantly, by the left-wing media, by the mainstream media.
00:11:30.000They are constantly calling Media Matters a media watchdog, just as they called the Southern Poverty Law Center a racism watchdog, These are hardcore leftist groups with motivation.
00:11:42.000F you and the bro you wrote in on for criticizing an opinion columnist in the pages of the Washington Post for basically throwing out slanderous material.
00:11:52.000Not legally slanderous, but in the generic sense.
00:11:55.000We'll get to more of this in a second because wait until you see what else Media Matters had to say.
00:11:59.000First, for decades credit cards have been telling us to buy it now and pay for it later with interest.
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00:13:05.000Media Matters didn't stop with suggesting that I F myself and also that they wanted to have sex with a donkey.
00:13:12.000They also continued by then trying to explain their way out of this.
00:13:16.000And so they tweeted out, in the aftermath of this, they also tweeted, quote, Some context, Talia Levin, a great writer who worked with us, has been on the receiving end of right-wing harassment for the better part of a year now, often spurred by spurious attacks on her work.
00:13:34.000So, in other words, I am now inciting violence against her?
00:13:40.000She attacked a disabled veteran and called him a Nazi and then deleted it.
00:13:44.000And when people got uptight, then it was incitement against her.
00:13:47.000She attacks me as someone who is supposedly calling for a war between Islam and the West, a war on Muslims or blaming Muslims based on Notre Dame Cathedral, a thing that I have not done.
00:13:58.000And then Media Matters responds by suggesting that my criticism of her crap column means that I am now generating harassment against her.
00:14:09.000A great writer who worked with us has been on the receiving end of right-wing harassment for the better part of a year now, often spurred by spurious attacks on her work.
00:14:15.000All of this, by the way, is a demonstration of the incitement lie that the left keeps telling over and over and over, which is that anybody on the right who says anything at all is involved in incitement.
00:14:28.000And it doesn't stop there, because Media Matters then continues.
00:14:32.000They keep trying to double down on this thing.
00:14:34.000The first rule of holes, of course, is to stop digging, but Media Matters never stops digging.
00:14:39.000So here's what Media Matters tweets then, quote, some additional relevant context here.
00:14:43.000This is the jerk store routine from Seinfeld.
00:14:46.000You know, they owned themselves, they played themselves, and now they're desperately trying to spin their way out of their own stupidity.
00:14:54.000So they say some additional relevant context here.
00:14:56.000Indeed, the specific MMFA tweet response Ben is drumming up outrage about is unbecoming of and unusual for an organization as prestigious as MMFA.
00:15:07.000By the way, so I guess now they're members of Prestige International from Step Brothers.
00:15:12.000When an organization calls itself prestigious, you know they're not.
00:15:14.000Then they say, but, you see, it was actually a reference to, drumroll, Ben's own tweet on related matter.
00:15:20.000And then they go and they dig up a tweet from a month ago.
00:15:24.000In which I suggested that if you call me alt-right, you ought to F yourself and F the horse you rode in on, which was directed, I read it at the time on the air, at The Economist because The Economist suggested in their headline that I was the alt-right sage without the rage, which was another lie.
00:15:39.000So Media Matters is now trying to dig up times where I have used the F-word online and then try to claim that they are making a callback reference rather than just being partisan heh.
00:15:50.000By the way, their incitement lie isn't just restricted to me.
00:15:53.000They have a piece today called National Review Writer's Distortion Invites Harassment of an Abortion Clinic Director.
00:16:01.000A National Review Writer, her name is Alexandra DeSantis, she's terrific.
00:16:04.000So she pulled a tweet from Hales' Twitter thread to wrongly claim, according to Media Matters, that the clinic director did not believe that infants were legal persons until 30 days after birth.
00:16:14.000Supposedly, supposedly, this is now incitement.
00:16:21.000So Sanctus tweeted out, a quote tweeted, one of these tweets about a North Carolina bill.
00:16:28.000Hales's tweet highlighted, according to Media Matters, some of the potentially unconsidered legal implications of the bill.
00:16:33.000For example, as Hales explained, while the bill states a born-alive infant is a legal person for all purposes, that definition appeared to be in conflict with Hales's understanding that an infant younger than 30 days cannot be added to a will in North Carolina.
00:16:46.000DeSanctis said, oh, here's a NARAL board member opposing a born-alive bill in North Carolina and claiming that an infant can't be a legal person because you can't add them to a will until they're 30 days old.
00:17:17.000I mean, they've been using it for the last couple of weeks about Ilhan Omar, that if you criticize Ilhan Omar for being a rabid anti-Semite, somehow you're inciting violence against her.
00:17:25.000When Bernie Sanders says that millions will die because Medicare for All has not been passed, that's not an incitement of violence.
00:17:31.000When Democrats suggest that President Trump is a Russian agent, that is not incitement of violence.
00:17:36.000When Democrats call me alt-right or suggest that I am responsible for violent attacks for which I have no responsibility, that is not incitement of violence.
00:17:46.000But it's incitement of violence for us to point out when the left is wrong.
00:17:50.000I mean, that Media Matters tweet is so telling.
00:17:51.000The one where they suggest that me defending myself against a slander is now incitement of violence against the person who attacked me in the first place.
00:17:59.000And you can see how cynical this tactic is.
00:18:02.000All of small-r republicanism is reliant on us being able to have discussions with each other and, yes, criticize each other.
00:18:09.000And if bad-faith criticisms take place, the proper answer to that is to point out that a bad-faith criticism has taken place.
00:18:17.000It is not to suggest that the person who made the bad-faith criticism is somehow involved in incitement to violence.
00:18:22.000If we reach the point where every critique is now considered incitement, free speech no longer exists.
00:18:27.000Remember, incitement is not covered by the First Amendment.
00:18:30.000So if the left moves to the standard Where everything that they don't like is now incitement to some form of violence, and therefore can be regulated, you end up with the repressive tolerance regime first proposed by Herbert McHugh's, the 1960s-era make-love-not-war Frankfurt School professor, who suggested that true tolerance lay in silencing voices from the right.
00:18:54.000Because if we allowed those voices to speak, then somehow even the expression of those viewpoints would amount to a targeting of people on the left.
00:19:02.000And this mentality, unfortunately, which started on a lot of college campuses, has expanded outward.
00:19:08.000It's expanded outward to the point of the absurd.
00:19:12.000To the point where even the expression of certain views is considered a form of supremacy that must be shut down.
00:19:17.000The best example of that today is there's an article from a woman named Sophia Lung In Library Journal, in which she suggests that libraries are now repositories of white supremacy.
00:19:31.000Because there are a lot of books by white people at libraries.
00:19:35.000In a piece that was put up yesterday, she said, Whiteness as Collections.
00:19:39.000I had this interesting mini-eureka moment a few weeks ago I wanted to share for a few reasons.
00:19:43.000One, I don't usually reflect on the connections that help me understand how I learned something new or what goes into coming up with some new concept.
00:19:50.000Most of the time, the connections aren't clear to me.
00:19:52.000Two, I like to show students that inspiration for new research or scholarly ideas doesn't have to come only from scholarly publications.
00:19:59.000Three, I needed to write it out to fully understand how I came to this conclusion and to really understand what this conclusion means.
00:20:06.000Marie Kondo has been in the zeitgeist for a while, but especially now that she has a Netflix series, I saw the first episode a while back and it reminded me of how having a space clean of clutter and mess really helps the mind feel clearer.
00:20:17.000Marie Kondo's spiritual approach to objects also made me reflect upon our relationship with objects and why we feel so much attachment to intimate objects, to inanimate things.
00:20:26.000Why can't we just let those things go?
00:20:29.000And she goes on to suggest that libraries themselves are a formation of whiteness.
00:20:35.000She says, One of the mind-blowing things she shared was this idea of how our library collections, because they're mostly written by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks.
00:20:44.000of color whose thinking continues to push me and who I respect and admire so much.
00:20:48.000And we had some really interesting discussions where I learned a lot.
00:20:51.000One of the mind-blowing things she shared was this idea of how our library collections, because they're mostly written by straight white men, are a physical manifestation of white men ideas taking up all the space in our library stacks.
00:21:12.000So the left is now going to label everything white supremacy, and white supremacy, of course, is a form of incitement, and so burning books, hey, what the hell, throw the books out of the library, and why not burn them?
00:21:21.000I mean, come on, what are they gonna do?
00:21:22.000You don't want them getting into the wrong hands.
00:21:24.000We'll get to more of this stupidity in just one second.
00:21:27.000First, there's a saying most athletes abide by, Play like you're in first.
00:21:35.000You're going to hear what happens when some of the most elite athletes on the planet take that phrase to heart and battle their biggest rivals for the chance to go down in history as one of the greats.
00:22:07.000Subscribe to Sports Wars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you are listening right now.
00:22:12.000Again, that is Sports Wars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you are listening at this very moment.
00:22:18.000Okay, so back to this stupid idea that libraries are a repository of white ideas.
00:22:24.000If you don't already know, says this writer, Sophia Lung, writing for Library Journal.
00:22:30.000She says, if you don't already know, whiteness as property is a seminal critical race theory concept first introduced by Cheryl Harris in her 1993 Harvard Law Review article by the same name.
00:22:39.000She writes, slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property, and the formation of whiteness as property required the erasure of native peoples.
00:22:48.000Basically, white people want to stay being white because of the privilege and protection whiteness affords under the law they created.
00:22:55.000So, I guess the theory of the article, according to Elisa Fialong, is that property itself is a white people creation.
00:23:20.000library collection, especially those in higher education institutions, most of the collections—books, journals, archival papers, other media, etc.—are written by white dudes writing about white ideas, white things or ideas, people, and things they stole from people of color and then claimed as white property with all of the rights to use and enjoyment that Harris described in her article.
00:23:37.000When most of our collection is filled with this so-called knowledge, it continues to validate only white voices and perspectives and erases the voices of people of color.
00:23:46.000Collections are a representation of what librarians or faculty deem to be authoritative knowledge, and as we know, this field and educational institutions historically and currently have been the site of whiteness.
00:23:57.000Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries.
00:24:10.000They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc.
00:24:24.000And I'm sure that all the collections at Widener Library at Harvard University, one of the largest libraries on planet Earth, I'm sure that it's all about preserving whiteness, not about, you know, having lots of books that we can all peruse.
00:24:35.000Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicate that we don't care about what people of color think.
00:24:40.000We don't care to hear from people of color themselves.
00:24:42.000We don't consider people of color to be scholars.
00:24:44.000We don't think people of color are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people.
00:24:48.000To return to the Harris quote from above, library collections and spaces have historically kept out black indigenous people of color as they were meant to do and continue to do.
00:24:57.000One only has to look at the most recent incident at the library of my alma mater, Barnard College, where several security guards tried to kick out a black Columbia student for being black.
00:25:05.000What happened at Barnard, we talked about it on the radio show, what happened at Barnard is that a black student went for free food at a library, refused to show ID to police over and over and over again.
00:25:19.000And then, after the police said, OK, we're going to take you outside, then he told everybody to turn on their cameras and urged people to distribute all of this information.
00:26:06.000Therefore, get rid of the white people collections at the libraries.
00:26:10.000And this chain of thought is so perverse and so stupid and so non-unifying, it's nearly astonishing.
00:26:16.000Unfortunately, as I say, it is becoming more and more prominent.
00:26:20.000In fact, there is a piece from Rolling Stone today talking about Notre Dame, in which Rolling Stone suggests that burning down Notre Dame was good for Notre Dame.
00:26:30.000They tweeted out, quote, the building was so overburdened with meaning that it's burning feels like an act of liberation.
00:26:36.000That's according to Rolling Stone magazine.
00:26:39.000Because the history of Judeo-Christian values, the history of the West, is in fact burdensome and bad, and thus must be torn out at its roots.
00:26:47.000So if Notre Dame burns, that's not bad.
00:26:57.000Hey, the article suggests, for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution, and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place.
00:27:10.000You see, when symbols burn, that's good, because we have placed meaning in those symbols.
00:27:15.000The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation, says Patricio del Real, an architectural historian at Harvard University.
00:27:24.000If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of the Old City, the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith, just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre, and change, Michael Kimmelman wrote for the New York Times.
00:27:37.000Despite politicians on both sides of the French political spectrum discouraging people from trying to politicize the Notre Dame fire, it would be a mistake to view the building as little more than a Paris tourist attraction, says John Harwood, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of Toronto.
00:27:54.000For centuries, the cathedral was the seat of the bishop of the Catholic Church at a time when there was virtually no distinction between church and state.
00:28:14.000His restoration of the church was highly controversial, to an extent it still is today.
00:28:18.000His approach to restoration was not, let's fix the building as it is and put it in decent structural condition, says Cesare Barignani, assistant professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York.
00:28:28.000In fact, he acted in a much more inventive and problematic way, because he claimed to re-establish or restore to the church an image that it may never have had.
00:28:36.000It was his own reinvention, or his own idea of how the church may have existed at the beginning of the 13th century.
00:28:41.000The restoration led to a reappraisal of the Gothic style as a kind of ultimate symbol of French architecture.
00:28:47.000What it means to be French, however, has obviously changed a great deal over the past few centuries.
00:28:51.000While France is still predominantly Christian, the number of practicing Catholics has fallen year after year.
00:28:56.000From 64% in 2010 to 56% in 2012, according to one census figure, the number of Muslims in France is also growing, comprising more than 5% of the population, giving rise to rampant Islamophobia.
00:29:07.000A profound income gap has led to the explosion of protests from the Yellow Vests.
00:29:12.000Therefore, Notre Dame has lost some of its weight as a totem of national identity.
00:29:17.000It is, so therefore it burning, not a terrible thing, not a terrible thing.
00:29:22.000Instead, we should, you know, reflect on what France means now and then rebuild this monument, not in its original style, but in line with what France means now.
00:29:34.000So this is, this is the push from the left.
00:29:37.000And unfortunately, as I say, it is becoming more and more prominent.
00:29:39.000There's an article in the Washington Post today suggesting that the Judeo-Christian tradition, even the invocation of that very good, true, and historically accurate phrase, is a very bad thing.
00:30:42.000Eastern, so go check that out tomorrow and subscribe so that you can have access to having your questions answered And all the rest of that sort of thing.
00:31:14.000So as I say, the left is in the business now of tearing apart traditional ideas because those traditional ideas are apparently inherently dangerous.
00:31:23.000So the new one that they don't like is Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:31:25.000If you say Judeo-Christian tradition, that is now divisive, and as we have learned, Divisive language is inciting language, and inciting language should be illegal.
00:31:34.000So, I'm not suggesting that that is what Anna Grismala Boussey is saying at Washington Post.
00:31:38.000She is not calling for censorship of the term, but the attempt to use, she is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies at Stanford, the attempt to take terms like Judeo-Christian tradition and turn them into wedges is pretty astonishing.
00:31:51.000It's pretty astonishing and pretty negative.
00:31:53.000So she suggests, even as Notre Dame Cathedral was burning, pundits such as Ben Shapiro began to mourn it as a monument to Western civilization built on a Judeo-Christian heritage, describing the fire.
00:32:03.000And Katie Hopkins, she links me together with a right winger in Britain named Katie Hopkins, who has described the fire as symbolic of Judeo-Christian annihilation, which is not something that I actually suggested.
00:32:14.000And then she says, so what is Judeo-Christian tradition?
00:32:17.000She says many people use the term Judeo-Christian tradition to describe a religious and ethical consensus.
00:32:21.000The phrase commonly refers to the shared religious texts, moral precepts, and millennia of shared cultural and historical values between Christianity and Judaism.
00:32:28.000Both faiths affirm one God, prize the covenant between God and His people, and value the dignity of human life.
00:32:33.000Said to be the basis of Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian tradition invokes shared values and connected fates.
00:32:39.000Okay, all of that is true, and that is accurate, and that is what most people mean when they use it.
00:33:37.000But to suggest that there is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian history in the West is simply asinine.
00:33:43.000She says, There is not much history of shared fates here on earth.
00:33:46.000In the name of defending Christian communities, European rulers and clerics promulgated the blood libel, forced Jews to convert, and had Jewish children taken away from their parents.
00:33:55.000Historically, ghettos, pogroms, expulsions, restrictions on jobs and education, the toleration of violence and prejudice directed against Jews in the name of Christian integrity, all belie the notion of shared fates, much less shared moral principles.
00:34:07.000Well, no, all of those evils were indeed evil.
00:34:11.000And as the West progressed, it made more room for Jews.
00:34:14.000To pretend that Judaism and Christianity don't have a shared root of the tree, however, is simply silly.
00:34:21.000And the attempt to turn what is a uniting term into a divisive term is demonstrative of how little people actually like the religion.
00:34:28.000Because in order to divide Judaism from Christianity in Judeo-Christianity, all you have to do is focus on the evils that Christianity has perpetrated rather than the great good that Christianity has perpetrated, by the way, on behalf of Jews, as well as many other people around the world.
00:34:43.000But using mainstream uniting terms to divide and then suggesting that those terms are inherently divisive, Pretty, pretty ugly stuff.
00:34:52.000We have historians who are denigrating history, librarians who are denigrating libraries, and popular magazines suggesting it's good when great symbols like Notre Dame burn.
00:35:03.000Yes, we may have a problem here in the West.
00:35:04.000As I've said, and I've said this in my book, Right Side of History, as I've said many times, there are two visions of what Western civilization constitutes, and we are watching that play out in real time.
00:35:14.000Version number one is that Western civilization is good.
00:35:17.000Western civilization, in fact, is the best civilization.
00:35:20.000It was funny, some lefty yesterday suggested, you know, Shapiro, with his tweets, implies that Western civilization is the best civilization.
00:35:26.000I'm not implying it, I'm stating it openly.
00:35:28.000Western civilization is the best civilization.
00:35:30.000If you disagree, why don't you turn in those vaccines, all your technology, democracy, free speech, and human rights.
00:35:36.000You can turn those in at the door if you don't think that Western civilization is the best civilization.
00:35:40.000Women's rights, gay rights, all those things.
00:35:44.000Western civilization is the best, as I posit in my book, because Western civilization is a fusion between shared Judeo-Christian values, values shared between Jews and Christians, springing back to Sinai and moving forward through the Sermon on the Mount, And Greek reason.
00:36:01.000And there are people who see that as good.
00:36:02.000And then there are people who see Western civilization as inherently evil and racist and predatory.
00:36:07.000And for those people, even the invocation of Judeo-Christian tradition or Western civilization, these things are a great lie promulgated in order to hide the evils of Western civilization.
00:36:19.000And if you are living in the greatest time in the history of planet Earth, in great comfort and safety, I would suggest that you don't actually believe that the principles of Western civilization are a lie either.
00:36:30.000Or if you do, you are being dishonest with yourself.
00:36:34.000Alrighty, meanwhile, the 2020 Democratic race continues to heat up.
00:36:38.000And I will say the level of incompetence in the Democratic race is pretty astonishing, which is one of the reasons that you're seeing the rise of Pete Buttigieg, who happens to be the least incompetent person in the field right now, other than maybe Bernie Sanders.
00:36:50.000So President Trump is pretty much trying to forecast who he's going to run against.
00:36:53.000He tweeted out yesterday, I believe it will be crazy Bernie Sanders versus sleepy Joe Biden as the two finalists to run against maybe the best economy in the history of our country and many other great things.
00:37:06.000I look forward to facing whoever it may be.
00:38:29.000The reason that I say that he is truly incompetent, he was asked last night at a town hall at the University of Virginia.
00:38:35.000I've served in public office since 2005.
00:38:37.000I do my best to contribute to the success of my community, of my state, and now of my country.
00:38:41.000There are ways I do this that are measurable.
00:38:42.000There are ways I do this that are immeasurable.
00:38:43.000He donated like a couple of grand out of $317,000 or something.
00:38:48.000Here was his response, quote, "I've served in public office since 2005.
00:38:53.000I do my best to contribute to the success of my community, of my state, and now of my country.
00:38:59.000There are ways I do this that are measurable.
00:39:00.000There are ways I do this that are immeasurable.
00:39:04.000Like, well, there are charities that we donate to that we've recorded and itemized.
00:39:09.000Others we've donated to that we have not, but I will tell you, I'm spending everything, I'm doing everything I can right now, spending this time with you.
00:39:17.000Not with our kiddos, not back home in El Paso.
00:39:21.000Because I want to sacrifice everything to make sure that we meet this moment of truth with everything we've got.
00:40:37.000And in the past, I should have given more charity.
00:40:39.000We should all have given more charity, and I'm one of the all.
00:40:43.000I feel the same thing about people who do military service.
00:40:46.000They undertook a sacrifice that I did not.
00:40:48.000So if Beto is asked, dude, why didn't you actually serve in the military when people like Pete Buttigieg did?
00:40:52.000His answer should be, some people have undertaken sacrifices far greater than anything that I have undertaken.
00:40:57.000Instead, I think what you get is, dude, is serving in Afghanistan really that much better than me, like, standing on this table right here in a Dairy Queen in Iowa, He's so bad at this.
00:41:19.000There's this recent bill that caused a lot of controversy where I had people from church communities that I frequent say to me, did you vote against this thing that allows us to kill babies when they're born?
00:41:55.000And also, if you don't actually like the bill, then you're going to have to explain why it's bad.
00:42:02.000Two weeks before the partial birth abortion bill came up, again, before the Protection of Unborn, Pain-Capable Unborn Children Act, before that came up, Cory Booker voted for a federal anti-lynching law.
00:42:16.000Lynching is illegal in every state in America.
00:42:30.000Pete Buttigieg is getting worse at this.
00:42:32.000So as Buttigieg moves into the mainstream, he also feels the necessity to push to the left.
00:42:37.000So instead of pushing as the sort of moderate candidate who kind of likes capitalism, instead, Buttigieg is pushing to the Bernie Sanders left, hoping to steal some of that vote.
00:42:45.000He says capitalism has let a lot of people down.
00:42:48.000I think the reason we're having this argument over socialism and capitalism is that capitalism has let a lot of people down.
00:42:55.000I guess what I'm out there to say is that it doesn't have to be so.
00:42:59.000I believe in democratic capitalism, but the democratic part is extremely important.
00:43:02.000At the end of the day, we prioritize democracy.
00:43:05.000And, you know, having that framework of a rule of law, of fairness, is actually what it takes for markets to work.
00:43:11.000Okay, no, that is not what it takes for markets to work.
00:43:13.000The idea that people can vote to stifle markets is a violation of fundamental human freedom to control the labor that you create.
00:43:23.000If you can't control your own labor because other people vote that you're not allowed to do that, that is not capitalism at work, nor does that help capitalism.
00:43:29.000Okay, time for some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
00:43:48.000The acting all the way through the series.
00:43:49.000Now, it does sandbag you a little bit at the end, but with that said, it's really, really well done.
00:43:56.000It's a murder mystery about an 11-year-old boy who's been killed, and these two police officers, these two detectives have to look into it, and it's this small town, and everybody's got a secret.
00:44:05.000So the premise is pretty common, but the execution is first-rate.
00:45:03.000A lot of folks, left, right, and center gave money.
00:45:06.000They have raised well over a million dollars in the last 48 hours to rebuild these three fire-ravaged black churches that were burned down by a white supremacist.
00:45:18.000And it just goes to show you that people do want to help each other out.
00:45:22.000There's this idea that runs through leftist thought that innately human beings don't want to help each other out and that you need government to step in and do something about it.
00:45:31.000There's this idea that runs through, yes, Judeo-Christian values.
00:45:34.000And by the way, in Muslim communities as well, many religious communities, That the social fabric requires you to take care of each other.
00:45:39.000And this is a perfect example of how a Judeo-Christian country goes out of its way to help people that you don't know, because you feel like there are institutions important to building a social fabric.
00:46:00.000And if you have a little bit extra money, this is a really good cause, rebuilding these churches in St.
00:46:04.000Landry, In Louisiana, so you can go check that out right now.
00:46:07.000And Yashar Ali does this kind of stuff all the time online, pushing charitable causes.
00:46:12.000Twitter is a flaming garbage heap, but sometimes Twitter comes through.
00:46:17.000Sometimes Twitter actually provides some good stuff.
00:46:19.000Alright, time for some things that I hate.
00:46:25.000So speaking of crackdown on Judeo-Christian values, Concordia University in Canada had invited Harvard University Professor Harvey Mansfield to give the spring commencement address for its Liberal Arts College.
00:46:34.000That makes perfect sense because Mansfield is one of the great scholars in the Western tradition.
00:46:38.000Mansfield has done translations of Plato.
00:46:41.000Mansfield has done translations of de Tocqueville.
00:46:50.000He's one of the most prominent scholars of it in the West.
00:46:53.000But then the university rescinded its invitation.
00:46:56.000Principal Mark Russell sent Mansfield a weaselly letter expressing regret that faculty and alumni were unable to reach consensus as to what we wanted to achieve with this event, is according to Reason.com.
00:47:06.000Russell lamented that the selection committee acted in good faith but rather precipitously when it invited him in the first place.
00:47:12.000Mansfield discovered the true explanation.
00:47:14.000He relates this in his Wall Street Journal op-ed.
00:47:16.000What had taken place, I learned not from the principal, was a faculty meeting prompted by a letter from 12 alumni that demanded a reversal of the committee's invitation because my scholarly and public corpus heavily traffics in damaging and discredited philosophies of gender and culture, promoting the primacy of masculinity.
00:47:32.000Apparently a reference to my book, Manliness, attracted their ire.
00:47:35.000Though I was to speak on great books, not gender, this trafficking, as if in harmful drugs, disqualified me without any need to specify further.
00:47:42.000Such sloppy, inaccurate accusation was enough to move a covey of professors to flutter in alarm.
00:47:48.000Mansfield is politically conservative.
00:47:51.000Natural law is conservative on matters of gender.
00:47:55.000Because it turns out that nature also happens to be rather conservatives on matter of gender.
00:48:00.000Mansfield says speech is not an alternative to power, but a form of power, political power, and political power is nothing but the power to oppress according to people who are targeting him.
00:48:08.000A professor like me might trick gullible students and lure them to the wrong side, so it is quite acceptable to exclude speakers from the other side.
00:48:14.000Supremacy of the wrong side must be prevented by supremacy of the right side.
00:48:19.000And Mansfield has this one pretty much spot on.
00:48:22.000So Harvey Mansfield, great scholar, now has been basically thrown out of a commencement.
00:48:31.000So, there was a guy who bet $85,000 on Tiger Woods, something like 12 to 1 odds, and made a million bucks on Tiger Woods, winning the Masters.
00:48:46.000So the media decided to look into him, and they found that the guy who won $1.2 million betting on Tiger Woods has a lengthy criminal record, including a domestic violence conviction.
00:48:58.000Why are the media digging into a guy who just won some money?
00:49:01.000Like, was winning the money the crime?
00:49:04.000Now he won some money, and we're supposed to all be upset about this because he has a criminal history?
00:49:11.000If you want to say that he was unjustly freed because of that criminal history, that's a story.
00:49:14.000It is not a story to randomly dig into the past of people who are in the news for another reason, simply because you feel like it that day.
00:49:27.000They're not just attacking people who are just doing stuff randomly and then trying to dig up their past the way they did to Joe the Plumber.