A major terrorist attack in Barcelona, the president reacts, the media overreacts, and we talk about nothing but Confederate statues all the time forever. Ben Shapiro's take on it all on The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro ( ) on today's episode of The Daily Wire's "Ben Shapiro Show." Subscribe to the Daily Wire Podcast! Subscribe on iTunes! Learn more about your ad choices. Use the promo code: PODCAST to receive 10% off your first month with discount code: CRIMINALS at checkout. You can also join our bi-monthly listener mailbag to learn more about what s going on in the news and discuss the most pressing issues affecting our society today. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It helps us to keep bringing you high quality, diverse perspectives on politics, culture, and society. Thank you so much for being a part of the Forward Together community. The Forward Together Podcast Network. Our mission is to connect, support, and celebrate the people who are making a difference in our world. We create a safe, positive, and supportive environment for all of us to live in a world where we all have a voice and a safe and a place to work and connect with people who care about their fellow human being. to make a better world. Thank you for being heard loud and clear on all of the things we can be heard loud, everywhere we can hear them everywhere we go. -Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire - Ben Shapiro, The DailyWire - "The Daily Wire" Thanks to Blinkist - Bl Blinkist - ) . - - Blakenist , Bl Blinkists - The BlakenIST - This is a new app that gives you access to all the latest news and information you need to help spread the word out there about what's going on around the world! - Thanks for listening to the world, wherever you get it? and everywhere you go, bl Blinkist is listening to your ears get a chance to know more about the latest in the world? - Thank you, blinkististist! Thanks Blinkist - blblinkist ? -- & much more! -- Thank you to Bl BlinkIST is a free trial or 3 months off your yearly plan when you join today!
00:00:00.000A major terrorist attack in Barcelona, the president reacts, the media overreacts, and we talk about nothing but Confederate statues all the time forever.
00:00:08.000I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:15.000All right, so I have a lot to get to today, as always.
00:01:12.000Two weeks to read, if you're a fast reader.
00:01:15.000Instead, you get the entire main points of the book in 15 minutes with Blinkist.
00:01:18.000And that's great, because if you read the 600-page book, a month later, all you're going to remember is 15 minutes worth of material, if you're lucky anyway.
00:02:04.000Obviously, the biggest story of the day is not what the media are saying is the biggest story of the day.
00:02:08.000The media want to focus on Confederate monuments, statues that have been up for 50 years or 20 years or 150 years.
00:02:15.000But the real issue yesterday is that there was a major terrorist attack in Barcelona.
00:02:19.000For people who missed it, this was a major ISIS-planned cell, apparently.
00:02:24.000According to CNN, the perpetrators of the terror attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils originally planned to use explosive devices to wreak greater devastation, but were apparently thwarted because their materials detonated prematurely, police said Friday.
00:02:36.000A house in Alcanar, south of Barcelona, was destroyed in a blast on Wednesday night, hours before one attacker mowed down dozens of people in the heart of Barcelona, killing 13.
00:02:44.000A group of five attackers then drove into pedestrians in the town of Cambrils, killing one in the early hours of Friday.
00:02:51.000Catalan police chief Jose Luis Trapero told reporters explosives were found in the Alcanar property and the police are working on the hypothesis that these attacks were being prepared in that house.
00:03:01.000The revelations pointed to an alarming conclusion that authorities knew nothing of an advanced plot to mount a spectacular terror attack until an accidental explosion at the perpetrator's base.
00:03:10.000And despite the eye-catching setback, the terrorist cells still managed to carry out two further improvised attacks without impediment.
00:03:17.000So four people have been arrested, one of them in Alcanar 3 in Ripoll,
00:03:21.000Three were Moroccan citizens, another was Spanish.
00:03:29.000Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy labeled the Barcelona attack jihadi terrorism, which is a perfect description.
00:03:35.000Rajoy's government has declared three days of mourning across Spain.
00:03:38.000The ISIS media wing has said that the Barcelona attackers were soldiers of ISIS, but stopped short of saying
00:03:44.000That they took responsibility for the attack, probably because it was a botched attack.
00:03:47.000So naturally, this would demand a unified response from the West, right?
00:03:51.000This would be the time when you expect the West to renew its determination to stamp out ISIS, to signal solidarity.
00:03:58.000And President Trump actually tried to do that initially.
00:04:01.000President Trump initially goes on Twitter, and he says that he is going to stand with the people of Barcelona, the people of Spain, and we all have to stand together.
00:04:11.000He tweets out, This is the problem with Trump's run-on mouth.
00:04:21.000This is the problem with a brain that has no filter.
00:04:24.000What he just did is he polarized the response.
00:04:26.000So instead of everybody being unified, ISIS bad, let's kill them all.
00:04:29.000Instead, in this tweet, he endorses fictitious history,
00:04:33.000He endorses a fictitious history that includes a war crime and he slanders General Pershing.
00:04:37.000Because what is he exactly talking about?
00:04:39.000What Trump is actually talking about here is a legend wherein supposedly General Pershing, Trump has told this story before, he said that Pershing was a rough guy and during the moral rebellion in the Philippines from 1899 to 1913, Pershing served as governor between 1909 and 1913.
00:04:54.000Pershing quote caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage
00:05:17.000To be fair to President Trump, General Pershing apparently at one diplomatic meeting brought the head of a pig.
00:05:22.000Apparently the Moros were very, very upset with pork.
00:05:26.000And apparently there were reports that there were members of the American Counterterrorism Unit who had taken terrorists and wrapped them in pigskins and buried them, or buried them with pigs.
00:05:42.000So, what this did is it allowed the media to escape the broader issue, which is radical Islamic terror, and the media, of course, did this.
00:05:51.000The media were looking for an excuse not to talk about jihadi terror so they could stay on Trump, so they could stay on what happened in Charlottesville instead of swiveling
00:06:00.000To cover what is a significantly more deadly terror attack in Spain.
00:06:05.000This is not to make light of what happened in Charlottesville at all, but just in pure numbers terms, what happened in Spain is a significantly more serious terror attack than what happened in Charlottesville.
00:06:15.000But the media spent all day yesterday continuing to talk about Charlottesville and talking about this tweet, which is what they wanted to do.
00:06:39.000Yeah, and there will be questions about copycats.
00:06:41.000There will be questions if what happened in Barcelona was at all, at all, a copycat version of what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, even though there may be different characters, different political ambitions.
00:06:55.000Uh, they use the same, uh, the same killing device, a vehicle going at high speed into a group, a large group of pedestrians.
00:07:04.000And as the local police are saying, at least one person is now dead.
00:07:07.000The media will do anything in order to avoid talking about the spate of jihadi terror.
00:07:13.000We had that in Berlin with the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin.
00:07:16.000In Jerusalem, we've had this multiple times.
00:07:18.000People using trucks as ramming vehicles in order to murder people.
00:07:21.000But Wolf Blitzer's first instinct is to try and connect this back to Charlottesville, because the media would like to continue talking about Charlottesville.
00:07:31.000The general, the general perishing comments from Trump are stupid, they're a waste of time, they're a waste of effort, they undermine our ability to get along with some of our Muslim allies.
00:07:43.000But to suggest that it has anything to do with Charlottesville, or that that's the main issue here,
00:07:48.000Trump, the one thing you can say about Trump, and he certainly has done this, he has unleashed the military against ISIS.
00:07:53.000The one-third of all territory taken against ISIS over the last seven, eight years has been during the Trump administration.
00:07:59.000Trump has utterly untied the hands of the military in the fight against ISIS, and it's been actually creating some significant results.
00:08:06.000To focus in on Trump's stupid tweet or to focus in on Charlottesville in the aftermath of this attack just demonstrates where the media want to put their attention.
00:08:15.000It's obvious where the media wants to put their attention.
00:08:18.000If you think about what happened in Charlottesville, there should be a spate of propositions that everyone of good heart and good mind can agree on.
00:09:12.000In fact, I've been probably the harshest or one of the harshest condemners of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the alt-right overall.
00:10:09.000Even on Confederate statues, I think there's broad agreement that people in New York don't have a lot to say about Confederate statues in South Carolina, and if the elected mayor of Charlottesville decides that he wants to remove a Robert E. Lee statue, he's an elected mayor, that's his responsibility, he can do that.
00:10:25.000I may disagree with the decision, but I really don't have a lot to say in that particular decision.
00:10:29.000I believe in localism, particularly when it comes to cultural historical issues like this one.
00:10:34.000I think there's broad agreement on all of this, but you can see that there's an attempt to polarize the country.
00:10:40.000The left wants people to believe that America is a deeply racist place, and so what they're attempting to say is that anyone who wants to keep
00:10:45.000The Confederate statues up must be a racist.
00:10:47.000I was on CNN last night with Don Lemon and a couple of other folks, including Keith Boykin, who's a Democratic strategist.
00:10:53.000And Keith Boykin openly said anyone who wants to keep the statues up of Confederate memorials is a racist or is a white supremacist.
00:11:02.000Don Lemon verged on that and I actually called him out on it.
00:11:04.000I questioned him on it and he backed off of it.
00:11:06.000But this is one of the things that's really nasty.
00:11:08.000And then on the Trump side you have a bunch of people like Pat Buchanan who are out there almost overtly declaring support for white supremacism because they think they have to do that in order to fight the left or because they actually believe it.
00:11:19.000And we'll get to all of this in just a second.
00:11:20.000But first I want to say thank you to our sponsors
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00:12:33.000Speaking of leftist overreaction again, the left always has to overstep.
00:12:36.000It's so funny, whenever the left does something bad, like whenever there's a leftist who shoots up a bunch of congresspeople and it's out of the news in three days because the media don't want to talk about it anymore, then what they do is they accuse the right of overreach.
00:12:49.000Oh, the right is speaking too much about this.
00:12:52.000In Barcelona attacks, you'll have President Trump say something about perishing, and all of the media coverage will be about the perishing comments, not about the actual terror attack.
00:13:00.000Well, the left is really, they are the kings and queens of overreaction.
00:13:04.000I mean, they really are amazing at this.
00:13:05.000So, for example, New York's subway system.
00:13:09.000Again, I don't know what any of this has to do with what just happened in Charlottesville, but there are a bunch of tiles in the New York subway system that look kind of like a Confederate flag.
00:13:18.000They look kind of like a Confederate flag.
00:13:20.000And there's a debate over what this was supposed to be.
00:13:23.000One side says that there was a New York Times editor who's from the South, and so when they built this particular subway station,
00:13:29.000They put the symbol in there as an homage to the person who was from the New York Times.
00:13:36.000The MTA says it's not about a confederate flag at all.
00:13:39.000It was supposed to be the crossroads of the world.
00:13:42.000Whatever it is, it kind of looks like a confederate flag.
00:13:44.000Now, is Richard Spencer, like, marching around there in a torchlight parade?
00:13:48.000Are we gonna get Chris Cantwell rallying down there for the frickin' subway tiles?
00:13:54.000Like, the biggest problem in New York right now is that the subway system sucks, okay?
00:13:57.000They've been running late, a lot of the subways are broken, it smells like urine all the time, and now they're worried about, what is this?
00:15:02.000Okay, you should lose your job over that when you are an elected official and you hope for the assassination of your political opponents, then you should lose your job over that.
00:15:09.000Imagine if the situation reversed and it had been some Republican legislator saying that about Obama.
00:15:39.000Michael Eric Dyson, who is on the news all the time, professor, I believe, at Georgetown, and Michael Eric Dyson, he comes out and he openly endorses Antifa, which is a violent far-left group that has engaged in violence against normal citizens in places ranging from Sacramento to Seattle to Portland.
00:15:56.000Here's Michael Eric Dyson saying Antifa is wonderful now.
00:15:59.000The people that we claim, Black Lives Matter, the Antifa movement and so on,
00:16:06.000Mr. Miller says again that there was violence there but the problem is to equate the violence in reaction against bigotry with the bigotry itself is to misunderstand the fact that when you go to cancer treatment the radiation is tough treatment but it is meant to remove the cancer.
00:16:25.000So what he fails to understand and what the president especially fails to understand is that you are complicit with the worst currents of bigotry in this country when you try to draw a false equivalence between secessionists and racists and confederate defenders and bigots and neo-nazis and African-American and white people and others who have defended the right of this nation to really seek a path
00:17:06.000I mean, it's a very minute group of people who are awful and evil, but you don't actually get to act in violence against them.
00:17:13.000Saying they're a cancer in sort of a generic, they're a harm to the body politic sense, that's true, but if you're saying they're deadly, that's not true, okay?
00:17:23.000If you're saying that they are actually out there killing people, then you'll have to point me to the ones who are actually out there killing people, and then I would say, let's let the police kill them.
00:17:32.000You need Antifa out there beating the crap out of them with clubs and sticks.
00:17:35.000And this is a problem because if you have, I mean I've been talking about this all week, if you have a violent movement on the left that's being justified by the mainstream left in response to the alt-right, and the alt-right is not actually acting violently at these rallies, then you got a problem on your hands.
00:17:48.000Okay, and if the alt-right is acting violently, that's why we have police in this country.
00:17:51.000We don't need groups of armed people going around beating each other up.
00:17:55.000It's not good for the country, but the left is embracing all of this, and it's really amazing how the left's overreach is actually making Trump appear better.
00:18:03.000The left's overreach, again, they're so stupid, the people on the far left, that they don't understand that if they would just tell the truth about what happened this week, they would win.
00:18:15.000They have to go exponential in a situation that requires a solid and a proportionate response.
00:18:25.000The covers from The Economist and The New Yorker are not going to be helpful to the left cause either.
00:18:28.000So The New Yorker has a cover of Trump on a boat blowing into the sail and the sail looks like a Ku Klux Klan hat and The Economist has a cover of Trump shouting into a KKK hood
00:18:45.000This sort of thing is just going to lead a lot of Trump supporters to think that he's being unfairly maligned since Trump did in fact actually condemn the KKK.
00:18:53.000I mean that's one of the things he actually did do during his Tuesday crazy press conference.
00:19:00.000He did a lot of other things that I thought were terrible but he did say that he condemns the KKK.
00:20:32.000I'm calling out white supremacy for what it is.
00:20:34.000And sometimes what it is, John, are blind spots.
00:20:38.000Sometimes what it is is not acknowledging that this country was built upon a very violent past that resulted in death and the raping and the killing of my ancestors.
00:20:47.000So I'm not going to, I'm not going to allow us to say that it's okay for a Robert E. Lee, but not a George Washington.
00:20:55.000There is a portion of the hard left that wants all of those statues to come down.
00:20:59.000Al Sharpton, an absolute disgusting race-baiting anti-Semite, he said the same thing yesterday about the Jefferson Memorial, like Al Sharpton gets to be the judge of bad symbolism.
00:21:07.000Al Sharpton was involved in incitement of riots in 1991 in Crown Heights ending with the murder of an Orthodox Jew.
00:21:13.000He was involved in the Freddy's Fashion Mart debacle later that decade in which a bunch of people were killed after somebody set fire to a store that Al Sharpton was railing about.
00:21:21.000That guy had attended an Al Sharpton rally where he was railing about
00:22:08.000Again, the left's overreach here is actually driving people into the arms of the right, into the arms of people who I think are pretty gross, like Pat Buchanan.
00:22:15.000Pat Buchanan has been a quasi-closeted white supremacist for a long time.
00:22:20.000He's been an anti-Semite for a long time.
00:22:22.000In 2005, he suggested the West should never have gone to war with Hitler.
00:22:25.000In 2006, he wrote the foreword to a book by an actual white supremacist named Sam Francis.
00:22:30.000His magazine, The American Conservative, he co-founded with a guy named
00:22:33.000Taki Theodorakopoulos, who called himself a soi-disant anti-Semite.
00:22:37.000William F. Buckley said that Buchanan's views were anti-Semitic.
00:22:40.000Well today, Buchanan has a full-on column, basically the mirror image of what you saw from Angela Rye there on CNN.
00:22:50.000So, Angela Rice says that Washington can't be distinguished from Lee, and then Pat Buchanan says the same thing.
00:22:56.000He says Washington can't be distinguished from Lee, and that's why we should leave the Lee statues up, because white supremacism is actually not a horrible thing.
00:23:04.000White supremacism is not an actual horrible thing.
00:23:05.000So, let me give you a portion from this column, because I think that it demonstrates
00:23:11.000The way that the radical left and the radical right, you know, Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative right, and not all paleoconservatives are Buchananites, but Buchanan's wing of the Republican Party, how they have a common view of American history that are just
00:23:26.000Basically the photo negatives of one another.
00:23:28.000So Angela Rice says it's a white supremacist history so it's bad, and Buchanan says it's a white supremacist history so it's good.
00:23:34.000This is actually from his column today, his syndicated column.
00:23:36.000Another term applied to the Unite the Right gathering in Charlottesville is that they are white supremacists, a mortal sin to modernity.
00:23:42.000But here we encounter an even greater problem.
00:23:44.000Looking back over the history of a Western civilization, which we call great, were not the explorers who came out of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England all white supremacists?
00:23:52.000They conquered, in the name of the mother countries, all the land they discovered, imposed their rules upon indigenous peoples, and vanquished and eradicated the native-born who stood in their way.
00:24:00.000He's saying all this is good because Western civilization spread, but it did so in the name of white supremacy.
00:24:06.000Okay, if you recall a little bit about your history books, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, and England were all at war with one another for several hundred years here.
00:24:13.000So all the white people were fighting each other too.
00:24:14.000So this idea that they had this kind of common white supremacist attitude is not really true.
00:24:20.000And even if they were white supremacists in the sense that they thought they were superior, you know, white man's burden, Rudyard Kipling, imperialists, even if they thought that, you know, even if they believed that the white man's burden had to do with white skin,
00:24:32.000That would be them mistaking the spread of Western Civilization for the spread of their own race.
00:24:37.000That would be a mistake on their part.
00:24:39.000That would be attributing the quality of the spread of Western Civilization to the color of skin, which makes no historic sense.
00:24:45.000There were white people in Europe going thousands of years back before Western Civilization was ever a thing.
00:24:52.000After the fall of the Roman Empire, there were white people all over Europe who had nothing to do with Western Civilization and who were barbarians.
00:25:01.000Before Rome came to Britain, Britain was white.
00:25:05.000I mean, so this idea that it's not culture, but it's skin color is really weird.
00:25:08.000Also, how do you separate the skin color?
00:25:10.000The Caucasus are full of people from various ethnicities, and a lot of them are not living lifestyles or have not lived historically lifestyles that were embedded with Western culture.
00:25:38.000And then he says, Nor is a belief in the superiority of one's race, religion, tribe, and culture unique to the West.
00:25:43.000What is unique, what is an experiment without precedent, is what we are about today.
00:25:46.000We have condemned and renounced the scarlet sins of the men who made America, and embraced diversity, inclusivity, and equality.
00:25:52.000Our new America is the land where all races, tribes, creeds, and cultures congregate.
00:25:56.000All are treated equally, and all move ever closer to an equality of results through the regular redistribution of opportunity, wealth, and power.
00:26:02.000We are going to become the first universal nation.
00:26:04.000All men are created equal is an ideological statement.
00:26:07.000Where is the scientific or historic proof for it?
00:26:10.000Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope?
00:26:14.000So notice the conflation that Buchanan makes here.
00:26:41.000But they did believe, and that's what the principle that was enshrined in the Declaration says, that all human beings are created with equal value in God's eyes, and that means that they have equal rights in the eyes of the government, or they should have equal rights in the eyes of the government.
00:26:55.000But Buchanan conflates that argument with the argument that the left makes, which is that all people ought to have equal outcome.
00:27:01.000And then he says, a pox on both your houses, basically.
00:27:03.000White people built civilization, and if white people begin to fade, then civilization will begin to fade as well.
00:27:09.000Okay, so he is basically taking the flip side of the racist argument made by Angela Rye, which is that America is based in racism, and that's why it's evil, and it's inherently in the DNA, and Buchanan says racism is in our DNA, and therefore it's basically good.
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00:29:20.000What led to this, and why now, and what's it going to mean?
00:29:24.000Why now is because Steve blew himself up.
00:29:27.000So in the last few months, Bannon has been marginalized by people ranging from Jared and Ivanka to General John Kelly.
00:29:33.000Kelly obviously didn't like Bannon, thought Bannon was a nefarious force in the White House.
00:29:37.000In the last week, Bannon has been the guy at Trump's elbow, kind of urging him to not disassociate from the alt-right and to engage with the alt-right over Charlottesville.
00:29:48.000And then he came out and he did a really kind of incredible interview with a magazine called the American Prospect, a lefty magazine called the American Prospect, in which he ripped on Trump's North Korean policy, talked about globalists like Gary Cohn, what he calls globalists like Gary Cohn, ripped him by name, and also suggested that he was going to get rid of all of his enemies in the State Department, undermine our foreign policy,
00:30:15.000It was a really bad interview, and it put Trump in a very awkward position.
00:30:19.000A lot of people have been calling for Bannon's ouster because of his closeness to the alt-right.
00:30:23.000I've said for a year that Bannon's closeness to the alt-right never should have been brought into the campaign.
00:30:27.000I mean, I wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post August 18th, I think literally one year ago today, saying exactly this, that this is a problem for Trump.
00:30:36.000So Trump is getting rid of him, probably because Kelly wants to get rid of him, not necessarily because Trump cares.
00:31:13.000They turned into an outlet that did nothing but cheerlead Trump, and that was under Bannon's auspices, because Bannon was working with Trump at the time, sort of behind the scenes, and then obviously became one of his campaign strategists, his chief campaign strategist.
00:31:25.000Well, now Bannon is gone, and so he's gonna go back to Breitbart, and he sort of paved the way for what he's gonna do next.
00:31:31.000He's got two paths here now that he's out.
00:31:34.000Path number one is that Bannon could theoretically kind of play it safe, keep it close to the vest, go back to Breitbart, keep quiet.
00:31:45.000He talks about military analogies all the time.
00:31:47.000He's not nearly as brilliant as people think he is because he gives off that impression, but he's a smart guy.
00:31:51.000I'm not saying he's stupid, but he's not quite the 4D chess guy that everybody thinks he is.
00:31:56.000He's a very instinctive knee-jerk knife fighter.
00:31:59.000So my understanding is that he will probably go back to Breitbart, and from his perch at Breitbart, he will launch attacks on all the quote-unquote globalists inside the administration.
00:32:08.000That once you go back to the administration, and you, and you, once you go back to Breitbart, and you decide to rip on Trump, this could really open a rift.
00:32:19.000So, remember, Bannon also has the support of the single biggest owners to the Republican Party, the Mercer family over in Florida.
00:32:28.000Their firm, Cambridge Analytica, was Trump's data operation.
00:32:31.000And it's unclear right now if this is sort of an amicable parting of ways or whether this is an open war.
00:32:38.000If it's an open war, things are about to get very, very interesting because you could see a situation where Trump and Bannon go right at each other, where Bannon decides to use Breitbart as his club to beat the living crap out of Trump, uses Rebecca Mercer and the Mercer family as his sort of money bags to do all of those things, starts to lash Trump from outside as having lost the support of his base,
00:32:57.000If Breitbart decides to go to war, do they lose readership?
00:33:16.000So we're about to enter a very interesting period now where a lot of Trump's base may turn on him for getting rid of Bannon right after a lot of Trump's base felt very enchanted with him after what he had to say about Charlottesville, at least the Bannon base.
00:33:29.000So it's going to be fascinating to watch.
00:33:43.000Steve is a very transactional fellow, so if he thinks that he will get better results by not attacking Trump, then he'll stay outside and sort of cheerlead for Trump in sort of the way Corey Lewandowski has after being ousted by Trump.
00:33:55.000But if he thinks that he is going to make a career of his own now, that he's famous enough that he can make a career of his own, he can go into talk radio, he can write books, he can
00:34:04.000He can run for office himself with the help of the alt-right.
00:34:06.000He can lead a populist revolution from the outside because Trump has abandoned his base.
00:34:11.000Then you could see an open war begin between Trump and one of the guys who was supposedly the intellectual in the Trumpism movement.
00:34:28.000So, I have to admit that I laughed a little bit when I saw this.
00:34:31.000Chris Cantwell is a really disgusting white supremacist who was at this white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and just talking about what a violent guy he was, over and over to Vice News, how he was preparing himself for violence, he wanted violence, he liked violence, he thought the violence was good.
00:34:49.000Here was Chris Cantwell to Vice News, just
00:35:58.000Who had openly talked about engaging in violence and now he's crying openly on camera.
00:36:02.000Does this seem like an emotionally stable human being to you?
00:36:04.000I mean, put everything else aside, this guy needs help.
00:36:06.000I mean, I actually feel a little bit bad for him in the sense that I think that- I don't feel bad for him because he's a bad person, but I feel bad for him just as a human being that this guy obviously is emotionally and mentally unstable.
00:36:33.000He was on with Tucker Carlson, and he started ripping on the tech industry.
00:36:38.000You know, how a lot of these tech companies had pulled service from some users, and Stein suggests that the government needs to get involved.
00:36:46.000I don't see why if the United States government thinks in 1918, no not 1918, I think it was about ten years before that, in 1909 whenever it was, that standard oil had gotten too big.
00:37:20.000When you have someone who is actually in control of ideas, who knows the data of just about all 7 billion people on the planet, and it is enforcing an ideological straitjacket, that is far more disturbing than if a Standard Oil or MGM are enforcing ideological straitjackets.
00:37:43.000I actually think we're moving into a very dark era where YouTube and Facebook and Twitter will bounce more and more people off their monopolies and that will lead to more violence.
00:37:59.000Okay, so I agree with Stein that a lot of these technological firms are engaging in some real nasty kind of thought policing.
00:38:08.000I agree with all that, but his idea that the government should get involved... I am on the side of the government should not be involved in any of this stuff.
00:38:14.000That if you don't like it, you can go build your own server.
00:38:16.000The idea that the government is going to start regulating these things means that the government is now going to have to take some sort of ownership of these.
00:38:24.000This is the problem that I have with... This is why I'm more of a libertarian in some of this than I am a conservative.
00:38:30.000I don't think the government should be involved in regulating how private companies do business.
00:38:34.000I think that's a dangerous, dangerous principle.
00:38:36.000And once you start doing it, it's hard to stop it.
00:38:38.000Okay, so let's jump right into the mailbag.
00:38:40.000So, Ian says, Ben, recently there have been advancements in science in relation to gene editing, and the future possibility of being able to safely edit people's genes seems to be getting closer and closer.
00:38:50.000From a religious perspective, do you believe this to be morally correct?
00:38:52.000I understand we are creations of God, but in examples of curing diseases and such, is it just for us to change ourselves from the way he has made us?
00:38:58.000So here is a distinction, well here's a logical distinction that you can take or leave.
00:39:06.000If I had a child who was going to be, and let's say the process of gene editing did not involve abortion in any way, it was just editing a gene so you're just fixing a problem.
00:39:18.000So let's say that my daughter had a development where she had a hole in her heart.
00:39:53.000I think that, you know, to prevent people from suffering with conditions I think is perfectly valid and normal.
00:40:03.000To enhance, however, I think you start to get into Dicey territory.
00:40:06.000This idea that you're going to enhance certain people's intelligence, or you're going to enhance their muscle power, or you're going to change the color of their eyes or their hair.
00:40:15.000I think now you're starting to play with dangerous stuff, because once you do that...
00:40:35.000One, you could see a situation where people just decide they don't want a particular type of human being so we're just going to breed it out of the population.
00:40:41.000You could also see a situation where the people who are very wealthy can afford gene editing and their kids are perfect and you can see a situation where poor people cannot.
00:40:51.000I don't think it's quite as easy as don't get involved in gene editing at all.
00:41:15.000in favor of science has led to the destruction of both faith and science.
00:41:19.000I discussed this last week in The Big Idea, but the idea that we are free human beings capable of making decisions, the idea that we have free will and change our minds, the idea that we have moral responsibility for our actions, all of these things are products of faith, not products of science, and science has actually undermined a lot of these claims, leading to a deterministic universe that forces you into a sort of existential nihilism, and that's very dangerous for society.
00:41:44.000Nicholas says, Dear Ben, today I got into an argument with an atheist friend of mine who believes that telling your kids that living a sinful life will lead you to hell is child abuse and will scar your kids for life.
00:41:52.000I'm not an extremely religious person, but I believe in my Christian values.
00:41:55.000How do I explain the morality of teaching kids about sin?
00:41:58.000Well, I mean, I think the fact is that teaching children that certain behavior is going to lead to an unhappy life, both here and in the hereafter, is not child abuse.
00:42:10.000Number one, if you're a person of faith, you don't believe that this is a conjecture.
00:42:13.000You believe that this is a fact, right?
00:42:15.000Faith believes that the idea of heaven or punishment in the afterlife or comeuppance in the afterlife is a real thing, so it's not like you're lying to your kid.
00:42:22.000This isn't Santa Claus or Easter or the Easter Bunny, right?
00:42:32.000I think that you can make the case against sin in almost secular terms very often by simply saying that things that are sinful lead you down a road that sullies you as a human being and makes your life more unhappy.
00:42:44.000There tends to be an extraordinarily high crossover between the things that God says are a sin in the Judeo-Christian system and things that end with nasty results to you in this life as well.
00:42:56.000I think that God set out a system that has created the greatest civilization in the history of mankind.
00:44:03.000Joy says, Do practicing Jews still believe that there is a Messiah, and why is there a difference between Jews today and Jews of the Old Testament?
00:44:24.000He has basically a very simple set of tasks.
00:44:26.000He's not some sort of superhuman figure.
00:44:27.000He's not a god come back to earth or anything like that.
00:44:31.000And as far as the difference between Jews today and Jews of the Old Testament, so Jews of the Old Testament were living, you know, in... I mean, the traditional Orthodox answer is there's not a huge difference, but the truth is that there's been development
00:44:46.000In Judaism, through the Oral Torah, through the Talmud, the rabbinic law has obviously developed a fair bit since the Old Testament, so there's a lot of stuff that Jews do today that's not explicit in the Old Testament, but we feel is implicit in the Old Testament.
00:44:58.000And so Moses may not recognize some of the practices that we pursue today in Judaism, but the idea in the Talmud, and it explicitly says this in the Talmud, is that Moses would come back and he'd be happy that he doesn't recognize that because he set up a system of lawmaking and law-giving, and we've developed that system.
00:45:14.000Sort of the same way that the founders might come back and look at America and say, wow, I don't really understand a lot of this, but they'd be happy with the system that they created.
00:45:21.000Luke says, what do you think of the idea that automation will one day take over so many jobs that a universal basic income might be necessary?
00:45:29.000So, as I've said before, I think that it's possible in the future that automation may do that, but I think that we are a long way from that.
00:45:37.000Every time there is an uptick in technology, there's a similar uptick in jobs of another type.
00:45:42.000I know that everyone always thinks that we've reached the end of the industrial road.
00:45:45.000People thought that in 1850 with the Industrial Revolution, which is why they were breaking machines.
00:45:50.000But I don't think that we've come close to that yet.
00:45:53.000Yeah, actually, after law school, I considered whether or not to join JAG.
00:45:58.000One of the reasons that I didn't join JAG at the time was because, as an Orthodox Jew, it's a little bit difficult to be in the military.
00:46:05.000It's not to say the military wouldn't accommodate it, but there are conflicts, religious conflicts, in terms of holidays off and Sabbath off and all this.
00:46:29.000I would like to know your thoughts on the new intentional walk rule in baseball.
00:46:31.000I always believed that having to actually throw the pitches would mess with the pitcher's rhythm and therefore add a readjustment dynamic when facing the next batter.
00:46:40.000This idea that you just signal and then somebody goes to first base as opposed to throwing the four pitches.
00:46:44.000I've actually seen games where there's a man on third and they're intentionally walking somebody because there's a man on second and third and they want to set up a force.
00:46:51.000And the pitcher throws it away and the run scores.
00:47:07.000There's still a lot of interest in baseball.
00:47:09.000It still draws millions and millions and millions of people to the ballpark every year.
00:47:13.000The one rule I do like is I do like this rule.
00:47:15.000The 30-second rule for pitches, I think, is good.
00:47:17.000And I think they should also have rules about how many times batters can step out of the batter's box and adjust their gloves and all this stuff.
00:48:05.000The wavelength of, I believe it's the wavelength of background radiation in the universe, and he talks about how as the universe expands, the wavelength of the background radiation gets longer, and so in fact, the number of waves in a 24-hour day of background radiation actually equates to the number of waves that would have been millions of years before the Big Bang occurred.