Students walk out of their schools for gun control to the delight of the media, while Stormy Daniels gets the red carpet treatment, and President Trump talks trade in the weirdest possible way. Ben Shapiro: As I predicted yesterday, all of the walkouts turned out to be a media propaganda campaign on behalf of gun control. It was not about solidarity with the slain students, it was not really about mourning over the slain ones, it wasn t about America coming together around the cause of stopping violence in schools, it s about a gun control program. That s all that was happening yesterday all across the U.S. It needn t have been a divisive one, and it certainly didn t need to be one. Ben: How many of those teachers would be okay with the students leaving their classrooms to protest abortion? What would you do if you were a pro-life walkout, and how do you think the teachers would react to it? Ben: Do you have an excuse for not showing up to class today, or are you a truant? What do you do when you don t feel the need to go to class, or you just don t have the time to go in the first place to do something you feel like you should be doing something about it? Ben: You don t actually have to be in class, do you need an excuse to be truant right now, right? And if you do have one, what would you actually be doing? Listen in to find out what you would do with that excuse notes you're writing in your head right now? You don't actually have a right to be excused for not going to class? Tweet me and let me know what you'd like to do with it, right or not have to go back to class in the next day, or what you're going to do in the middle of class, right, or so on that s going to get a chance to do it in your life, right in a day, etc., etc., right, etc. ? Thanks for listening to this episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Timestamps: 5:00 - What are you listening to me? 6:30 - How do you feel about this episode? 7:20 - What s your thoughts on that? 8:40 - Is it a good thing? 9:00 11:30 12:40 13:30 Is it possible to be an excuse? 15:20 16:00 Is that a pro life walkout?
00:00:00.000Students walk out of their schools for gun control to the delight of the media, Stormy Daniels gets the red carpet treatment, and President Trump talks trade in the weirdest possible way.
00:00:39.000We'll get to all of that in just a second.
00:00:41.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wink.
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00:02:24.000Do you have a situation here where thousands, hundreds of thousands of students are just getting up and walking out of school at the same time because they heard online they were supposed to do so?
00:02:31.000Or are they being told by their teachers and the teachers' unions and all of the leftist administrators at school that it's a good thing for them to get up and leave class?
00:02:38.000Because I guarantee you that if I had gotten up and ditched class in high school, there would have been some sort of
00:02:43.000Some sort of excuse note needed, right?
00:02:46.000You don't just get to leave class in the middle of class when you're in junior high or high school.
00:02:50.000You actually have to have an excuse for doing so, otherwise you are a truant, right?
00:02:53.000So here, the schools themselves are writing the excuse notes.
00:02:56.000Now let me just ask a question that's been asked by a lot of folks down the right.
00:02:59.000Let's say there were a pro-life walkout tomorrow.
00:03:01.000How many of these teachers do you think would be okay with the students leaving?
00:03:04.000If all the students just got up and walked outside to protest for 10 minutes,
00:03:08.000The one million abortions plus in the United States per year.
00:03:11.000If every student in America did that, how many of those teachers do you think would excuse the students?
00:03:15.000And how many of them do you think would actually punish the students?
00:03:19.000How many do you think would dock the students in some way?
00:03:21.000In other words, one of the problems here is that you have these leftist propaganda centers called our public schools that are taught by teachers who are members of teachers unions, who are Democratic Party cronies, and then
00:03:31.000They use that position in order to promulgate a certain agenda.
00:03:34.000So all these students get up and they walk out.
00:03:36.000Of course, this thing really was organized in AstroTurf by the Women's March, and they used the same organizational structures in order to push it.
00:03:42.000The Women's March, of course, run by some of the worst people on planet Earth, members of the Louis Farrakhan contingent.
00:03:48.000And so they organized this whole thing as a gun control push.
00:03:50.000Now, what was so annoying about this, and I discussed it yesterday, I read a bunch of letters from students
00:03:56.000I mean, really, I must have received at least 250 emails yesterday from students around the country who are upset about how they were treated yesterday during these walkouts.
00:04:07.000I was hearing from tons of people yesterday that this was going to happen, and then it did.
00:04:11.000That this turned into a propaganda effort that this was never about solidarity with the students.
00:04:15.000That if you said, listen, I am in favor of gun rights, and I also feel terrible for what happened for the students, that you were treated like garbage.
00:04:23.000And the most obvious example of this is clip 13.
00:04:26.000So yesterday, there was a clip that was going around the internet, pretty amazing.
00:04:30.000One of the students walked out of class and did what I suggested, right?
00:04:32.000Brought a sign that was a pro-Second Amendment sign that
00:04:36.000Also expressed sympathy for the children who were killed, and he was escorted from the protest, right?
00:04:40.000He was told he couldn't be at the protest, and they actually tried to push him into a police car.
00:05:38.000It's not been verified that the student's story is the entire truth.
00:05:40.000We'll have to hear from the school exactly what happened.
00:05:42.000But is there a question that if the student had been holding a sign that said, gun control now, that everything would have been fine for him?
00:05:49.000I have very little doubt that's the case.
00:05:50.000It was obvious what the networks were trying to do here.
00:05:52.000It's obvious what the media were trying to do here.
00:05:54.000Again, these are the same media who every year ignore the March for Life, which draws hundreds of thousands of people to Washington, D.C., and the coverage is always scant and minimal, even though it's a huge number of young people who are going to that particular march.
00:07:04.000I mean, last week there was a walkout as well, and it was in California, and there were a bunch of students who essentially went wild.
00:07:09.000Now, that was not representative of these rallies.
00:07:12.000The only reason I'm pointing this out is to point out that young people, who are supposed to be our leaders, sometimes are very stupid.
00:07:17.000Okay, just like old people are sometimes very stupid.
00:07:19.000And so granting them, conferring upon them some sort of grand intellectual legitimacy because they're young seems to me really, really foolish.
00:07:26.000This was, in fact, as I say, a left propaganda effort, if you don't believe me.
00:07:30.000Here's what it looked like when Bernie Sanders showed up at the walkout.
00:07:33.000So no Republicans were invited to the walkout.
00:07:35.000No Republicans were invited to speak at the walkout.
00:07:37.000None of them were invited to the steps of the Capitol for the walkout.
00:07:40.000But Bernie Sanders walked out to join the students in the gun protest, and he was treated like a hero.
00:08:20.000This is the way the media were playing it last night.
00:08:21.000Of course, Bernie Sanders speaking and shouting for gun control is an amazing thing, considering that Bernie Sanders comes from Vermont, a state with very little gun control, even though it is a very left state.
00:08:31.000You, you the young people of this country, are leading the nation and the country.
00:08:42.000If you can't hear crazy, I'll bring it.
00:08:44.000You, the young people of this country, are leading the nation.
00:08:46.000Please give me money, please, for my next campaign.
00:08:53.000The time is now for me to pretend to be relevant as though I had done anything except run for president in my entire career.
00:09:05.000So Bernie Sanders stepping out, and of course, you're not seeing any actual discussion here.
00:09:10.000Now, a guy who I've become friendly with, Kyle Kashuv, a student over at Parkland High School, he actually went around on Capitol Hill, did more than Bernie Sanders.
00:09:18.000Bernie Sanders has refused to meet with him.
00:09:20.000Apparently, there are a bunch of other legislators, right and left, who have met with him.
00:09:24.000And Kashuv has done a lot of the work that the other kids at his high school won't.
00:09:29.000He's actually going around trying to speak with various members of the legislature.
00:09:32.000He spoke with Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson.
00:09:38.000So he's met with a bunch of legislators he's met with President Trump.
00:09:41.000The idea here, trying to come to some sort of consensus about things that can be done.
00:09:44.000The kids at Marjory Stoneman High School, though, the ones who are being shown on the media, are not the ones who are meeting with legislators on Capitol Hill.
00:09:50.000They are the ones instead appearing on Ellen and then shouting about how America's a terrible, horrible, very bad place, where the old people suck, right?
00:09:56.000They're the ones who go on Bill Maher and say, F my parents.
00:09:58.000Which is just a great way of getting things done, which, again, shows there's a lot about moral posturing and not very much about getting anything done.
00:10:06.000So Viacom Networks decided to go silent for 17 minutes in order to—this is Nickelodeon and MTV—they went silent for 17 minutes in order to pay tribute to the Parkland students.
00:10:18.000They would say, oh, this isn't political at all, except that I don't remember them doing this after the Boston Marathon bombing.
00:10:22.000I don't remember them doing this after the Orlando shooting.
00:10:25.000I don't remember them doing this after any terror attack.
00:10:27.000They only do this after a particular shooting that is driving a particular narrative on a particular day at a particular time when everyone else is walking out.
00:10:35.000So here's what it looked like on Viacom networks yesterday morning.
00:10:40.000They printed on their screen, Viacom stands with all students as they participate in the national school walkout against gun violence.
00:10:46.000So that's VH1, it's TV Land, it's Paramount, it's Nick Jr.
00:10:51.000So if you just want to put your kid down for a second and have him watch Nick Jr., you couldn't do that because Viacom was busy protesting with all the kids.
00:10:57.000Listen, their cooperation with this corporate virtue signaling is really amazing.
00:11:01.000And it's obvious that all the people in Hollywood who proclaim they have no political agenda have a pretty obvious political agenda.
00:11:07.000If there were a school walkout against the violence of the murder of the unborn, and there are many, many, many more children who are killed in the womb every year than are killed in schools every year.
00:11:35.000But don't pretend that it's news coverage.
00:11:37.000When CNN puts on a town hall that is essentially a show trial on behalf of gun control, don't pretend that that's you being a neutral arbiter of the facts.
00:11:48.000If you're the media and you proclaim all you care about is ratings on the one hand and just pleasing people on the other, entertaining people on the other,
00:11:56.000Then don't claim that this is apolitical, because this is not apolitical.
00:12:02.000We're going to get to some of the stuff that students had to say yesterday, again, proving that 17-year-olds don't know everything, despite their own maybe beliefs to the contrary.
00:12:11.000We'll get to all of that in just a second.
00:12:12.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Texture.
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00:13:16.000And magazine journalism lately has been really good.
00:13:17.000Like, The Atlantic has done a lot of really good long-form journalism.
00:13:20.000The New Yorker, of course, broke the Weinstein story.
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00:13:46.000Okay, so here are some of the things that the students had to say at this rally.
00:13:50.000Again, the rally was happening all over the country, so there was a set of disparate rallies happening everywhere.
00:13:54.000Here is USA Today covering this as though it is one of the great moments in human history, when in reality it's just an AstroTurf leftist thing.
00:14:03.000Again, when teachers are telling students to walk out, this is teachers using students to push their political agenda.
00:14:27.000It was led by a bunch of adults who decided they were going to work with a couple of students and use those students as a prop in order to push a particular agenda.
00:14:45.000But we're going to analyze your arguments with the same seriousness we would analyze anyone else's arguments, and we also cannot pretend that this entire thing was just some spontaneous uprising of the people, and that everybody just decided all of a sudden—like, they're trying to portray this as like it's the Arab Spring, like there's this horrible superstructure run by the NRA and Dana Lash, and now all those people have to be brought low.
00:15:07.000What's happening here is a bunch of Teachers Union members are telling their students we're all going to walk out at a particular time, a bunch of principals are green lighting it, and then a bunch of students are saying, well what the hell, if everybody else is walking out I may as well, at least I don't look like a jerk that way.
00:15:18.000So here are some of the students who are speaking at the walkouts.
00:15:46.000Second, this is not happening every day.
00:15:48.000Clearly, it's not happening every day.
00:15:49.000The number of school shootings in America is on the decline.
00:15:52.000Third, would you not want to—I mean, we teach kids stop, drop, and roll from the time that they are five years old, right?
00:15:57.000We teach them what's happening in case of a fire.
00:15:59.000We teach them—for generations in this country, we taught people, in case of nuclear attack, get under your desk for all the help that would do you, right?
00:16:05.000So, you don't want to be taught what to do in an emergency situation?
00:16:09.000There's never going to be a point where we don't teach kids what to do in an emergency situation.
00:16:12.000We should teach kids what to do in an emergency situation.
00:16:14.000Does this mean that we shouldn't try to stop the shootings?
00:16:16.000No, it means we should, but we have different ways of doing that, and it doesn't all involve seizing 300 million guns.
00:16:28.000We cannot just allow our legislators to say that our thoughts and prayers are with the victims, because that's not going to bring them back, and that's not going to prevent us from joining them.
00:17:53.000And for 17 kids who don't have graduation or can't go on with their lives or can't do what they wanted to do, it's really sad.
00:18:00.000We are the beginning of something that is long overdue and I cannot begin to express how proud I am to be involved.
00:18:08.000Everyone is somehow connected to someone of gun violence and someone who suffered from a mass shooting and there's so many that it's just rocking the world right now.
00:18:17.000OK, again, this dramatic video, the voiceovers, if you're not seeing this, you're just listening to this later, then what it's actually showing in the video is not just the faces of the students who are talking and crying.
00:18:28.000It's actually showing videos of all the people walking out.
00:18:31.000It's showing this dramatic video with the rising music, the swelling music from the end of the Truman Show.
00:18:36.000You're supposed to feel something when you watch this.
00:18:39.000It's why the media is covering this the way that it is.
00:18:42.000And the sort of propaganda being put out by the students is obviously not well-informed.
00:18:46.000I'm not going to say that the students, you know, are—know exactly what they're saying.
00:18:49.000I think, in many cases, they're just adopting talking points that they're being cheered for.
00:18:53.000People respond to applause, and the media are cheering folks.
00:18:55.000They're putting them on Bill Maher, and they're putting them on Ellen, and they're doing all of this in the aftermath of a shooting because they want to push—Kyle Kashuv
00:19:03.000There are a bunch of students like him, by the way.
00:19:04.000He's not the only one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
00:19:07.000There are a bunch of students who are writing me.
00:19:09.000None of these kids are being put on TV.
00:19:10.000They're not being put on TV because the media agree with certain of these kids, but do not agree with others of these kids.
00:19:15.000Here's another one of these students talking about how—this is one of the rallies, I think this is the one in Washington, D.C.—talking about how getting shot at any moment is an American thought.
00:19:24.000Through all their struggles, they never had to worry about someone barging into their classroom with an assault rifle and slaughtering everyone in their class.
00:19:57.000But again, one of the reasons that if you ask kids all over the world, all over the United States, what are the chances that you're going to be shot in a mass shooting?
00:20:07.000The numbers, I'm sure people would wildly exaggerate, right?
00:20:09.000People always think that they are likely to be shot in a crime, they're likely to be killed, they're likely to be murdered.
00:20:14.000And the chances of that happening in the United States are extraordinarily low.
00:20:17.000The chances of you being shot in a mass shooting in the United States are
00:20:24.000The lifetime risk of being killed in the United States by any firearm, according to the National Safety Council, is 1 in 358.
00:20:30.000The lifetime risk of dying in a mass shooting is 1 in 110,000, which is the same chance of dying from a dog attack or a legal execution in the United States.
00:20:41.000And a school shooting, it's even lower than that.
00:20:43.000A school shooting, it's like one in millions, I believe.
00:20:46.000So, the notion that all of these kids are sitting around worried about being shot, maybe that's because of the media coverage, but it is certainly not true that your chances are very high of being shot in a classroom or that you should waste a lot of time worrying about it as a general rule.
00:21:06.000The Safe Schools Initiative says that, this is according to Campus Safety,
00:21:10.000The odds of a high school student getting into a fight at school are one in seven.
00:21:16.000But that means that the chances that you will be killed in a school shooting are less than one in one million.
00:21:22.000But we're being told that this is an American thought, this is something that kids are thinking, only because the media want you to think about these school shootings every day so that they can push the idea that we ought to remove guns from American society.
00:21:32.000Here's another student who is saying that the kids should fight back and prevent
00:21:37.000And I believe that as students, we need to make a few things clear.
00:21:39.000To start, we will not sit in classrooms with armed teachers.
00:22:26.000You're saying you don't want an armed guard at school to protect you from a piece of crap who barges in with a gun to murder you because it feels like a prison?
00:22:32.000There are kids all over the world who are actually going to school in situations where it is basically like a prison, right?
00:22:38.000If you're in Afghanistan and you're going to school, it's going to be protected like a prison because otherwise terrorists are going to barge in.
00:22:59.000And I want to talk about some Stormy Daniels news, because the media are fawning over Stormy Daniels in a pretty shocking way.
00:23:06.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at PolicyGenius.
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00:24:31.000A lot of hubbub breaking out about Stormy Daniels.
00:24:34.000So Stormy Daniels' lawyer is out there speaking to the press.
00:24:37.000Stormy Daniels is supposed to do a 60 Minutes exclusive.
00:24:42.000So I guess Stormy Daniels' lawyer, I guess, is doing an exclusive on 60 Minutes on Sunday.
00:24:45.000So the lawyer's name is Michael Avenetti.
00:24:48.000And Trump, of course, has essentially sued Stormy Daniels, trying to get Stormy Daniels not to talk about the fact that they were knocking boots back in 2007, the year, or 2006, the year after Barron Trump was born, and while Trump was already married to Melania.
00:25:02.000Now, number one, no one in the United States cares about this because Trump is garbage with women.
00:25:39.000Uh, and, you know, he's been married three times, he's cheated on all three of his wives, he cheated on wife number one with wife number two, cheated on wife number two with wife number three, and cheated on wife number three with Stormy Daniels, among others.
00:25:49.000So, this is not a guy who any of this stuff is going to cling to.
00:25:53.000Nobody cares because we all know who he is.
00:25:56.000There's no new information added to the system.
00:25:58.000The new information the media are trying to add to the system is that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels to shut up right before the election.
00:26:03.000Now, Trump has said, I didn't know anything about it.
00:26:18.000Anyone who says differently is saying silly talk.
00:26:21.000Anyway, so Avenetti debunked the notion that Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen, negotiated with Stormy Daniels on a nondisclosure agreement independently of the Trump Organization.
00:26:30.000He says, That's what Anderson Cooper said in agreement with Avenetti.
00:26:32.000Here's what it looked like last night on CNN.
00:26:42.000The focus of this filing in February was to gag my client, put a muzzle on her, and prevent her from speaking.
00:26:51.000And that's why they filed the arbitration, to obtain what's called a temporary restraining order.
00:26:56.000So this idea that there is a separation between EC-LLC and Donald Trump and the Trump Organization is a complete and utter fiction.
00:28:30.000None of these women were treated with respect.
00:28:31.000They were all treated like garbage by the media for legitimately decades.
00:28:34.000Stormy Daniels, who's a porn star who had consensual sex with the president before he was the president, and then was paid off by the president in a contract that she signed, and she took the money, and now she wants to talk about it.
00:28:44.000Now she's being treated as some sort of victim.
00:28:46.000She's being treated as some sort of heroine for coming out and speaking, oh, the bravery of Stormy Daniels.
00:28:50.000Now, I don't have to like Trump's sexual behavior in order to recognize that Stormy Daniels is not exactly the Virgin Mary.
00:28:57.000I don't have to believe that Trump is great with women to recognize that Stormy Daniels is not exactly standing up out of a pure sense of righteous indignation and virtue.
00:29:26.000All that's changed is that there's a Republican in office, and the Republican in office should be slapped around as much as possible.
00:29:31.000If this were a Democrat in office, and if this were Barack Obama, and he had sex with a porn star and paid her off to keep silent, people would have said, this is a sexual matter.
00:29:39.000We'd get exactly the same—they'd say it was consensual, because this was consensual.
00:29:43.000We'd get exactly the same crap that we got when Bill Clinton was president, because the media are filled with Democrats.
00:29:48.000If you didn't believe it from all the talk about gun control, the media are filled top to bottom with Democrats, and so they are treating Stormy Daniels as though she's anything but a porn star who wants to make a little extra money by telling lewd stories out of school about the president's junk, which is really what this is.
00:30:55.000I know him, you know, reasonably well.
00:30:58.000And it was just a terrific experience.
00:31:00.000I don't want to sound sophomoric, but it was just a really good thing.
00:31:03.000So I will say, I think that it is very funny that the president basically hired Kudlow because he thinks that Kudlow is on TV a lot.
00:31:10.000And he's about to do the same thing with Pete Hegseth over at Fox News.
00:31:13.000The rumor is that the current secretary of the VA, who stinks, Eric Shulkin, he's awful, that he's about to be ousted, which he should be.
00:31:20.000In favor of Pete Hegseth, who Trump likes because he's on TV.
00:31:23.000In fact, there was a report last week that Trump, during a meeting with his VA secretary, actually called up Hegseth on the phone and said he'd just seen him on Fox & Friends and wanted to get him in on the conversation.
00:31:33.000So the president is governing by TV, which, listen, if he's got the right people from TV, I'm happy about that.
00:31:38.000I mean, Obama said that he governed by TV because he never saw anything bad that happened in his administration until I saw it on the news.
00:31:45.000Right, so at least if we're going to govern by TV, hopefully Trump will pick some of the best commentators from TV and bring those people into his administration.
00:31:53.000But it is funny that he's replacing a free trader with a free trader.
00:31:55.000Okay, so, meanwhile, Trump had, there's a story in the Washington Post about how Trump talks about trade with foreign leaders.
00:32:47.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:55.000Alrighty, so, President Trump, apparently, it's going to be good to have him talk to Larry Kudlow, because when the president is talking not to Larry Kudlow, he says silly things.
00:33:06.000This is an amazing story from the Washington Post.
00:33:08.000President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech on Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S.
00:33:13.000ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether this was true.
00:33:56.000But that doesn't include energy and timber.
00:33:57.000And when you do, we lose $17 billion a year.
00:34:00.000OK, so Trump basically just made it up, right?
00:34:02.000He goes into a meeting with Trudeau, and he wants to rip on him over the trade deficit because Trump is under the wildness impression that trade deficits inevitably mean American economic decline.
00:34:14.000What is more important is your trade policy.
00:34:16.000A free trade policy makes your country richer.
00:34:18.000A non-free trade policy makes your country poorer.
00:34:20.000And there's a whole article in the Journal of American Greatness, which I'm writing a response to as soon as this show is over, about how I get free trade wrong, like me personally.
00:34:28.000To which I would say, then you need to talk to every economist for the past 200 years, because
00:34:32.000The notion that you're going to make an economy better with tariffs by protecting certain industries is just silly.
00:34:37.000And there's a more complex argument that is made over at Journal of American Greatness, so you'll have to go over later at Daily Wire.
00:34:41.000Maybe I'll talk about it tomorrow a little bit on the show.
00:34:44.000But again, Trump is under this impression that if we just tariff everybody to death, then this makes America stronger.
00:35:05.000Now, obviously, this has nothing to do with the Nazis' racial policies.
00:35:08.000I'm just talking about economic policies.
00:35:09.000The policy of autarky was really stupid, and it ended up destroying Germany and their manufacturing capacity, actually, up until World War II.
00:35:55.000According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, it reports that in 2016, the United States exported $12.5 billion more in goods and services than it imported from Canada, leading to a trade surplus, not a deficit.
00:36:06.000So then Trump tweeted out that we do have a trade deficit.
00:37:03.000If Trump is going to meet with Kim Jong-un, and he's simultaneously threatening South Korea that he's going to pull out troops, then what happens if Kim Jong-un says, listen, I'll get rid of my nuclear program, and you just get rid of the troops in South Korea?
00:37:13.000The answer is disaster, because if Trump actually wants to move the troops out of South Korea, suddenly South Korea falls into the orbit of the Chinese, as opposed to being an American satellite state to a certain extent.
00:37:23.000Trump said, our allies care about themselves.
00:38:11.000There is no test where they take a bowling ball and drop it on top of a car in Japan to determine whether the car should be imported to Japan.
00:38:27.000Trump said he didn't even want Japan to pay tariffs, but to build more automobiles in the U.S., saying that he just wants Japan—well, if you want Japan to actually move more automobile manufacturing to the United States, they already build tons of autos in the United States.
00:38:44.000All you have to do is lower the tax burden in the United States, which is one of the things that Trump has done by lowering the corporate tax rates.
00:38:50.000He said, the free trade globalists are against his trade moves because they're worldly people.
00:39:12.000It is a tax on everyone to the benefit of a few.
00:39:14.000So the only argument that's been made on behalf of tariffs is basically that these industries are so important, they are so vital, that everybody in the United States should be taxed in order to benefit that few people.
00:42:09.000The bad reason why people are not taking this seriously is because there is this view in American culture that sex is an ultimate good.
00:42:17.000Not that it's good within certain confines, but that sex and sexual activity and the kissing and all this stuff, that it's good under any circumstances, right?
00:42:24.000Have you ever seen the movie Pleasantville, which is an awful film?
00:42:27.000The first 30 minutes of the film is really good, and then the rest of the movie is garbage.
00:42:32.000So the basic concept of the film is that there's a bunch of people who are living in modern times, and Tobey Maguire loves watching this show called Pleasantville from the 1950s, where everything is really clean-cut and really everybody's very nice to each other, and then he somehow gets sucked back into that with his sister.
00:42:46.000And his sister is basically, in the movie, promiscuous and sexually active, and she goes back there and she brings color to the lives of all the people of Pleasantville with her sexual liberation
00:42:56.000Because obviously modern morality is better than 1950s morality, despite the rates of STDs and single motherhood.
00:43:01.000Everything is better now than it was then.
00:43:03.000So the way that you liberate people is through sex, not through commitment, not through obligation.
00:43:07.000The way that you make people free is through random sexual activity.
00:43:10.000So this guy should just be happy because after all, Katy Perry just kissed him and Katy Perry's famous and Katy Perry is beautiful.
00:43:15.000So therefore, he should be a happy camper.
00:43:17.000His consent doesn't matter at all because any sort of sexual activity is fine.
00:43:20.000But that obviously is not the whole story.
00:43:22.000There's also the part of the story that he's a male and she's a female.
00:43:47.000That is considered women's empowerment.
00:43:49.000So Katy Perry's empowered so she can do whatever she wants, even if the guy doesn't want it.
00:43:53.000Okay, so that is the bad reason why people are ignoring this.
00:43:57.000The good reason why people are ignoring this to a certain extent is because there is, and it's not really a good reason, it's a mediocre reason, is because of course there's a double standard.
00:44:06.000No one sees the male sexual instinct in the way that they see the female sexual instinct.
00:44:10.000No one sees Katy Perry as a sexual predator because she's a woman.
00:44:13.000No one would see a man doing this as anything but a sexual predator because he's a man.
00:44:17.000There's a good reason for that, because there are natural differences between men and women.
00:44:20.000It may be a dramatic overrate of the situation, right, to extend it to what Katy Perry did here and say that's okay.
00:44:26.000But, it is true that human beings see a natural difference between men and women, which is why we treat these situations differently, and yet we as a society deny that those differences exist, which is this really bizarre thing that we do, and really stupid.
00:44:38.000Also, one of the things that bugs me about this particularly, is this guy was basically shamed, right?
00:44:44.000Because virginity until marriage is stupid, and kissing until love, waiting to kiss until love, that's stupid too.
00:44:49.000As a proactive, as a real advocate for that position, that you should wait until marriage, that you should reserve physical intimacy for the person that you love and are committed to for life, I think that this is just another, just throw another branch on the fire in the conflagration that eats Western values from the inside.
00:45:08.000Okay, that's a pretty deep read on a pretty minor incident, but let's get to some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
00:46:25.000Archipelago is a series of islands by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
00:46:30.000Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:46:36.000So, Senator Rand Paul, obviously a civil libertarian, and he's been very much opposed to, for example, the Bush administration policy of treating prisoners of war as terrorists captured abroad, not as prisoners of war, but as detainees, as unlawful combatants, and the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on them.
00:46:55.000Now, it is true that enhanced interrogation techniques allowed us to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the organizers of 9-11, we wouldn't have otherwise been able to get, but Rand Paul has been adamantly and steadfastly opposed to that.
00:47:06.000What's not fine is him slandering Gina Haspel.
00:47:07.000So, Gina Haspel is Trump's pick to lead the CIA, and she oversaw a secret prison in Thailand, which was used for rendition, and she's been bashed for that, because the idea here is that we should never have used rendition.
00:47:21.000The rendition program is that terrorists would be captured abroad.
00:47:24.000Instead of bringing them back home, we would hand them over to a U.S.
00:47:25.000ally, and those people would be able to use methods that we would not approve here in the United States, according to the New York Times.
00:47:32.000She ran a prison code named Cat's Eye, and that began her deep involvement in the agency's counterterrorism operation, showed her willingness to take part in the agency's Rendition Detention and Interrogation program, which shaped her career.
00:47:43.000This is when she was younger and she was rising in the organization.
00:47:47.000She's the first woman who would become the head of the CIA if she were appointed.
00:47:51.000There's no evidence that she enjoys torture.
00:47:53.000But Rand Paul decides that this is where he's going to go.
00:47:55.000Well, there was a book written about the torture treatment, the waterboarding, and some of her comments were basically gleeful.
00:48:02.000The man can't breathe and he's choking on saliva and water.
00:48:05.000And she's saying, oh, you're a good actor.
00:48:08.000And it's, you know, I can't believe a grown man's crying because of this treatment.
00:48:12.000And it almost seemed to be a little bit of glee in her voice that she actually enjoyed the torture.
00:48:17.000And I think that's not who we need to lead the CIA.
00:48:19.000There are many career officials of the CIA who would be perfectly competent to do this, but we should not reward somebody who actually participated in torture treatment.
00:48:27.000Okay, there's a particular problem with this is that he's completely misquoting the book, okay?
00:48:31.000The book does not even mention Haspel.
00:50:28.000I think it's still questionable as to whether it was immoral.
00:50:30.000I think that waterboarding terrorists for information that could prevent future terrorist attacks, I am not going to pretend that I think that that's a terrible thing.
00:50:36.000I don't think that's a terrible thing.