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00:00:00.000New Zealand's government bans the sale of semi-automatic weapons, the woke scolds come for Jordan Peterson, and President Trump keeps getting in his own way.
00:00:24.000Today, the debt is nearly $22 trillion and it is rising like a hockey stick.
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00:01:31.000Alright, so the big breaking news this morning is obviously that New Zealand has now banned semi-automatic weapons.
00:01:39.000They're imposing a broadband on guns after this horrific white supremacist terror attack on mosques in Christchurch.
00:01:46.000According to the Wall Street Journal, New Zealand moved to ban military-style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles, and high-capacity magazines.
00:01:53.000Whenever folks say military-style, they just mean semi-automatic weapons because The only thing that distinguishes a semi-automatic military weapon from any other semi-automatic weapon is presumably caliber size, muzzle velocity maybe, and the look of the gun.
00:02:08.000Usually when folks on the left say military style, what they mean is it's black and it has scary grips.
00:02:13.000The things that make it look scary, even though it doesn't actually affect the functioning of the gun.
00:02:17.000The shooter had held a valid gun license.
00:02:20.000They'd actually applied for and gotten a gun license, but the weapons used in the terrorist attack included semi-automatic rifles that had been illegally upgraded with higher capacity magazines to enable 30 bullets or more to be fired without reloading.
00:02:32.000His license restricted his magazine capacity to seven bullets.
00:02:35.000So obviously, more gun laws will certainly prevent this sort of thing in the future, considering this guy was already violating current gun laws when he went and shot up a bunch of innocent people.
00:02:44.000Also violating current murder laws, and assault laws, and all sorts of other laws.
00:02:48.000Turns out mass shooters don't really care about violating laws.
00:02:51.000This is one of the things about mass shooters.
00:02:53.000And this is particularly true when it comes to mass shooters living in quote-unquote gun-restricted societies.
00:02:59.000The truth is that if you look statistically at on a per capita basis, which countries have the highest rate of mass shooting deaths, the United States is not in the top 10.
00:03:07.000And that includes industrialized countries.
00:03:09.000We have a lower rate of mass shooting death than does France.
00:03:16.000It's emotionally driven policy, and it's understandable on an emotional level, but it is bad policy because bad policy is rarely, good policy is rarely taken at a moment's notice on the back of a tragedy.
00:03:29.000It's rare that something terrible happens and people immediately snap to the most reasonable makes sense policy.
00:03:33.000This is true in your own personal life, and this is true when it comes to government policy as well.
00:03:37.000The Prime Minister of New Zealand, whose name is Jacinda Ardern, said that her government would also pay cash to gun owners who surrender their weapons in a nationwide amnesty.
00:03:46.000She is proposing jail time or fines for people who refuse to turn over those weapons.
00:03:50.000Here is what the Prime Minister of New Zealand had to say.
00:03:52.000Today I'm announcing that New Zealand will ban all military-style semi-automatic weapons.
00:05:38.000It is very difficult to create good policy on the back of statistically rare events that don't have an endemic basis to them.
00:05:46.000When you talk about events that you can draw, that you can extrapolate from, you have to extrapolate to something that makes sense in correlative fashion.
00:05:56.000So for example, if you wanted to say that white supremacist ideology is inherently bad, And therefore, we should crack down on, in non-governmental ways, I don't think the government has a role in restricting free speech, but the government should monitor white supremacist chat boards, for example.
00:06:12.000I would agree, because number one, the ideology is itself evil, and second of all, There's a good correlation, or at least some correlation, between violence and evil acts and white supremacy.
00:06:22.000That is obviously not the case when it comes to gun ownership in New Zealand, where again, hundreds of thousands of people own guns.
00:06:28.00035 murders took place in 2017, and one horrible evil event now means that the New Zealand government is going to criminalize legitimately hundreds of thousands of people?
00:06:47.000One third of the guns were actually turned back in to the government of Australia.
00:06:51.000Now, folks say, well, you know, the number of murders went down in Australia after that.
00:06:55.000Right, if you actually look at the chart of murders in Australia, they were declining before the gun buyback, they were declining after the gun buyback.
00:07:01.000If you look at the chart of murders in the United States, as the number of guns in circulation in the United States continued to rapidly increase from the early 90s to now, the murder rate went down at a rate faster than Australia's murder rate went down.
00:07:14.000When folks say, well, there haven't been a mass shooting since 1996 in Australia.
00:07:18.000That's when they implemented this mass gun confiscation.
00:07:24.000So you're talking about going from a rate of maybe two every 10 years in Australia to a rate of zero in the past 10 years.
00:07:30.000That's not statistically significant, obviously.
00:07:34.000Making bad policy on the back of tragedy is generally a mistake.
00:07:41.000And as I say, this is indeed bad policy.
00:07:43.000Now, one of the things that has happened here, and it's amazing to watch, is members of the Democratic Party have of course jumped on this, and they've suggested that this demonstrates that Action can be taken if people want to take it.
00:07:54.000Now, I'm old enough to remember when Democrats were saying they did not want to confiscate your guns.
00:07:58.000Hillary Clinton used to say this all the time in 2016.
00:08:00.000All those crazy Republicans saying, we want to come confiscate your guns.
00:08:04.000We don't want to confiscate your guns, guys.
00:09:04.000And they are localized in high crime areas.
00:09:06.000You go to an area like Vermont, there are no murders and lots of guns.
00:09:09.000You go to an area like New Zealand, no murders, lots of guns.
00:09:12.000And you go to New Orleans, lots of guns, lots of murder.
00:09:16.000So the suggestion is not that guns and murder are not linked.
00:09:19.000They can be, but it depends on the human beings who are holding the guns, obviously.
00:09:25.000And it is worth noting here, as I said earlier, that statistics that suggest that America is rampantly filled with mass shootings in a way that other nations are not, is simply not true.
00:09:36.000John Lott, who's written extensively about this, writes a piece in the New York Post with Michael Weiser, talking about whether America leads the world in mass shootings.
00:09:45.000He says that there was a study that came out and reported that over 47 years, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of the world.
00:09:53.000This is according to a study by a fellow named, a criminologist named Adam Lankford, and this received all sorts of coverage.
00:10:00.000Lott asked him to release the list, and Lankford refused to release the list.
00:10:05.000A new report that was created by John Lott collected cases using the same definition of mass public shootings used by Lankford.
00:10:12.000We know of no way to discover most of the cases where four people have been shot to death in an incident in Africa or many other parts of the world during the 60s, 70s, 80s or even 1990s.
00:10:21.000And so we looked at the last 15 years, from 1998 to 2012, of the 47 years that were examined by his study.
00:10:27.000Even when we used the coding choices most charitable to Lankford, such as excluding any cases of insurgencies or battles over territory, his estimate of the US share of shooters falls from 31% to 1.43%.
00:10:38.000It also accounts for 2.1% of burgers and 2.88% of their attacks.
00:10:43.000All are much less than the United States' 4.6% share of the population.
00:10:47.000Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the United States ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate.
00:10:57.000Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Russia all have at least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
00:11:05.000Well, one possibility here is that it is not guns that enable mass shooters.
00:11:08.000Guns also help deter a lot of this stuff from happening.
00:11:12.000It is also possible that low crime areas tend not to have lots of gun crime.
00:11:17.000And that is true in New Zealand, as it is true in Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont.
00:11:21.000The reason that I bring all this stuff up is because there is this implication from the left that is really gross.
00:11:27.000That if you don't agree with them on gun policy, it's because you don't care about dead people.
00:11:31.000Maybe I do really care about dead people and the best way I think to protect people from being dead is to arm people outside of, for example, mosques and churches and synagogues.
00:11:41.000It's an argument I made in the wake of the Tree of Life shooting.
00:11:44.000It's one of the reasons why we have armed guards outside of the synagogue that I attend.
00:11:47.000And not only that, I have personal security that comes with me to synagogue.
00:11:51.000And one of the reasons for this is because I don't believe that law enforcement can get there in time if somebody decides to do something evil.
00:11:59.000It seems like an odd contention that you're going to remove guns from some 230,000 New Zealand citizens who are licensed to carry and licensed to register to own guns.
00:12:10.000You're going to remove those guns from those people and somehow New Zealand is going to get safer than the 35 murders committed in 2017?
00:12:16.000All because an Australian citizen who violated gun laws decided to do something completely evil?
00:12:21.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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00:13:28.000Okay, so again, here is the reality about violent crime in the United States.
00:13:32.000Okay, violent crime is down and has been on the decline for decades in the United States, despite the increase in the number of guns in circulation in the United States.
00:13:40.000The principal public safety hazard when it comes to guns in the United States is suicide, not mass shootings.
00:13:51.000This is according to Heritage Foundation, and this is correct.
00:13:53.000America is relatively safe, and the trend is toward becoming safer, and this has been true for legitimately years.
00:13:59.000There have been minor increases in certain types of violent crimes in large metropolitan areas, but those increases are nowhere near those seen in the 1990s, despite the fact that, again, there are increasing number of people who have guns in the United States on an absolute level, and an increasing number of guns in circulation in the United States on an absolute level.
00:14:19.000And as we say, crime is local, and crime is localized.
00:14:23.000So, targeting an enormous number of people who are law-abiding citizens in the United States, as the left is now suggesting, is such a mistake.
00:14:31.000First of all, you really think it's going to go well?
00:14:32.000You think that everybody in Texas is going to turn over their gun to the government for a cash buyback?
00:14:38.000The Second Amendment was instituted to protect the Second Amendment, meaning that it was designed so that if people try to take your guns, that you can protect yourself against the people trying to take your guns.
00:14:50.000Higher rates of gun ownership internationally are not associated with higher rates of violent crime.
00:14:55.000Again, and that's true in the United States also.
00:14:57.000There are lots of states in the United States where there are high levels of gun ownership and low levels of crime.
00:15:04.000The left's celebration of this really goes to their attempted character assassination of everybody who happens to differ with them on gun control.
00:15:12.000The suggestion being, if you disagree with us, it's because you don't care about dead people.
00:15:16.000And thus, New Zealand is about will, it is not about policy.
00:15:20.000Now, it turns out a lot of us have pretty good reasons, politically, why we don't want the government seizing our guns.
00:15:24.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:15:28.000So, let's talk for a second about Australia's gun buyback.
00:15:32.000So Australia's gun buyback, as Matt Palumbo writes, Australia's gun buyback reduced homicides, but only at the same rate as the United States.
00:15:42.000He writes, firearm homicides did fall post-1996 gun control at exactly the same pace as they were naturally falling before gun control.
00:15:50.000Over a similar period, 1993 to 2014, gun homicides in America were cut by more than half.
00:15:56.000Keep in mind that guns per capita increased about 50% in America over that period.
00:16:00.000And the overall homicide rate fell faster in the United States than it did in Australia.
00:16:08.000Well, there was an American Medical Association study that didn't find any statistically significant effect of the National Firearms Act in Australia on gun suicide.
00:16:16.000There was a decline in firearm suicides, but non-firearm suicides fell at a faster pace than firearm suicides.
00:16:22.000In other words, the suicide rate just fell generally.
00:16:27.000The notion that you can simply ban guns and that will fix the problem is really foolish.
00:16:32.000It's just as foolish to believe that you can ban books and somehow that this is going to cure the problem.
00:16:38.000There's a story out of New Zealand today that is just insane.
00:16:45.000We've been told that there are firefighters in the media and they rushed to the story.
00:16:48.000Where are the firefighters in the media over this?
00:16:50.000They've talked about tyranny in the United States and President Trump being a tyrant and a dictator.
00:16:54.000Where are they when it comes to folks in the West legitimately banning books?
00:16:59.000And not even banning white supremacist books, not even banning Mein Kampf or something.
00:17:03.000Mein Kampf is still banned in Germany, for example.
00:17:05.000I think that's a bad idea, but at least you can understand that, sort of.
00:17:09.000I mean, Mein Kampf is one of the most evil books ever written and did inspire people to join the worst movement in the history of the world.
00:17:16.000Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life is now being banned.
00:17:19.000It is not for sale from a store called Whitcool's in New Zealand.
00:17:24.000It's one of the bigger book outlets in New Zealand.
00:17:27.000According to News Hub in New Zealand, the controversial Canadian professor visited Ederia in February, weeks before a gunman killed 50 people and injured dozens more at two mosques in Christchurch.
00:17:37.000Although Peterson's book promotes self-help rather than violence or racism, he was photographed in New Zealand embracing a fan, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words, I'm a proud Islamophobe, along with a list of various inflammatory accusations about Muslims.
00:17:50.000The shirt just says something like, I'm a proud Islamophobe, and then lists off a bunch of terrible things that it distributes to Islamists.
00:17:59.000It says, I'm a proud Islamophobe, I'm against pedophilia, rape, wife-beating, misogyny, etc, etc, etc, etc.
00:18:05.000I'm for the freedom of the individual.
00:18:07.000And Jordan is just standing next to this guy in a picture.
00:18:35.000I've legitimately taken, I would imagine at this point, 30 to 40 thousand pictures with fans.
00:18:40.000I don't remember a single damn shirt anybody was wearing.
00:18:43.000And unless somebody walked up to me wearing a full-on swastika or a full-on hammer and sickle shirt for some reason, I'm not examining their shirt.
00:18:51.000If it's got a lot of text, I'm not reading the shirt.
00:19:06.000The new public standard is if you take a picture with a person who is a fan, and you're a public figure, and that fan turns out to be a terrible person, then somehow your book gets banned.
00:19:15.000If that's the case, we're going to need to know why it is that the Orlando Pulse shooter's father, you'll recall, showed up at a Democratic rally.
00:19:25.000We didn't say the Democrat was a bad guy.
00:19:27.000We said, what association does he have with this person?
00:19:30.000If you've ever been to one of these rope lines where you shake the hand of a prominent person, you're in the picture for legitimately about three seconds flat.
00:19:38.000And so Whit Cools is banning Jordan Peterson's non-Islamophobic, non-white supremacist book on the basis that a person who wore a shirt that they find offensive took a picture with him?
00:19:50.000Whit Cools doesn't specify the exact reason for dumping Peterson's 12 Rules for Life and Antidote to Chaos, a book that has sold some 3 million copies.
00:19:57.000It's probably the biggest bestseller of the last 15 years in the nonfiction list.
00:20:02.000They say that They say this, quote, This is insanity.
00:20:05.000"12 Rules for Life is currently unavailable, "which is a decision that Whitcalls has made "in light of some extremely disturbing material "being circulated prior, during, and after "the Christchurch attacks.
00:20:14.000"As a business which takes our responsibilities "to our communities very seriously, "we believe it would be wrong to support the author "at this time.
00:20:20.000"Apologies that we're not able to sell it to you, "but we appreciate your understanding." This is insanity.
00:20:26.000So you're fighting neo-Nazism by banning books.
00:20:29.000You're fighting white supremacism by banning books.
00:20:31.000Jordan is an active fighter against white supremacism.
00:20:40.000But when you decide that you're going to quash freedom of speech in favor of supposed safety, and this is not going to guarantee safety in any case, there's no way that banning Jordan Peterson's book from sale in New Zealand is preventing shootings.
00:20:58.000By the way, other books that continue to be on sale at Wickles include Mein Kampf, which has to do with white supremacism, guys, and also a book called, it's like, Jordantology by Vox Dei, an outspoken white supremacist, and Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right troll.
00:21:17.000That book is still on sale, apparently, at Wickles.
00:21:23.000Very, very solid stuff here from the left.
00:21:26.000So their solutions to a mass shooting are to do, by the way, exactly what the shooter wanted.
00:21:31.000The shooter says in his manifesto, and I have not quoted his manifesto at length because I don't wish to give it credibility, but since the left now insists that the manifesto is a rationale to ban books, it seems worthwhile pointing out that the shooter explicitly suggested that this be done.
00:21:46.000The shooter explicitly said he was attempting to drive a gun debate in the United States that would cause gun confiscation and therefore violence.
00:21:52.000He says this explicitly in the manifesto and so the left immediately falls for it.
00:21:56.000Now again, you want to make the case for why guns ought to be confiscated, make the case.
00:22:01.000But it has to be a logical case and it can't be based on, you don't care enough if you disagree with me.
00:22:06.000That's simple absurdity on a vast scale.
00:22:10.000Now speaking of Jordan Peterson, he's also being banned now from Cambridge University.
00:22:16.000And this does speak to the left's desire to shut down anybody who is remotely successful on the non-left.
00:22:22.000Jordan happens to be a relatively conservative guy, although he doesn't vote in U.S.
00:22:50.000So there's something that happens in right-wing circles, where if you say something that is heterodox with conservatism, for just a moment, you get strange new respect.
00:23:10.000And if you do that for long enough, then maybe they'll invite you to a few more cocktail parties.
00:23:16.000But then if you do something that snaps back into the reality of conservatism, if you say anything conservative, then they come after you.
00:23:22.000So David Frum, who has mirrored a lot of the left's preferences on policy as well as on President Trump, David Frum was welcome in left circles until he wrote a column at the Atlantic on immigration and then all of a sudden it turned into that typical right-wing racist, David Frum.
00:23:36.000And it's the same thing with anybody who is prominent.
00:23:39.000The left, they've shrunk the Overton window to the point where no one is inside the Overton window except people with whom they agree.
00:23:46.000I challenge the left to name somebody on the right who they actually respect or think is not a bigot.
00:23:51.000You're gonna have to name some people.
00:24:41.000We're having a discussion, which is what rational people do.
00:24:43.000Unless it is a set-up debate that is designed to be a debate, we like to call this thing discussion.
00:24:47.000And if you watch my Sunday specials, which come out on Sundays, I've had many people who disagree with me on a variety of subjects, from Michael Shormer to Sam Harris, on the Sunday special.
00:24:58.000And that would be true if Andrew Yang comes on.
00:25:00.000So Andrew Yang expressed interest in coming on the podcast, and I said, well, that'll be great.
00:25:04.000Immediately, he was hit with a wave of, how dare you even sit down with Shapiro?
00:25:09.000How dare you even have a conversation with Shapiro?
00:25:12.000It was the same thing with my friend Michael Shermer.
00:25:14.000Michael and I disagree radically when it comes to religion.
00:25:18.000Michael had me on his podcast to discuss my new book, The Right Side of History, which, for the record, is now number one on Amazon, the number one best-selling book on planet Earth.
00:26:03.000He said that he would be a visiting fellow.
00:26:05.000He announced he would be a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge Divinity School, which makes perfect sense.
00:26:09.000He's one of the world's leading authorities and one of the most popular speakers when it comes to biblical meaning on planet Earth.
00:26:17.000He has a series on biblical meaning that has 10 million views on YouTube.
00:26:20.000That's better than any of the other professors over at Cambridge University.
00:26:24.000On Wednesday, Cambridge's administration announced they had rescinded the invitation following a public outcry from students and professors.
00:26:30.000A Cambridge spokesperson told the UK Guardian, quote, Cambridge is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles.
00:26:37.000There is no place here for anyone who cannot.
00:26:40.000So what principles did Jordan violate?
00:26:42.000Well, he violated the principle that you should be forced by the government to use a transgender person's preferred pronouns.
00:26:50.000So if you disagree with the basic idea that we should falsify pronouns, then you are no longer welcome to teach at University of Cambridge.
00:26:59.000And also, they say that he is not sufficiently woke when it comes to feminism.
00:27:03.000This is the case that they are making.
00:27:04.000So they renounced their initial offer and deplatformed Jordan.
00:27:09.000They removed the offer after realizing that he is who he has always been.
00:27:14.000I'm against this even when it happens on the left.
00:27:17.000I controversially argued that James Gunn should not be removed from the Guardians of the Galaxy series for a series of bad old tweets, jokes about pedophilia and such.
00:27:25.000Because everybody knew about those tweets when he was hired, so why are you firing him?
00:27:28.000I said the same exact thing about Sarah Jean.
00:27:43.000Everybody knows that Jordan holds these views on transgender pronouns.
00:27:46.000It's one of the reasons he is very, very famous.
00:27:49.000Jordan put out a statement about all of this.
00:27:52.000He says that he began discussions with Cambridge in November.
00:27:55.000He enjoyed his conversations, and he was looking forward to giving speeches to students about the nature and meaning of the Bible.
00:28:03.000He says, it's not going to make much difference to my future in some sense.
00:28:06.000I have more opportunities at the moment than I can keep track of, let alone, let's say, capitalize on.
00:28:11.000It's a complex and surreally fortunate position to occupy, and I'm not taking it for granted, but it happens to be true.
00:28:18.000In the fall, therefore, I will produce the lectures I plan to produce on Exodus, regardless of whether they occur in the UK or in Canada or elsewhere, and they will attract whatever audience remains interested.
00:28:26.000But I think it is deeply unfortunate that the authorities at the Divinity School in Cambridge decided that kowtowing to an ill-informed, ignorant, and ideologically addled mob trumped participating in an extensive online experiment in mass Christian and psychological education.
00:28:40.000Given the continuing decline of church attendance, the rise in atheistic or agnostic sentiment, the increasing irrelevance of theological education, and the collapse in interest in such matters among young people, wiser and more profound decisions might have been made.
00:28:55.000He says, he adds that, he says, I wish them the continued decline in relevance over the next few decades that they deeply and profoundly and diligently work toward and deserve.
00:29:07.000The Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope of University of Cambridge gave a statement, and here's what Jordan quoted from it.
00:29:14.000One very specific aspect of openness is being inclusive and open to diversity in all its forms, diversity of interests and beliefs, of gender, of religion, of sexual identity, of ethnicity, and of physical ability.
00:29:24.000Yet obviously the left does not believe in such diversity.
00:29:27.000The only diversity they care about is racial and ethnic diversity, and maybe the diversity of the intersectionally woke.
00:29:37.000And using a shooting in Christchurch that had nothing to do with New Zealand to de-platform, that had nothing to do with Jordan Peterson, to de-platform Jordan Peterson, is truly astonishingly ridiculous.
00:29:48.000This is the, I mean, we often say this sort of stuff, this is the world the left wants.
00:29:51.000If this is the world the left wants, it's a really ugly world.
00:29:54.000A world where books are banned, and you don't have a gun to protect yourself.
00:29:59.000Okay, meanwhile, in the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden is eyeing a couple of strategies that are designed to help assuage fears about his age and lack of woke credentials.
00:30:35.000Also, make sure that you subscribe over YouTube and iTunes.
00:30:37.000That means that you can get our Sunday special.
00:30:39.000This week's Sunday Special features Stephen Meyer, an intelligent design advocate, and we ask some tough questions about evolution and the presence of God in science and all of the rest of this stuff.
00:30:48.000If you subscribe, you get that on Saturdays.
00:30:50.000See, this is what we like here at the Ben Shapiro Show and at the Daily Wire, a diversity of viewpoints.
00:30:55.000On the Sunday Special, I've had Michael Shermer, an advocate of Darwinian evolution, and then I have Stephen Meyer, who believes that there are gaps in Darwinian evolution, even though he believes in microevolution.
00:31:59.000Speaking of The Right Side of History, just a brief note.
00:32:02.000There's a couple of reviews that are out, one from the Washington Times, somebody who actually read the book, and there's one from some lefty outlet, somebody who clearly has not read the book, and says the book is anti-Enlightenment, which is obviously untrue.
00:32:12.000I praise fulsomely the Enlightenment, the Anglo-Saxon Enlightenment.
00:32:17.000I praise the Scottish-British-American Enlightenment.
00:32:20.000I think the French Enlightenment was a mistake, but the person didn't read the book.
00:32:24.000And then they also suggest That the book is somehow not standing up for racial diversity, which is absurd.
00:32:32.000Like, an entire chapter at the end of the book is all about how white supremacy is garbage.
00:33:09.000And if you look at how he's rolling out his campaign, he keeps delaying it and delaying it and delaying it in the hopes that if he delays it long enough, then he'll be handed the nomination by acclamation.
00:33:25.000You'll remember that when he ran for president in 2008 against Barack Obama, who would eventually choose him as VP, Joe Biden said that Barack Obama was clean and articulate.
00:33:34.000And people were like, dude, that's pretty racially coded language.
00:33:40.000Joe Biden is the guy who went to a 7-Eleven and talked about how everyone who worked at 7-Eleven was Indian because he watches too many episodes of The Simpsons.
00:33:51.000Well, now Joe Biden is apparently considering a couple of doltish strategies that do say something about the nature of the Democratic Party.
00:33:57.000According to the New York Times, former VP Joe Biden, aware that concerns about his age could weigh on his candidacy if he runs for the White House, has discussed two steps that could reassure voters about electing a 78-year-old president next year.
00:34:10.000Mr. Biden and his top advisors are considering nodding to the rising next generation in democratic politics and elevating an heir by announcing a running mate early, well before the nomination is sealed.
00:34:21.000Okay, so that, number one, would be a stupid idea.
00:34:23.000It was seen as a desperation move when Ted Cruz picked Carly Fiorina in an attempt to win more female votes in the Republican primaries.
00:34:30.000It would look like a desperation move now if Biden were to pick a VP candidate before he is even in the race.
00:34:36.000Normally, it's seen as a sign of strength to wait because you have leverage and then you can get who you want.
00:34:40.000Plus, it could be another one of the candidates, right?
00:34:42.000If Biden wins the nomination, he could turn to Kamala Harris.
00:34:45.000If he does it now, it can't be anybody else who's running against him.
00:34:48.000Also under discussion is a possible pledge to serve only one term, and framing Biden's 2020 campaign as a one-time rescue mission for a beleaguered country, according to multiple party officials.
00:34:58.000But that, of course, is going to raise the question of age.
00:35:00.000Trump is slightly younger than Biden, and this will be Trump's last term no matter what.
00:35:05.000He's termed out after his second term.
00:35:08.000So Joe Biden's saying, I'm going to run for one term.
00:35:10.000Trump can look at him and say, right, you have to assure people of that because they're afraid you're going to keel over, my friend.
00:35:17.000Such moves would amount to a big play that would send a signal about the seriousness of the election and could potentially appeal to both liberal activists and general election voters who are eager to chart the safest route toward defeating President Trump.
00:35:28.000If Biden is not sold on either approach, both carry significant risks, chiefly that they could call further attention to the age of a candidate who would turn 80 in the White House.
00:35:44.000So that means that he would presumably turn 78 while he's in the White House if he wins a second term.
00:35:53.000So everybody who's running right now is old.
00:35:54.000Bernie Sanders will turn 1,000 years old if he is elected.
00:35:58.000There's also the risk that Biden could appear presumptuous, even imperious, by choosing a running mate before the electorate has a chance to sift the field of candidates.
00:36:21.000Well, she's apparently considered a presidential run herself.
00:36:26.000Biden may be telling her that he will run with her.
00:36:29.000She's served, like, one term in the House of Representatives, no?
00:36:32.000I mean, Stacey Abrams is not exactly... This is about the same as picking Sarah Palin for your VP running mate, because you're obviously attempting to get female votes.
00:36:44.000She, her background is that she was minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives.
00:36:49.000So she was not even, she's never been elected in a federal election.
00:36:53.000And he'd pick her as his vice presidential candidate after losing an election in Georgia and then refusing to acknowledge that she lost an election in Georgia.
00:37:00.000I mean, I guess the bad news for her is she's going to have to give up the fake governorship of Georgia since she says she never lost.
00:37:06.000But it's pretty obvious that this is the forced, the forced long march through the intersectionally woke battlefield of the 2020 Democratic primaries.
00:37:14.000Joe Biden isn't picking Stacey Abrams because he thinks that she is the best VP candidate.
00:37:19.000If you were really waiting for the best VP candidate, you would assume that he'd go through the primaries and then he would choose whomever he thought was the best VP candidate.
00:37:27.000Doing it now and picking a woman who is minority in an obvious appeal to try and break into the intersectional base of people like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker?
00:37:37.000It's pretty obvious what he's doing at this point.
00:37:39.000He's not doing it because he thinks Abrams is the most qualified.
00:37:41.000He's doing it early because this is a political ploy.
00:37:45.000And anybody who suggests differently is just not being cynical enough about politics.
00:37:50.000If you think Joe Biden is looking at America and he's like, oh, yeah, Stacey Abrams, she'll be the best president if something should happen to me.
00:37:57.000Sure, I'm sure it's that and not him trying to win black votes in the South in Democratic primaries by picking up a popular black figure.
00:38:06.000Biden's position apparently couldn't be learned.
00:38:10.000Axios was told about this by Biden's advisors.
00:38:14.000Biden's office has declined to comment.
00:38:17.000It does so show some lack of confidence among the Biden team about how they are out of touch with the intersectionally woke base.
00:38:24.000This would be a foolish move by Joe Biden, but then again, Joe Biden is used to making foolish moves.
00:38:30.000All right, meanwhile, The Trump show continues.
00:38:33.000If you're Donald Trump, as I've been saying for legitimately months at this point, if you are President Trump, then what you ought to be focused on right now is keeping your mouth shut and pointing at the Democrats.
00:38:44.000Your entire campaign should just be that gif of Donald Sutherland making a face in Invasion of the Body Snatchers as he points at the other side, as he just points.
00:39:26.000I also think that John McCain was an American war hero, which he was.
00:39:30.000I think John McCain was a patriot, which he was.
00:39:33.000All of those things can be true at once.
00:39:34.000I can be highly critical of John McCain's record in the Senate and also acknowledge that John McCain was a good American and a great American in many ways.
00:39:43.000Well, President Trump had a long going feud with John McCain going all the way back to 2015.
00:39:49.000And people are saying, well, you know, President Trump, he has the right to fight back against John McCain.
00:39:54.000John McCain has been dead for six months.
00:39:56.000I'm not sure what you're fighting back against at this point.
00:39:59.000And this isn't in defense of everything John McCain ever did.
00:40:02.000But it is pretty indecent to start going after John McCain, a dead man, for how you operated at his funeral.
00:40:10.000And that's what President Trump did yesterday.
00:40:12.000It is this sense that Trump is engaging in unstable behavior that is going to help his opponents.
00:40:18.000What you want in the White House is somebody who you know what he's going to do on a daily basis.
00:40:23.000The wild vacillations allow a candidate like Joe Biden, who is indeed a dolt, to play at being the rock of stability in a time of chaos.
00:41:55.000And the same thing holds true of his attacks on George Conway.
00:41:58.000Now, George Conway is a self-aggrandizing narcissist on Twitter.
00:42:02.000There's just no way, two ways about it.
00:42:03.000He spends all of his time sniping at President Trump.
00:42:06.000And Trump, as a human being, has every right to snipe right back at George Conway.
00:42:10.000But Kellyanne, George's wife, works for the White House.
00:42:13.000So you would assume that if you're going to fight back against George Conway, you would say something like, you're speaking completely out of turn, you're completely unqualified for discussing my psychological state, you consider taking a position in my administration, and now you're bitter, right?
00:43:16.000In the same way that it's pretty dumb that Devin Nunes decided to sue a Twitter account called Devin Nunes' Cow.
00:43:21.000Nobody cared about Devin Nunes' Cow, the Twitter account, until five minutes ago, when Devin Nunes decided, you know what would be a great idea?
00:43:27.000To sue an account on Twitter called Devin Nunes' Cow.
00:43:33.000I've never thought about suing the people who give me crap online.
00:43:36.000It's a bizarre, it's just a bizarre notion.
00:43:38.000In any case, President Trump goes after George Conway, and as I say, even if he's going to do that, a bad strategic decision, but even if he's going to do that, there's a moral way to go about this and an immoral way to go about this.
00:43:49.000You know what's not a really moral thing to do?
00:43:51.000Calling him a quote-unquote, husband from hell.
00:44:02.000I mean, listen, this should be between Kellyanne Conway and George.
00:44:05.000I mean, Trump should say, listen, whatever issues Kellyanne and George have, they've got four kids, by the way.
00:44:09.000I'm not sure how this plays out for their kids.
00:44:11.000I just, I do not understand how a couple can go through this sort of stuff publicly and allow, I mean, Kellyanne then responded by siding with Trump.
00:44:20.000She said, quote, But you think he shouldn't respond when somebody, a non-medical professional, accuses him of having a mental disorder?
00:44:28.000You think he should just take that sitting down?
00:44:31.000But that isn't the part of the tweet that is really messed up, right?
00:44:34.000I mean, the part of the tweet that's messed up is calling him a husband from hell.
00:44:39.000Hey, Kellyanne, that is one loyal employee, I'll give him that.
00:44:43.000None of this is positive for President Trump.
00:44:44.000It's a waste of time, it's a waste of energy, and it's simply foolish.
00:44:49.000It just doesn't make any sense strategically, and it's immoral.
00:44:52.000So immoral and foolish is a hell of a combination.
00:44:55.000Alrighty, let's do some things that I like and then some things that I hate.
00:45:07.000If you've never read the Jewish Megillah, you should.
00:45:09.000You know, the phrase, the whole Megillah, it comes from the actual Megillah, the actual Megillat Esther, which is the book of Esther, which is a fascinating religious book.
00:45:18.000It never mentions God anywhere in the book because there's this belief that God influences the world through natural channels in the Maimonidean and Thomistic view.
00:45:28.000And that is really evident in this particular biblical story.
00:45:33.000The story, for those who don't know, the quick story of Purim, is that there is a king whose name is Ahasuerus, as transliterated into English.
00:45:40.000He's the king of Persia, and he has an advisor named Haman, and Haman decides that he wants to take out all the Jews, and Ahasuerus goes along with it.
00:45:50.000And meanwhile, Ahasuerus has executed his wife Vashti, and needs a new wife, and so he decides to have basically a beauty contest.
00:45:57.000And in the beauty contest, a Jewish girl wins, Esther.
00:46:00.000She does not want to be married to Ahasuerus, but she's essentially forced to do so, because this is ancient Persia.
00:46:04.000And she marries him, and then she uses her influence to...
00:46:09.000Awaken the king to the error of Haman's ways and Haman is executed.
00:46:14.000And then the Jews are allowed to fight back.
00:46:15.000So it's a good story about why people should be armed in defiance of tyranny because one of the ways, the way that Haman wants the Jews to be wiped out is an edict from the king saying that the Jews are not allowed to defend themselves against mass pogroms.
00:46:28.000And then the king revises that and he sends out a second emissary who says the Jews are now allowed to defend themselves and the Jews defend themselves and win.
00:47:40.000So my friend Michael Shermer, a man with whom I disagree greatly on religion and the impact of Judeo-Christian ethics and all of this.
00:47:47.000He had me on his podcast to talk about my new book, The Right Side of History.
00:47:50.000And And last night, he tweeted out a couple of sections from his book, The Moral Arc, How Science Makes Us Better People.
00:47:57.000Now, make no mistake, I really disagree with Michael Shermer that you can derive values simply from science and reason alone.
00:48:02.000My book is largely About the idea that divorcing reason from baseline assumptions embedded in the Judeo-Christian culture is a huge mistake.
00:48:10.000With that said, I think you should totally read his book.
00:48:12.000I think it's a really well-written book and a well-argued book.
00:48:14.000The book is The Moral Arc by Michael Shermer.
00:48:18.000But the good news is that we are all trying to work within a certain Enlightenment tradition.
00:48:22.000I think that tradition springs all the way back to Sinai.
00:48:24.000He thinks that that tradition sort of comes into being Almost spontaneously, at the end of the 18th century, that's really where our argument lies, and that has implications for how we should teach people today.
00:48:34.000Do we teach them secular humanism, in the hopes that this will make them better people?
00:48:37.000Or do we teach them about Judeo-Christian roots, in combination with secular reason?
00:48:42.000That's the main argument between Michael and me.
00:48:43.000The nice thing is that I think we are all fighting for an evidence-based discussion system.
00:48:48.000So, go read his book, The Moral Arc, How Science Makes Us Better.
00:48:50.000People, go pick that up at Amazon as well.
00:48:53.000Well, you're picking up my book, The Right Side of History, which continues to be the number one book on planet Earth as of the moment.
00:48:58.000Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.
00:50:47.000Parents of a teenage son who has Asperger's and autism were threatened by authorities to have their child placed in foster care after they refused to help facilitate a so-called sex change of the boy.
00:50:56.000Recalling the horrifying ordeal to the Daily Mail, the couple, who wish to remain anonymous, claimed an NHS clinic in the UK said their then 14-year-old boy should be put on hormone blockers since he told them he thought he was a girl.
00:51:08.000This is according to Amanda Prestigiacomo at Daily Wire.
00:51:11.000The parents, believing their child's autism played a role in the declaration of gender confusion, refused to cooperate with the transition, particularly since the blockers can cause irrevocable harm.
00:51:20.000After mom and dad pulled their son from the gender clinic, school officials reported that the parents, they reported the parents to child services for emotional abuse due to their objections to the sex change.
00:51:30.000So, parents who have raised their kid from the time the kid was born, and object to permanent body changes to their child, hormone blockers in teenage years for their child, because the kid has autism, and they think that that may be related to the kid's gender confusion, That kid was nearly removed from the home.
00:51:50.000The couple was visited by local authorities concerning the complaint.
00:51:54.000Desperate to keep their child out of foster care, they allowed the boy to live with a family friend.
00:51:58.000He was placed on a so-called child protection plan.
00:52:01.000Which is a plan drawn up by the local authority.
00:52:04.000It sets out how the child can be kept safe, how things can be made better for the family, and what support they will need.
00:52:09.000The boy's mother told the Daily Mail, I'm absolutely devastated.
00:52:12.000When I saw the report that social services wrote about us and saw the words emotional abuse, I just broke down.
00:52:16.000All we were doing was trying to get him to pause and think about his actions.
00:52:19.000My biggest worry as a mom is my child gets pushed down this route, becomes a woman, goes through surgery, then gets to 25 and says, I've made a mistake.
00:52:26.000The mother noted that she and her husband read these blockers might not be reversible and there might be long-term effects for brain development.
00:52:32.000The family has been placed back together temporarily, but the mother fears that more parents will be subjected to such a horrendous ordeal with their own kids.
00:52:41.000It is also true that rapid-onset gender dysphoria is a thing, and that there have been reports in Britain that huge levels of kids who are reporting gender dysphoria are also autistic.
00:52:51.000And so there may, in fact, be a relationship between one certain type of condition and gender dysphoria.
00:52:57.000This is full-scale insanity that has nothing to do with good parenting or decency.
00:53:01.000And yet this is, I guess, something that we are interested in pursuing.
00:53:04.000All right, well, if you want to come back and have two more hours of the show a little bit later today, all you have to do is subscribe over at dailywire.com for $9.99 a month or $99 a year.
00:53:12.000And I remind you once again, my new book, The Right Side of History, is on sale at Amazon and everywhere at bookstores.
00:53:18.000Still, until New Zealand tries to ban it for some odd reason.