The Right Side of History continues to chart in the top three nonfiction books over at Amazon, it was number 3 on the New York Times bestseller list in its second week, and it was No. 1 in its first week. I think it's an important book, and we're going to get to all the news about it in just one second. I also talk about the 2020 presidential race, and how big business is working hand-in-glove with the government to make sure they can do whatever they want. And finally, I talk about what's happening in the social media space and how the government is trying to control the free speech of millions of people, and what we should do about it. Ben Shapiro is a conservative commentator, bestselling author, and host of the podcast "The Ben Shapiro Show." He's also a regular contributor to the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, and is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast. His new book, is out now and is available for pre-order on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. It's out now. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should do so before the end of the week! Thanks for listening and share it on your social media platforms! if you like what you're listening to The Ben Shapiro's show! Subscribe to my podcast! and tell a friend about what you think of it! I'll be listening to Ben's show on The Ben's Show on Anchor. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Podcharts, and subscribe on Podchaser, and I'll read it out to your friends and tell them about Ben's thoughts on the show on his podcast on the podcast. Thank you for listening to the Ben Shapiro Podcasts! - Thank you Ben's Mailbag! Timestamps: 1:00 - 2:30 - What's your favorite thing you've listened to? 3:15 - What would you like to hear me talk about? 4:00 5: What do you think about it? 6: What's the worst thing I've heard of Ben's book? 7:40 - What are you would you'd like to see Ben's favorite thing? 8:10 - What s your biggest takeaway from a book you've read so far? 9:00 | What s going to be the most important thing that you're reading? 11:30 | What are your favorite part of a book that's making you most interesting?
00:00:37.000The reality is that if you are not shopping around, then you are probably not saving money.
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00:01:55.000So I do want to get to the 2020 presidential race, but I want to begin today with something that is really deeply troubling, and that is you are starting to see social media, instead of looking at the government as an opponent in its free speech mission, instead of looking at the government as a regulatory body that is seeking to quash its creativity, We have now moved from social media as capitalist companies to social media as government-enabled companies.
00:02:22.000That is where these big companies are seeking to go.
00:02:25.000There's this grand failure to understand how exactly big business sometimes works.
00:02:31.000People tend to say, well, big business, rapacious, exploitative, capitalist pigs.
00:02:36.000Big businesses are in the business of profit-seeking.
00:02:39.000When you have a giant government, and that giant government can increase your profit margins by issuing regulations, companies will work hand-in-glove with the government.
00:02:47.000Corporatism is not, in fact, fair use of the free market.
00:02:50.000It is not, in fact, use of the free market at all.
00:02:52.000It is use of the government to do your bidding for you.
00:02:55.000And once the government is so big that it can threaten your company, then many companies have a binary choice, and that is they can either work hand-in-glove with the government to help quash their competitors, and they can say they are friends to the government, or they can fight the government.
00:03:08.000You see this historically with, for example, the car companies.
00:03:12.000So Henry Ford famously resisted the unionization efforts at Ford.
00:03:17.000He resisted the government cram downs of the FDR administration.
00:03:22.000He did not want to abide by their rules and regulations, and he fought them tooth and nail.
00:03:27.000Whereas other car companies just went along with the government and Ford kept losing market share because of all of that.
00:03:33.000Well, the same thing is happening right now in the social media sphere.
00:03:36.000Basically, there are all these major social media companies and the government actors see power in regulating a lot of these major companies.
00:03:43.000And so the major companies have two choices.
00:03:46.000They can go to the public and say, listen, you need to tell the government to lay off and leave us alone.
00:03:50.000Or the easier path is often to go to the government and say, listen, regulate us.
00:03:55.000But when you do regulate us, understand that what you're really doing is regulating everybody else who is smaller.
00:04:00.000This was a lot of the net neutrality debate.
00:04:01.000There were major companies on both sides of that debate.
00:04:04.000Google, for example, was very much in favor of net neutrality because it prevented broadband carriers from charging them for things that it essentially crowded lower-down competitors out of the search engine market.
00:04:18.000That's why Google was in favor of net neutrality.
00:04:20.000It wasn't out of any goodness of their heart or anything.
00:04:22.000Big companies have an interest in working hand-in-glove with the government.
00:04:25.000Well, the latest company to do this is, of course, Facebook.
00:04:28.000So Facebook is now begging the government to censor it.
00:04:42.000Because he recognizes that Facebook is getting beaten up for its own failures to, on the one hand, censor speech, and on the other hand, they censor too much speech.
00:04:49.000So what he wants to do is kick the responsibility over to the federal government and thereby remove himself from the process.
00:04:55.000This is what he says to George Stephanopoulos.
00:04:57.000He poses this in terms of the public good.
00:04:59.000He says, I want more regulation in my company.
00:05:01.000Whenever somebody who's the head of a company says, I want the government to regulate my company, understand there's an ulterior motive.
00:05:07.000And the ulterior motive is almost always, I want the government to do something that will make my bottom line more lucrative while shielding me from the government's actual intervention.
00:05:17.000There's a question of what decisions should be left to a private company to make, especially around things like speech and expression for so many people around the world, and where should we have either industry or more government regulation?
00:05:29.000You're already seeing the FCC push back fairly hard against this.
00:05:33.000Two commissioners, I think, saying, no, we don't want to get into the business of policing the First Amendment.
00:05:38.000Yeah, I don't think that that's what this is, though.
00:05:41.000You can say that any regulation around what someone says online is protected, but I think that's clearly not right today.
00:05:48.000It's not clear to me that we want a private company to be making that kind of a fundamental decision.
00:05:54.000Well, this is really funny, because Zuckerberg, like a year ago, was saying, that's the kind of decision that we will make.
00:05:59.000We will take responsibility for these decisions.
00:06:01.000And that's because he was called onto the hill by Republicans and Democrats, and then he was run through the ringer about all the stuff that was appearing on Facebook.
00:06:08.000Now his correct answer should have been to say to Congress, hey guys, it's not my business what appears on Facebook.
00:07:10.000Well, that's not the role of government.
00:07:11.000And it's very dangerous to have folks in corporate life who are very powerful, like Zuckerberg, calling for this to be the role of government, because you could see a world in which House Democrats take Zuckerberg up on this.
00:07:23.000Our social media companies have declared that they can't do anything about the white supremacy online, the white nationalism online, and now it's our job to do that.
00:07:29.000Well, no, it is not your job to do it.
00:07:31.000There's a First Amendment to the Constitution that guarantees, in fact, that Congress shall make no law respecting the abridgment of speech.
00:07:40.000So when Zuckerberg explicitly calls for a violation of the First Amendment by the government in response to his own inability to police his own site, That's a problem.
00:07:50.000And here's the, again, here's the real reason he is doing this.
00:07:52.000The real reason he is doing this is because in Europe, there are now regulations coming down the pike that would punish Mark Zuckerberg for bad material appearing on his website.
00:08:00.000He doesn't want the responsibility of having to censor his own website after saying he would take responsibility.
00:08:05.000Again, the answer to all of this was for Zuckerberg always to say, I created a platform, I'm like AT&T.
00:08:11.000All I did was provide a forum where people can talk.
00:08:13.000Instead, Zuckerberg, because he wants to be seen by his friends, is a do-gooder.
00:08:17.000Instead, he has said, no, I will be one of the great policemen of speech.
00:08:21.000And now he's saying, I want the government to do it so I don't have to take the blame for it.
00:08:25.000Again, this is more in response to pressures from government than it is in response to an actual necessity on Facebook for censors to shut down speech.
00:08:35.000Because here's what they are doing in Europe.
00:08:36.000According to a leaked plan from the United Kingdom, social media bosses could be liable for harmful content, according to The Guardian.
00:08:45.000Social media executives could be held personally liable for harmful content distributed on their platforms.
00:08:50.000There's been growing concern, according to The Guardian, about the role of the internet in distribution of material related to terrorism, child abuse, self-harm, and suicide, and ministers have been under pressure to act.
00:09:00.000Under plans expected to be published on Monday, the government will legislate for a new statutory duty of care to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies.
00:09:10.000In other words, they're going to tax Facebook to police Facebook.
00:09:13.000And the way they're going to police Facebook is by fining or jailing people like Mark Zuckerberg if they do not take a quote-unquote duty of care to prevent bad material from getting on their platforms.
00:09:22.000It seems to me the reason we pay taxes is so that the police can prevent crime.
00:09:28.000We don't shut down phone lines because criminals often use phones, and we don't hold AT&T responsible for criminals using their phones.
00:09:35.000It is obvious that we have been treating these social media companies not as common carriers, not as platforms.
00:09:40.000Instead, we have been treating them as actual editorial sites, and that's why they're seeking to blame people like Zuckerberg.
00:09:47.000The regulator, likely initially to be something called Ofcom, but no longer from a new body, will have the power to impose substantial fines against companies that breach their duty of care and to hold individual executives personally liable.
00:10:00.000The debate has been sharpened in recent months by the case of the British teenager Molly Russell and the issues raised by the Christchurch shootings.
00:10:06.000Molly's parents said she killed herself partly because of self-harm images viewed on social media.
00:10:12.000Self-harm images are not threats of violence.
00:10:15.000They're horrible, they're terrible, but it is up to individual people not to look at things that are going to hurt you unless it is an actual attempt to hurt you.
00:10:29.000Rights come along with responsibilities.
00:10:31.000If we as individuals can't be trusted to participate in a free speech society, the answer isn't to curb free speech.
00:10:37.000The answer is that we better do some introspection and figure out how we are utilizing our free speech in a bad way.
00:10:43.000Other proposals in the online harm white paper include government powers to direct the regulator on specific issues such as terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation, What exactly constitutes harmful content?
00:11:03.000government determining what content is harmful?
00:11:06.000Especially when in New Zealand, they're legitimately attempting to prosecute people for reading a manifesto online.
00:11:12.000Is that something we want in the United States?
00:11:13.000The manifesto is evil of the Christchurch shooter.
00:11:16.000Do we want people prosecuted for downloading it and reading it so that they know what's bad?
00:11:20.000The same people who think that it is a good thing that Jordan Peterson's book was temporarily banned from White Coals, a bookseller in New Zealand, over the Christchurch shooting, those would be the same people sitting on boards like this.
00:11:32.000And that is what Mark Zuckerberg is calling for.
00:11:36.000In Europe, obviously, they don't have the same sort of free speech protections, which is one of the reasons I'm incredibly glad I'm an American.
00:11:43.000Both right and left in Europe are far more comfortable with curbing free speech than we are in the United States.
00:11:49.000Theresa May has repeatedly raised the issue of online harm.
00:11:51.000The government has gradually shifted its position in Britain from favoring voluntary self-regulation to backing tougher enforcement.
00:12:10.000American citizens and citizens abroad who are now subject to the government deciding what messages they can and cannot see.
00:12:15.000This is dangerous stuff and Zuckerberg is not the creator of the danger but he is complicit in the increase of the danger if he doesn't stand up for the free speech The sort of free speech basis for the platform that he built in the first place.
00:12:28.000We'll get to more of this in just a second.
00:12:29.000The tech companies caving to kind of social justice warriors and then looking to hand it over to government.
00:12:45.000They use the answers to match your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress.
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00:13:40.000I mean, the mattresses are incredibly comfortable and not nearly as expensive as some of the stuff that's worse that you're going to get at a mattress store.
00:13:48.000Speaking of social media companies botching their job, Google on Thursday announced that it opted to disband its newly formed Artificial Intelligence Ethics Council following aggressive pushback from more than 2,000 Google employees.
00:14:11.000We're going back to the drawing board.
00:14:13.000Google had announced its new AI ethics board, a body tasked with serving as an ethical check on Google's AI technology production last week.
00:14:20.000The board was immediately met with controversy as thousands of Google employees and hundreds of external petitioners took issue with one of the board's members, who they said had an anti-trans and anti-immigrant record.
00:14:31.000K. Cole James, who's president of the Heritage Foundation.
00:14:33.000That is a mainstream conservative organization, and K. Cole James is about as mainstream a conservative as you can find.
00:14:39.000But because she believes that men are men and women are women, and she believes that we should have border security, this means that she cannot be present in a hearing between multiple viewpoints about AI ethics.
00:14:52.000A petition from Google employees, signed by almost 2,400 of them, said by appointing James, Google elevates and endorses her views, implying that hers is a valid perspective worthy of inclusion in its decision-making.
00:15:41.000Because if you regulate Google or you regulate Facebook, let's say that there's a new Google or Facebook who wants to come up, and they don't want to regulate speech in the same way that Facebook and Google do.
00:16:19.000Once the government regulates, that is no longer the case.
00:16:21.000Then you have to start regulating these things like monopolies because effectively they are.
00:16:26.000The AI Ethics Council is over and we did this together, the Googlers Against Transphobia account tweeted.
00:16:31.000So many people answered the call to stand against transphobia.
00:16:33.000We thank you for your support and unwillingness to compromise on hate.
00:16:37.000One of the council's members dropped out almost immediately after the council was announced.
00:16:41.000Leading behavior economist and privacy researcher Alessandro Acquisti last week tweeted, I'd like to share that I've declined the invitation to the council while I'm devoted to research grappling with key ethical issues of fairness, rights, and inclusion in AI.
00:16:52.000I don't believe this is the right forum for me.
00:16:56.000On Wednesday, another one of the council members, Luciano Florida, a leading AI expert, wrote that James' inclusion was a grave error and sends the wrong message.
00:17:03.000In other words, any conservative cannot be part of the Google board.
00:17:06.000I mean, this sort of top-down idiocy at these major social media companies, combined with government power, turns this from a company sucking at its job to an actual monopoly issue.
00:17:21.000Alrighty, meanwhile, The 2020 race is heating up.
00:17:24.000There are no less than 18 potential Democratic candidates who want to jump into the race.
00:17:29.000And the list just goes on and on and on.
00:17:36.000It's the three Bs, plus Kamala Harris.
00:17:39.000I would say that that's probably the top tier in the Democratic Party right now.
00:17:42.000By polling data, that's the top tier in the Democratic Party right now.
00:17:46.000And Biden is the one who is in trouble, shockingly enough.
00:17:50.000Without any real rationale, I gotta say, like, again, because he did not have the courage of his convictions, because he was unwilling to simply come out and say, listen, I've never sexually harassed anyone.
00:18:23.000It's unfortunate, but that is the way that it works.
00:18:25.000And we are now supposed to take seriously every allegation of something terrible happening.
00:18:30.000I mentioned yesterday one of the allegations from a woman named Sophie Karasek, a survivor's rights advocate and progressive organizer who appeared at the Oscars with Lady Gaga.
00:18:41.000And she now has a piece in the Washington Post called, A Photo of Me and Joe Biden Went Viral.
00:18:46.000I want him to take ownership for his actions.
00:18:48.000This is the one I talked about yesterday, where this lady took the photo, had it printed, had it framed, put it on her bookshelf, and then decided two to three years later that it was actually a very, very bad thing.
00:19:26.000No one can live by these constantly shifting standards in the Democratic Party.
00:19:30.000Really, there's this moment in the new, not very good Star Wars movie in The Last Jedi, where Kylo Ren, who's the bad guy, turns to Rey, who is the Mary Sue good character, and they're fighting together for a brief moment in time.
00:19:48.000And Kylo Ren turns to Mary Sue, to Rey, sorry, and says to her...
00:19:54.000And says to her, you know, we should just kill all the oldies and start something new.
00:20:13.000They're the ones who got us to where we are, but they're oldies, man.
00:20:16.000And they don't understand the new wave.
00:20:18.000Now, the thing about this sort of mentality is that the revolutionaries are usually the first to the guillotine, meaning that sooner or later these people will be hoisted by their own petard.
00:20:27.000He's one of the people who pushed for lowering standards when it came to proving sexual misconduct in Title IX cases, for example.
00:20:35.000But Biden is now being shellacked by his own party for stuff that even the people who were the quote-unquote victims did not consider victimization at the time.
00:20:46.000I mean, Nancy Pelosi, I'm old enough to remember when Nancy Pelosi was the great radical inside her own party.
00:20:51.000Now she's the establishment holding back the radicals.
00:20:55.000For example, yesterday, Bernie Sanders tweeted this out.
00:20:57.000He tweeted out, Those who oppose Medicare for all need to explain why our current failed system should be allowed to continue bankrupting the American people.
00:21:08.000Okay, well, then Nancy Pelosi comes out and she's like, um, you know that Medicare for all thing?
00:21:16.000If he really opposes Medicare for All, by the way, if he's upset with Medicare for All, I mean, with opponents of Medicare for All, you know who he should talk to?
00:21:25.000Because Barack Obama is the creator of that system he is criticizing right now.
00:21:29.000When Bernie Sanders says, if you stand for the current system, you're standing for high costs on people, who does he think constructed the current system?
00:21:38.000It was Barack Obama and Joe Biden who, as I recall, said to Barack Obama that the new system was a big effing deal.
00:21:45.000A phrase that was so popular among Democrats that it was sold on a t-shirt by the DNC.
00:21:51.000It's the old guard Democrats versus the new fangled socialists.
00:21:55.000This is why Speaker Nancy Pelosi is out of step with her own party.
00:21:59.000She questioned today whether a health care proposal embraced by several Democratic presidential candidates would be too expensive and fail to provide the same coverage as the Affordable Care Act.
00:22:08.000Instead, she suggested she'd rather build on Obamacare, is yet to be convinced the Medicare for All proposal pushed by many liberals would achieve its purported goals.
00:22:15.000She said in an interview with the Washington Post, quote, I'm agnostic.
00:22:18.000Show me how you think you can get there.
00:22:20.000We all share the value of health care for all Americans, quality, affordable health care for all Americans.
00:22:26.000And if that leads to Medicare for All, that may be the path.
00:22:30.000She also suggested that Medicare for All had become more of a buzzword among political activists in the run-up to the 2020 campaign, which is basically her ripping on all the 2020 candidates, saying, you guys are ignoring the effect of Obamacare so that you can run for president.
00:22:45.000She says, when most people say they're for Medicare for All, I think they mean health care for all.
00:22:49.000A lot of people love having their employer-based insurance and the Affordable Care Act gave them better benefits, which is not actually true, but sure.
00:22:58.000The fact that Nancy Pelosi has now been castigated as out of the mainstream by her own party is pretty telling.
00:23:03.000The fact that Joe Biden is now considered retrograde by his own party demonstrates that when you have no fundamental principles to which you adhere, it is pretty easy for you to be cast overboard by the newer More robust socialists among you.
00:23:29.000According to the Washington Times, President Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen says he has new information to offer Democrats if authorities reduce or delay his upcoming three-year prison sentence.
00:23:38.000First of all, I'm not sure what he thinks he's doing.
00:23:40.000I mean, he is a bad lawyer, obviously, but his plea agreement says he had to be completely forthcoming with prosecutors all the way through.
00:23:47.000If he says that now he has new material, that means he was not forthcoming before, so they could theoretically revoke his sentence and give him a new, longer sentence.
00:23:54.000In a letter to lawmakers on Thursday, Cohen's attorneys say he has discovered substantial files on a hard drive that could help investigations of the president.
00:24:01.000So now he's trying to become a hero of the resistance.
00:24:04.000The hard drive is said to include over 14 million files consisting of all emails, voice recordings, images, and attachments from Cohen's computers and phones.
00:24:12.000But Cohen has already testified that he has no actual evidence of Russian collusion, even though he is trying to float such evidence now to Democrats.
00:24:19.000According to a memo that he apparently sent to Democrats, he said that he would provide significant value to the various congressional oversight and investigation committees.
00:24:28.000Honestly, this may be more of a threat to Democrats than it is to Trump, because Cohen probably doesn't have much that is new, but Democrats could continue to spiral down this hole and never recover.
00:24:37.000If they focus in here, I'm not sure that's a smart strategy for them.
00:24:40.000In just a second, gotta give you the Jussie Smollett update, and then we'll get to some mailbagging because it's Friday.
00:24:45.000First, Let's face it, Congress, they stink.
00:24:49.000The balance of powers that was guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States has completely fallen apart.
00:24:54.000In some ways, Congress has overstepped its boundaries regulating on activities that have nothing to do with Congress's original purview.
00:25:00.000And in other ways, Congress has kicked a lot of power to the executive branch, to the regulatory bodies, so that they never have to be held accountable.
00:25:07.000We need to restore the checks and balances that were originally invested in the Constitution The only way to do that is to call a convention of states where we the people can propose amendments.
00:25:16.000Those would be amendments that could force changes to the current balance of power, that could restrict the power of the federal government to intervene in your life.
00:25:24.000Can you imagine the look on the faces of federal regulators and members of Congress when they realize they can no longer control your life as they once wanted to?
00:25:30.000Calling a Convention of States is the only way to get the job done.
00:25:33.000There are already 3.8 million people with us on this and more every day.
00:25:36.000So join me and Mark Meckler and go to conventionofstates.com slash Ben.
00:25:51.000That is conventionofstates.com slash Ben.
00:25:53.000Help restore the original constitutional checks and balances that ensured limited government and our freedom.
00:25:58.000Go to conventionofstates.com Again, almost 4 million people with us on this already.
00:26:03.000Go to conventionofstates.com slash Ben and check it out right now because obviously that balance of power does need to be restored at the first available opportunity.
00:26:12.000Already, I think, what, 13 states have approved the Convention of States?
00:26:16.000So go check it out right now and become part of the fight.
00:26:23.000So, apparently, Jussie Smollett has now refused to pay.
00:26:25.000Chicago had sent Jussie Smollett a bill for like $130,000, which, by the way, he can afford to pay.
00:26:30.000He made, apparently, about $100,000 an episode from Empire.
00:26:34.000Well, now the city of Chicago is going to sue him.
00:26:37.000Last week, the Cook County State Attorney, they dropped 16 counts against Smollett, of course.
00:26:41.000The decision caused an uproar in Chicago.
00:26:43.000Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other officials blasted the prosecutor's office.
00:26:46.000Two days later, the city's Department of Law sent Smollett a bill in the amount of $130,000 and gave him a week to pay up.
00:26:52.000That deadline expired on Thursday afternoon.
00:26:54.000The law department issued a statement saying it was drafting a lawsuit.
00:26:58.000They said Mr. Smollett has refused to reimburse the city of Chicago for the cost of police overtime spent investigating his false police report on January 29th, 2019.
00:27:07.000The law department is now drafting a civil complaint that will be filed in the circuit court of Cook County.
00:27:11.000The law department will file the suit in the near future.
00:27:13.000As part of this legal action, the law department will pursue the full measure of damage as allowed under the ordinance.
00:27:19.000Smollett, of course, had falsely claimed that he was jumped while walking on the street at 2 a.m.
00:27:25.000on the way back from the subway by two white guys wearing red hats who used racial and homophobic slurs and shouted that it was MAGA country.
00:27:35.000And now he is going to be sued for $130,000.
00:27:39.000Meanwhile, the real scandal here is the prosecutor in this particular case, Kim Foxx, who has significant political connections to Team Obama.
00:27:46.000Yesterday, the police union called on Kim Foxx to resign her job.
00:27:51.000We're very grateful for the top police officials who are here with one united voice to demand the resignation of Cook County State's Attorney Kimberly Fox.
00:28:02.000This is not just about Jesse Smollett.
00:28:04.000This is about many cases in the Cook County system that have gone unprosecuted or having charges reduced.
00:28:13.000And what she's doing is she's enabling the offenders.
00:28:16.000The bad guys are not being held accountable.
00:28:18.000So today we're here to ask State's Attorney Fox to do the right thing to step down and resign from her position.
00:28:24.000Okay, and this has been the commonly held position among the police chiefs all over the city of Chicago.
00:28:30.000Suburban police chiefs and the Fraternal Order of Police called out Kim Foxx yesterday and they suggested that she needed to resign over the case.
00:28:37.000A group of suburban police chiefs joined with the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police.
00:28:41.000They gave her a vote of no confidence Thursday.
00:28:43.000The Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham and some other 30 suburban police leaders took it a step further.
00:28:47.000They called on Fox to resign, and that's what you just heard.
00:28:52.000They said, I was elected by the people of Cook County to pursue community safety, prevent harm, and uphold the values of fairness and equal justice.
00:28:59.000I plan to do so through the end of my term.
00:29:01.000And if the people will, so will it into the future.
00:29:03.000Graham said the union's issues with Fox's office didn't start with Jussie Smollett.
00:29:07.000He expressed frustration that Fox's office had dropped murder charges against Gabriel Solash and Arturo Reyes in late 2017 after a judge threw out their confessions.
00:29:16.000At the time, Fox's then-top assistant said the office still believed the two had fatally stabbed a couple in their Bucktown neighborhood home in 1998, but had no choice to dismiss the charges after the judge discredited testimony by a retired detective.
00:29:28.000Since mid-2016, about a dozen convictions tied to that particular detective have been thrown out of court because of allegations that the former detective beat suspects and coerced confessions.
00:29:37.000Apparently, this ticked off the Fraternal Order of Police.
00:29:41.000So, listen, the Chicago Police Department has had a bevy of problems, but that's really not the case when it comes to this particular case.
00:29:48.000This particular Smollett case was interviewed all the way down to the ground, and the fact that Kim Foxx decided not to prosecute is pretty astonishing.
00:29:56.000Meanwhile, speaking of law and order, the situation on the border continues to degrade.
00:30:02.000The crisis on the border continues to move ahead.
00:30:06.000We spoke yesterday on the radio show with a member of the Border Patrol down in San Diego who said that the crisis was essentially historic.
00:30:13.000He said he'd never really seen much like this.
00:30:16.000Tens of thousands of people descending on the border en masse.
00:30:18.000President Trump doesn't really know what to do because nobody knows what to do.
00:30:32.000Do they take seriously the problems at the border?
00:30:34.000No, of course they don't take seriously the problems at the border.
00:30:37.000So Lawrence Jones is a reporter for Fox News.
00:30:40.000Okay, he went down to the border and he put on a flak jacket.
00:30:44.000And the reason he put on a flak jacket is because in this particular area, There had been a case of 12 Mexican Marines wounded in a shootout in the nearby area.
00:30:56.000This is March 26, 2018 from the Associated Press.
00:30:59.000A Mexican Marine and four suspected gunmen were killed during a coordinated series of ambushes against Marine patrols in a northern Mexico border city, authorities reported on Sunday.
00:31:08.000So Lawrence Chose goes down there, and he is told by the Border Patrol, put on this flak jacket because we just don't know what we're going to encounter out there.
00:32:14.000Okay, I've talked to people who are serving down at the border, and what they've told me is there are cases where the cartels who are on the other side of the border, they've got binoculars, they've got eyes on a lot of the border patrol agents.
00:32:23.000They will figure out who they are, and then they will call up their hotel rooms and threaten them.
00:32:27.000So this idea that the border is a perfectly safe place, that's the myth.
00:32:31.000That's the myth, that the border is a perfectly safe... You literally have an organized criminal outfit that has killed legitimately thousands and thousands of people in Mexico, sitting right on the other side of that border.
00:32:40.000And we're supposed to believe that it's somehow out of bounds for a reporter to wear a flak vest?
00:32:47.000You know, Howard Schultz, who turns out to be maybe the only reasonable person in the 2018 race, I mean, he's amazing.
00:32:53.000The former CEO of Starbucks, one of the few sane people apparently running for office, and he's sane because he's really not from the political... He's really not from a political party at this point.
00:33:03.000He pointed out yesterday on Fox News that President Trump is correct on securing the border, which is obviously and eminently true.
00:33:09.000President Trump is correct, and the Republican leadership is correct, that we need fierce, strict levels of control on that border to keep bad people from coming in.
00:33:22.000Illegal immigrants should not come in.
00:33:25.000I don't want to get into a wall or anything, but I agree we should fund whatever we need to do to secure the border.
00:34:05.000Ro Khanna, who is a congressperson from out here in California, a Democratic congressperson from out here in California, he says that what we need to do is bring everybody through and then we can teach them coding.
00:34:16.000Why is this a solution to everything except for journalism?
00:34:18.000If you say to a journalist on Twitter, learn to code, they will suspend you.
00:34:22.000If you're a congressperson who says we should teach illegal immigrants, many of whom do not have a high school education, how to code, then this is somehow a solution to the border crisis.
00:34:30.000There's no doubt that the numbers of people coming over has increased.
00:34:43.000aid programs that are working, that are decreasing the violence there, that are teaching people about coding so people stay there, so folks aren't coming across the border.
00:34:53.000So we're going to teach them to code in Honduras is the idea here?
00:34:59.000That's definitely going to fix things.
00:35:01.000Okay, in a second, we'll get to the mailbag.
00:35:03.000First, let's talk about how you can alleviate that back pain.
00:35:06.000So it may sound kind of weird, but hanging upside down is actually a pretty great way to decompress the back and joints after a workout and boost recovery.
00:35:12.000You may not know it, but I work out on a regular basis.
00:35:17.000But that means that sometimes my back hurts after a workout, and I need inversion therapy.
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00:36:03.000Remember, you can only get that new 2019 Teeter FitSpine Inversion Table plus a free pair of gravity boots by going to teeter.com slash ben.
00:36:20.000Okay, in a second, we're going to get to the mailbag.
00:36:22.000But first, I need to remind you that as a thank you to our Daily Wire annual subscribers, we are giving a shout out to a different subscriber every Friday.
00:36:30.000We are thanking you For supporting what we do.
00:36:32.000In this photo, it appears that one of EJ's students came in with her leftist yours tumblr, and EJ put her in a choke because she wouldn't share the tumblr with him.
00:36:39.000She now realizes that chokes, like facts, do not care about your feeling.
00:36:46.000If you want a chance at being featured on the show, become a Daily Wire annual subscriber, post a photo of your leftist year's Tumblr on Twitter or Instagram.
00:37:30.000I listened to much of your conversation with Joe Rogan.
00:37:32.000When you were talking about decriminalizing marijuana, it makes me wonder how to sell this to religious communities.
00:37:37.000I had a good conversation with my pastor about it.
00:37:39.000Well, I think he made a great point in saying if we were to vote for decriminalization or legalization, he felt he would be signing approval, signaling approval for the usage.
00:37:46.000I tried to rebut by saying when we do things the right way or God's way, it works.
00:37:50.000The war on drugs is a complete failure.
00:37:51.000I said it was sinful because we as Christians weren't being a good steward of God's money or resources.
00:37:55.000Though he agreed, he would refuse to ever vote to decriminalize or legalize marijuana.
00:37:59.000Most of the parishioners in my church are much less open-minded to that conversation.
00:38:03.000I respect people's moral opposition, it just seems like a giant waste of money to me.
00:38:06.000Do most people in your synagogue disagree with you?
00:38:08.000Well, I would say there's a pretty broad disagreement in my synagogue and in religious communities generally about decriminalization of marijuana.
00:38:15.000So what is a good way to convince the religious community that the government is obviously not competent enough to deal with the issue?
00:38:21.000Well, I think that the first thing that you have to recognize is that just because something is bad doesn't mean that the government gets to regulate it.
00:38:27.000I do not like using the government as the imprimatur of appropriate behavior.
00:38:31.000I don't think that's the government's role.
00:38:33.000And in fact, I think it's been a huge mistake for conservatives to use government action as a sort of moral substitute.
00:38:41.000So we disapprove of something, therefore we pass a law against it, and then we use that law to crack down on the behavior, and then when we fail at cracking down on the behavior, then we legalize the behavior, and now the moral imprimatur is taken away, and people think it's okay to do something.
00:38:54.000I don't think that's how we should view things.
00:38:55.000I don't think politicians are moral leaders.
00:38:57.000I don't think that laws are about installing a quote-unquote moral system.
00:39:03.000They're about preventing harm to others.
00:39:05.000Installing moral systems is something you do in your home.
00:39:08.000Installing moral systems is something you do in your religious community.
00:39:11.000Yes, there's more of an onus on churches to take responsibility for their members when it comes to the use of marijuana or overuse or abuse of marijuana.
00:39:19.000If you were to decriminalize it, presumably it would become more common in particular areas.
00:39:24.000But that is not an argument in favor of the government simply enforcing your views on someone who is doing no harm to anyone else.
00:39:32.000Externality is the measure of what a government ought to do.
00:39:34.000So you really ought to discover, I mean, you really ought to discuss what government is there to do, and then move from there, rather than talk about whether it is moral or not to smoke pot.
00:39:46.000Because I don't think these two questions have to do with anything.
00:39:48.000I mean, this is basically the conversation that I had with Joe, not only on marijuana use, but also on same-sex marriage.
00:39:55.000I said that the government does not have a role here.
00:39:56.000That does not mean that I personally am in favor of same-sex marriage, because I'm not.
00:40:00.000Stephen says, hey, Ben, what are you looking for in episode...
00:40:02.000I think it's very difficult to imagine a universe in which they can recover from what they did, not only in The Last Jedi, but from Force Awakens.
00:40:14.000I thought Force Awakens was wildly overrated.
00:40:16.000I think that they should, honestly, listen, they're never going to do this.
00:40:21.000If it weren't for that, they should throw out episodes 7, 8, and presumably 9.
00:40:25.000They should go back and they should throw out episodes 1, 2, and 3 and they should start over.
00:40:28.000As I've said before, what they should have done after episode 6 is they should have either skipped forward 100 years and then relaunched an entirely new Star Wars universe, or they should have actually recast all of the characters after Return of the Jedi.
00:40:43.000And then just moved on with the story.
00:40:45.000That would have made a lot more sense than simply killing off these characters in the dumbest possible way to make room for new and significantly more boring characters.
00:40:52.000Also, they made a huge mistake in not allowing Rey and Kylo Ren to team up.
00:40:55.000That would have been so much more interesting.
00:41:07.000Adiel says, hey, Ben, I'm writing a paper on affirmative action.
00:41:10.000What would you say is the biggest issue with the policy specifically in regard to post-secondary education?
00:41:14.000Well, there are two major issues with affirmative action.
00:41:17.000Issue number one is it doesn't actually tend to help the people that it seeks to help.
00:41:20.000There's not a lot of data to demonstrate that affirmative action has been effective in increasing the upward mobility of people who benefit from affirmative action.
00:41:27.000Dropout rates are significantly higher for people who get into college through affirmative action.
00:41:31.000It also creates a broad spread perception, a widespread perception, that people who are of the race that has benefited from affirmative action are somehow unqualified because probably they got in, or maybe they got in, or possibly they got in through affirmative action.
00:41:44.000It does create a certain level of social stigma.
00:41:47.000If you look at your class and you say, well, I know some of these people got in with lower SAT scores, and I can tell who they are, probably, or at least possibly based on race, that creates an unfair stigma on a bunch of people who may have gotten in not based on that.
00:42:07.000Asian people are outperforming at major colleges across the country.
00:42:10.000This has been true of Harvard, where a lawsuit is now going on on the basis of all of this.
00:42:14.000Using standard metrics is a far better way of admitting students than this Ridiculous, holistic examination of your college essay.
00:42:22.000So you got 200 points less on the SAT, but you had a hard life, and so we are going to pretend that that is the equivalent of an Asian person who had a hard life, but got 200 points higher on the SAT.
00:42:31.000Race does not make up for performance when it comes to these issues.
00:42:35.000Again, if you have two people, and they have the same SAT scores, and one had a harder life than the other, race or not, race as a factor or not, then Fine.
00:42:45.000That person who has the harder life has overcome more to get the same scores.
00:42:48.000But if you're talking about letting in someone with a 1200 SAT to Harvard because that person was of a particular race, that is obviously a separation of human beings by race and an aspect of racism that is quite unpleasant.
00:43:03.000out here in the socialist republic of canada it is more than the weather that is bleak in our future i know you don't follow canadian politics who could really but i'd like to know what given the limited information you have now what would you want for a canadian conservatism in the future well i think that a canadian conservatism would start by pushing back against a lot of the free speech encroachments that have happened in places like british columbia where you could theoretically be prosecuted for violating particular political beliefs the same thing is true i believe in ontario of bill c16
00:43:29.000i would start there and push back against the idea that the government gets to cram down on people what to think or how to raise their children it's very very dangerous stuff socialized medicine obviously won't be touched in canada because once people are given what they see as an entitlement they are very loath to give it up But obviously, socialized medicine in Canada has some serious, serious problems.
00:43:48.000Such serious problems that a part of Canada was forced to recently open up the private market because people simply were not getting the care that they needed from Canada's public market.
00:43:59.000Lower taxes, obviously, would be a factor in driving more business to Canada.
00:44:04.000I mean, I don't want to rip on Canada too much.
00:44:05.000I think Canada's a pretty great place, but that's, those are a few corrections.
00:44:08.000Jonathan says, Hey Ben, long time listener, first time subscriber.
00:44:33.000In fact, I see a censorious left that is looking to harm people who disagree.
00:44:37.000I have a great story about this, in fact, from the College Fix today.
00:44:40.000Quote, "One evening last September, a Michigan State student, university, awoke from his nap to see his roommate sitting at his computer.
00:44:47.000There was a video playing, and the student realized his roommate was watching a video of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
00:44:52.000The newly awoken student then took to his own computer to file a complaint with the administration's biased reporting system against his roommate for watching the Shapiro video.
00:45:02.000Ben Shapiro is known for his inflammatory speech that criticizes and attacks the African American community.
00:45:07.000The student wrote in his report against his roommate, I'd like to see any evidence that I have attacked the African American community, like legitimate evidence.
00:45:14.000He said, I thought hate speech, I thought hate had no place on MSU's campus, yet MSU has roomed me with someone who supports hate speech, spelled S-P-E-A-C-H.
00:45:25.000Shapiro is a popular conservative pundit, says the College Fix, whose appearances on college campuses are frequently accompanied with protests.
00:45:31.000In response, the university tasked an investigator to look into the matter, who is told to work for a room change if the claimant would like one.
00:45:38.000First of all, if I were the other student, I'd be like, yeah, get this person out of here, because this person is crazy.
00:45:43.000If my roommate in college were watching Rachel Maddow, I wouldn't file a complaint.
00:45:48.000And that's a near human rights violation, for goodness sake.
00:45:51.000But no, the tolerance is not going to be extended anytime soon.
00:45:55.000Raphael says, Hey Ben, I agree that abortion is a sin and immoral.
00:45:58.000However, in my opinion, the government should allow it with proper education in cases of rape.
00:46:02.000The argument that it is the person's responsibility since they did not use contraceptives and they chose to have sex does not apply in rapes.
00:46:07.000What is the pro-life position in this case?
00:46:09.000And in your opinion, is there a valid argument to be made for this kind of policy?
00:46:12.000Well, the pro-life position is not dependent on the quote unquote responsibility of the person.
00:46:17.000Because again, the actual pro-life position has to do with the status of the human life growing in the womb.
00:46:21.000It's actually a separate question The quote-unquote responsibility.
00:46:24.000Responsibility adds to the mix in the sense that if there is a predictable result to the thing that you are voluntarily doing and then that result happens, you can't throw up your hands and go, oh my God, I was victimized by life.
00:46:41.000As Barack Obama said, punishing somebody with a baby.
00:46:42.000You don't want to punish her with a baby.
00:46:45.000That is not what we are talking about.
00:46:46.000We are talking about protecting the life of an infant.
00:46:48.000We're talking about protecting the incipient life of a baby.
00:46:52.000And that really has nothing to do with where the responsibility lies, it has to do with the idea that you are not allowed to kill a baby because the original creation of the baby was not your responsibility.
00:47:01.000In other words, if somebody leaves a baby on my doorstep, and I open the door and there's the baby, and then I shut the door and I just leave the baby out there to die, that's not something that we should presumably morally be okay with.
00:47:18.000Now, in Western law, this is one of the dicier issues in Western law.
00:47:22.000In Western law, the question is, is there a duty of care that attends a person who you are not related to?
00:47:31.000So in Western law, we've been reluctant.
00:47:32.000The best argument for abortion in cases of rape is this argument, effectively, which is, If you're walking by a person who is drowning, you don't actually have a responsibility under Western law to jump in the water and save that person, even if you could do so pretty easily.
00:47:46.000There's no responsibility in Western law.
00:47:50.000So that could theoretically be extended to cases of abortion and cases of rape, but the problem is that there's a difference between not saving somebody, letting them die, and actively killing somebody.
00:48:01.000So if the baby is on my front door and somebody leaves the baby at my doorstep, and then I open the door, And it's not just me closing the door now, now it's me actively stabbing the baby.
00:48:11.000That is now a completely different question.
00:48:13.000Sure, go read my book, The People vs. Barack Obama.
00:48:15.000President Obama's administration has been scandal-free.
00:48:17.000Could you go over some of the top scandals people are forgetting?
00:49:06.000Orthodox Judaism believes that the Bible, the Torah, the five books of Moses, were given by God, and that they are true, and that the Talmudic tradition that interprets the Bible is in fact good and proper law and that you have to abide by the commandments of the Bible because that is what you are put on earth to do.
00:49:25.000Conservative Judaism, original conservative Judaism said that basically the Bible may have been God-inspired and that we could abrogate a lot of the laws because those laws are no longer relevant and said that the rabbinic tradition is not nearly as important as it has been in Orthodox Judaism for a long time and Reform Judaism Honestly, I'm not sure even what the doctrine of Reform Judaism is at this point.
00:49:47.000They say that the Torah may not have been biblically and may not have been God-inspired.
00:49:53.000The bottom line is that conservative used to be kind of closer to what modern orthodox is now.
00:49:58.000Now conservative Judaism has fallen into disrepair and moved toward reform Judaism.
00:50:03.000The only growing area of Judaism right now is the orthodox community.
00:50:07.000Well, certainly there is an attempt to downgrade particular states, right?
00:50:09.000Well, certainly there is an attempt to downgrade particular states, right?
00:50:21.000Nobody would spend time in Wisconsin or in Michigan or in Pennsylvania outside of the major urban areas if it were just a popular vote.
00:50:30.000And this is one of the big arguments in favor of the Electoral College, is that if you want to have a country that holds together across a disparate population, you do need to give a certain level of outsized impact to people who don't live in city centers, or those people are simply going to say, listen, leave me alone.
00:50:51.000One of the things that keeps communities together is a certain level of care that is taken for people who are living outside these sort of city centers and levers of power.
00:51:03.000As you know, the left has pushed this idea that men and women are completely the same and that all gender roles are socially constructed.
00:51:08.000I do believe there are gender roles that are socially constructed, but I also believe a lot of feminine and masculine attributes are human nature.
00:51:13.000Can you say which gender roles you consider to be socially constructed and which you believe are influenced by biology?
00:51:19.000Well, you can tell which gender roles are socially constructed and which are influenced by biology by looking cross-culturally.
00:51:23.000So the fact is that women tend to be more caring and affectionate.
00:51:27.000They tend to be more interested in interpersonal relationships.
00:51:30.000Men tend to be obsessed with objects and things and mechanisms.
00:51:34.000The male tendency toward aggression and violence is documented not just in the human species, but also in virtually all mammalian species.
00:51:44.000These are things that are hardcore embedded.
00:51:47.000The sort of cultural outgrowths of that have manifested in various modes of dress.
00:51:52.000Obviously, the notion that women are more nurturing, that women are less physically aggressive has manifested in sort of prettier garments for women in most cultures, for example.
00:52:01.000But as far as gender roles that are sort of constructed, well, I mean, the idea that women were not supposed to work at all was an exaggeration of a perceived gender binary.
00:52:11.000So the idea was that women are more likely to want to be in the home, and they're the ones who bear and rear children.
00:52:17.000There's a certain biological truth to that, but that was taken to the extreme by saying, well, women shouldn't work outside the home, and obviously that's stupid.
00:52:22.000So what has very often happened is that gender roles are based in reality, but then they are pushed too far to the point where they become oppressive.
00:53:33.000The reason that anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian attitudes dominate leftist college campuses is because the left has a widespread view That anytime you see a rich person and a poor person, the rich person is responsible for the poor person's misery.
00:53:45.000And so when they look to the Middle East, and they see a westernized, liberal, powerful country like Israel, juxtaposed with a hellhole like the Gaza Strip, where a terrorist group is in charge, they want to attribute that to Israeli exploitation.
00:53:58.000Despite the fact that Israel abandoned the Gaza Strip in 2005.
00:54:02.000Despite the fact that the vast majority of Palestinians have been living under direct Palestinian control for the last 20 years.
00:54:08.000This is somehow Israel's fault, Even though Palestinian terror groups keep being elected and controlling the governments in these areas.
00:54:14.000It's a very convenient baton to wield against the Jewish state, which, after all, seeks to survive only.
00:54:20.000As Dennis Prager is fond of saying, if Israel put down all of its guns tomorrow, there would be no Israel.
00:54:24.000If the Palestinians put down all their guns tomorrow, there would be a Palestinian state.
00:54:28.000Alrighty, let's get to some things I like and then some things that I don't.
00:54:31.000So, first thing that I like today, There's a movie that came out and was largely ignored called Vox Lux.
00:54:37.000Now, I understand why it wasn't a popular movie, but it is one of the best takes on the depredations of Hollywood and modern culture that I've seen in a very long time.
00:54:47.000The basic premise of the film is that there's a young girl who is going to school in the late 90s, and her classroom is shot up in a Columbine-style attack, and she herself is shot.
00:54:58.000And when she recovers, she sings a song at a memorial service, and it becomes popular, and she ends up becoming a pop star.
00:55:04.000And the movie is basically about how she falls apart as a human being, thanks to the predations of Hollywood and the music industry, and how we as a society have decided to gloss over many of our problems with this sort of happy talk of pop music, that sort of, the Irisatz happiness that pop music is supposed to represent.
00:55:28.000Other things that I like, so I just have to pay homage to this amazing nurse who has adopted a baby At the hospital that had not been visited for five months, is according to the Washington Post.
00:55:38.000Two years ago, Liz Smith, director of nursing at Franciscan Children's Hospital in Brighton, Massachusetts, was headed toward the elevator at work when she saw her.
00:55:45.000A tiny girl with bright blue eyes and a single soft brown curl swept across her forehead.
00:55:50.000Smith asked the nurse who was wheeling the infant down the hall.
00:55:52.000Her name is Giselle, the nurse told her.
00:55:53.000The infant, a ward of the state, had been at the hospital for five months, but Smith had never seen her before.
00:55:58.000Smith learned that Giselle, then eight months old, had been born premature at another hospital in July 2016, weighing just under two pounds.
00:56:04.000She had neonatal abstinence syndrome, a result of her birth mother using heroin, cocaine, and meth during pregnancy.
00:56:10.000The state of Massachusetts took custody of Giselle when she was three months old, And transfer her to Franciscan Children's because her lungs needed specialized care and she had a feeding tube.
00:56:18.000The baby didn't have a single visitor in five months at the hospital.
00:56:21.000Social service workers were trying to place her in foster care.
00:56:24.000And so Smith decided to foster the baby and become her mother.
00:56:27.000She adopted the baby, which is just an amazing thing.
00:56:30.000You know, folks who adopt are the great unsung heroes in our society.
00:57:28.000There's been a lot of talk in recent months about the inversion of the yield curve.
00:57:31.000What exactly does that mean, and what does that indicate for the future of the economy?
00:57:35.000I mean, it's a really key sign that we have some tough times to come.
00:57:40.000Essentially, the yield curve charts interest rates on bonds short versus long-term.
00:57:46.000And in a normal climate, what you expect to see is shorter-term bonds will carry lower interest rates, longer-term bonds higher interest rates.
00:58:44.000So what are some of the other signs that we've been seeing?
00:58:45.000I've seen a number of reports about employment slowing.
00:58:48.000What are some of the other signs that you're seeing in the economy about a sort of slowdown in the economy that we might be expecting here?
00:58:53.000Look, a lot of key metrics are reflecting bubbles and some bad things to come.
00:58:58.000We mentioned price-to-earning ratios last time I was here.
00:59:01.000Something we've been looking at very closely recently is something called a Smart Money Flow Index.
00:59:07.000It's a Bloomberg chart and essentially it's designed to track institutional money flows in and out of the stock market.
00:59:14.000And what we're seeing is a lot of institutional money last year and carrying on into this year Flooding out of the Dow Jones, a really, really big sign of tough things to come.
00:59:25.000What I think is even more interesting about the chart, it goes back to 1992, and it seems to show the uncanny ability of institutional investors to get out because we saw the same trend before the crash in 2008, same trend before the crash in 2000.
01:00:02.000It's a case of understanding where opportunity exists, and I think making preemptive moves.
01:00:07.000And as you and I have discussed, I think precious metals, for a portion of one's portfolio in a climate like this, Can work really, really well.
01:00:14.000They're contrarian in nature, so the idea is, if we see losses on one portion, it should be the same climate driving growth in contrarian assets, so that losses could be mitigated.
01:00:25.000And this is what people mean by diversification.
01:00:27.000When people talk about diversification, you're not talking about everybody taking all their money and putting it into precious metals.
01:00:31.000You're talking about, you should have your eggs in more than one basket, effectively.
01:00:37.000You wouldn't recommend anyone taking all eggs and putting them in any one basket, but it's diversification, it's a measure of a hedge, that's exactly what we're talking about.
01:00:44.000So when it comes to precious metals, how have they performed historically versus the market, particularly in downtimes?
01:01:54.000Folks, check out Birchgold Group at birchgold.com slash Ben.
01:01:58.000Okay, time for some things that I hate, so let's just jump right in.
01:02:06.000Okay, so it is worthwhile noting that Students for Justice in Palestine actually is a group that has ties to terrorism.
01:02:13.000They were just given an award, apparently, at New York University.
01:02:17.000The Presidential Service Award at NYU.
01:02:21.000Despite the pushback we have received from our institution, we agree that we have made significant contributions to the university community in the areas of learning, leadership, and quality of student life.
01:02:30.000Anyway, New York University divests from Israeli apartheid.
01:02:33.000The attempts to boycott Israel on campuses is growing in stature.
01:02:36.000It's always fascinating to watch as groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, which again, do have ties to groups that are associated with terror, that those groups are given all sorts of credence, despite the fact that Students for Justice in Palestine is legitimately an anti-Semitic group.
01:02:52.000Instead of them doing Palestinian Pride Week, there's Israel Pride Week, which happens on campuses all over America.
01:02:59.000Instead of doing Palestinian Pride Week, they do Israeli Apartheid Week, because the goal is to label the Israelis as a bunch of evil racists, despite the fact that Israeli Arabs are treated better than Muslims in any part of the Middle East, bar none, it is not close.
01:03:12.000Despite the fact that Arab parties sit in the Knesset, despite the fact that there's a Palestinian on the Supreme Court of Israel, none of that matters.
01:03:18.000Israel is the bad guy, and so they put out posters like this one.
01:03:21.000For Israel Apartheid Week, in which it shows a Palestinian who is throwing a, it looks like a paint can, a spray paint can at an Israeli.
01:03:31.000And this is either causing the Israeli to have a bump on his head or the Israeli soldier has horns.
01:03:36.000And is following the Palestinian with a gun.
01:03:38.000Because that's all that's happening there, is that people are spray-painting and then the Israelis shoot them.
01:03:42.000It's not that terrorists are trying to break through the border and murder Israeli citizens, or fire rockets into civilian areas in the middle of Israel.
01:03:51.000And this sort of stuff is not only tolerated on college campuses, which it should be.
01:03:55.000I mean, bad rhetoric should be tolerated on college campuses, obviously.
01:03:58.000But it is promoted by the administration in many of these cases.
01:04:01.000Students for Justice in Palestine, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Has significant ties to Islamic terror groups, this is according to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.
01:04:10.000The JCPA report notes that the National SJP Organization was established in 2010 by American Muslims for Palestine, AMP, the US-Palestinian Community Network, at the 2010 World Social Forum.
01:04:21.000AMP is chaired by Hatem Bazyan, who is also the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine.
01:04:25.000Bazyan has called for an intifada in the United States and has referred to Israel as the slave master.
01:04:30.000Additionally, at least a couple of A&P board leaders have ties to the Holy Land Foundation, a charity that was convicted in 2008 for providing material support to Hamas.
01:04:39.000National SJP has also provided a platform at their conferences to the terrorist Razmiya Odeh, who was convicted by an Israeli court for a 1969 Jerusalem supermarket bombing that killed two students.
01:04:49.000Razmiya Odeh, by the way, has also been praised by people like Linda Sarsour.
01:04:53.000The report notes that SJP has been involved in a number of incidents on college campuses throughout the country, including members of UC Irvine's SJP getting arrested for violent verbal disruptions of a presentation by Dr. Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
01:05:09.000Things are very ugly in the anti-Israel community on college campuses, and that is something worth taking note of.