The Ben Shapiro Show - July 14, 2017


Does Any Of This Stuff Matter? | Ep. 340


Episode Stats

Length

55 minutes

Words per Minute

200.699

Word Count

11,102

Sentence Count

742

Misogynist Sentences

19

Hate Speech Sentences

13


Summary

On Friday, three Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount, and were shot dead by police, but not before murdering two Druze police officers, one of whom has a three-week old baby in his arms. Meanwhile, the mainstream media reacted ineffectually to the news, and continued to demand moral equivalence where none exists. Ben Shapiro explains why this is a predictable pattern, and how to deal with it. Plus, the latest on the latest in the Trump-Russia scandal, and a listener mailbag featuring Mark Levin. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on the FiveThirtyEight Network and host of the Daily Wire's "Politics with Ben Shapiro" podcast. He is a regular contributor to The Daily Wire and the Weekly Standard, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal. He's also a frequent guest on CNN and NPR. His new book, "Trump's Russia," is out now, and will be available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo, as well as on Audible, iTunes, and Podchaser, where you can get 20% off your first month for free! if you search for "Trump, Russia." and use the promo code "RUSSIA" at checkout to receive $5 and receive a FREE month of unlimited access to a free course from the site that includes a $99 credit plan from Shraga, which includes access to "The Daily Beast. and Shrutee and a $10 credit plan. You can also get an ad-free version of the entire show on the show, plus a free copy of The Daily Beast app, and an additional $5 promo code, and access to the show is available for a month of the show. The show will include a $5 discount, plus an additional discount on the full course, and $5 VIP membership when you sign up to the service, which is available in full-service only you get $5.00 and receive $10.00 a month, plus they will receive $25, plus $5, and they will get an additional month of VIP access to The Shapiro will also receive a VIP membership and a discount on The Daily Mail and VIP membership begins in 7 days, plus 7 other places they can receive $4 VIP membership starts in March 2019. Learn more about the offer begins in March 2020. Want to become a supporter?


Transcript

00:00:00.000 On Friday, three Palestinian terrorists opened fire on the holiest site in Judaism, the Temple Mount.
00:00:05.000 They were shot dead by police, but not before murdering two Druze police officers, one of whom has a three-week-old child.
00:00:10.000 One of the terrorists reportedly played dead as an emergency medic tried to help him, then tried to stab the medic before he was shot.
00:00:16.000 Naturally, the media's headlines were insanely vague.
00:00:18.000 Here's the AP, quote,
00:00:20.000 Two Israeli policemen killed in shooting near Jerusalem Shrine.
00:00:23.000 The BBC, quote, Israelis injured in gun attack near Jerusalem Holy Site.
00:00:27.000 Al Jazeera, breaking, at least three Palestinians killed in shooting in Jerusalem's Old City.
00:00:32.000 Getty Images, Israeli policemen killed three Palestinians in Al-Aqsa Mosque.
00:00:36.000 All of this is in keeping with the mainstream media's dedication to imposing moral equivalence where none exists.
00:00:42.000 Holy sites in Israel are routinely under assault, not from Jews, but from Palestinians.
00:00:45.000 Palestinians have burned Joseph's tomb multiple times.
00:00:48.000 They've spent years destroying archaeological evidence of Jewish presence on the Temple Mount itself.
00:00:53.000 Whenever Palestinians attack Jews, the official response from the supposedly peaceful Palestinian Authority is to continue funding terrorism, then offer a vague statement about stopping violence on all sides.
00:01:02.000 Meanwhile, the Israeli government has already announced it will maintain current policy on the Temple Mount, which favors Muslims to such an extent that Jews are not even allowed to mouth silent prayers on the Temple Mount.
00:01:12.000 Again, the holiest site in Judaism.
00:01:14.000 In cities like Bethlehem, the number of Christians has dropped from 50% of the population to 12%, and terrorism is still a serious threat.
00:01:22.000 In 2002, Palestinian terrorists actually used the Church of the Nativity as a safe haven.
00:01:26.000 All of this is demonstrative of the fact that Israeli control of holy sites is the only way to preserve their free and open access.
00:01:33.000 Yet the United Nations continues to rip away Jewish history piece by piece, claiming that the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron are not Jewish, but Palestinians' historical site.
00:01:42.000 Don't expect the truth to emerge anytime soon.
00:01:44.000 The media are dedicated to perpetuating this conflict.
00:01:46.000 They see Israel as a colonialist aggressor,
00:01:48.000 No, it's all just a cycle of violence, as always.
00:01:50.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:01:50.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:02:07.000 All right, many a thing to get to.
00:02:08.000 We have a very busy show today, so we'll give you the latest on all of the Trump-Russia stuff.
00:02:11.000 Then we're going to be talking with Mark Levin in just about 15 minutes here.
00:02:14.000 He will be stopping by, and that'll be awesome.
00:02:17.000 And then, after that, we are going to do the mailbag, so lots to get to on today's show.
00:02:21.000 But before we get to any of that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
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00:03:50.000 Okay, so.
00:03:52.000 Last night, after all of the Trump-Russia, Don Jr.
00:03:56.000 stuff seems to have boiled down a little bit, and everybody seems to have retreated to their respective corners in this fight, a new article from the Associated Press breaks.
00:04:04.000 And here's what this article says, quote, A Russian-American lobbyist says he attended a June 2016 meeting with President Donald Trump's son, marking another shift in the account of a discussion that was billed as part of a Russian government effort to help the Republicans' White House campaign.
00:04:18.000 Rinat Akhmetshin,
00:04:21.000 Hmm.
00:04:21.000 Confirmed his participation to the Associated Press on Friday.
00:04:24.000 Akhmetchin has been reported to have ties to Russian intelligence agencies, though he denies ever working as an intelligence agent, which is what you do if you're an intelligence agent.
00:04:31.000 He told the AP he served in the Soviet military in a unit that was part of counterintelligence, but was never formally trained as a spy.
00:04:37.000 So we just keep learning that more and more people were at this meeting.
00:04:39.000 So originally, the meeting never happened.
00:04:41.000 Then the meeting happened, but it was just with this crazy lady who wanted to talk about adoption.
00:04:45.000 Then it turned out that the crazy lady who wanted to talk about adoption was billed as a Russian government lawyer,
00:04:49.000 Who's going to spill information about Hillary Clinton in order to help Russia's pro-Trump campaign.
00:04:54.000 And now it turns out there was a second Russian there with apparent intelligence ties.
00:04:58.000 So, just awesome.
00:05:00.000 Guys.
00:05:01.000 Trump administration, if you want us to believe you on these things, you are going to need to stop omitting details that are not details, right?
00:05:08.000 You're going to actually have to come clean about this, and then we'll all let it go.
00:05:12.000 Because as I have said a million times, there's no evidence of law violation.
00:05:15.000 There's no evidence that actual active collusion took place even beyond this.
00:05:19.000 I've been saying this for a while, but I'm still confused by the Democrats' theory of what collusion would constitute.
00:05:24.000 Do they think that the Russians went with WikiLeaks and hacked the DNC?
00:05:27.000 And then they were giving hints to Trump about what would come.
00:05:29.000 I didn't see that at all during the campaign, did you?
00:05:31.000 I didn't see any speeches where Trump was like, there's something unbelievable it's gonna drop tomorrow.
00:05:36.000 At ten people.
00:05:36.000 Get ready.
00:05:37.000 And then the next day, WikiLeaks dropped something.
00:05:39.000 I didn't see any of that.
00:05:40.000 And I didn't even see that the Trump campaign was on top of the content of the WikiLeaks.
00:05:45.000 Like they'd been pre-warned and all of a sudden an hour later they'd militarized it and they exploited it.
00:05:49.000 What I saw was WikiLeaks was releasing a lot of stuff, and then people like me were group sourcing it, crowd sourcing it, so that we could see what exactly was in there.
00:05:56.000 So a lot of this is, again, I still don't see what exactly they're saying the strategy was here.
00:06:01.000 That said, Trump is going to have to do a better job of telling the truth on this, and so is Trump Jr., if they want this whole thing to go away.
00:06:09.000 So yesterday, President Trump is in France, and it's been a week since he's answered any questions from the press.
00:06:15.000 As far as my son is concerned, my son is a wonderful young man.
00:06:17.000 He took a meeting with a Russian lawyer.
00:06:19.000 Not a government lawyer, but a Russian lawyer.
00:06:21.000 It was a short meeting.
00:06:23.000 It was a meeting that
00:06:41.000 Went very, very quickly, very fast.
00:06:43.000 Two other people in the room, I guess one of them left almost immediately and the other one was not really focused on the meeting.
00:06:50.000 I do think this, I think from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting.
00:06:56.000 It's called opposition research or even research into your opponent.
00:07:00.000 Okay, and he continues along these lines.
00:07:02.000 He said, you know, it's called opposite research.
00:07:05.000 I've had many people, I've only been in politics for two years, I've had many people call up and say, oh gee, we have information on this factor or this person or, frankly, Hillary.
00:07:12.000 That's very standard in politics.
00:07:13.000 Politics isn't the nicest business in the world, but it's very standard where they have information and you take the information.
00:07:18.000 In the case of Don, he listened.
00:07:19.000 I guess they talked about, as I see it, they talked about adoption and some things, and then he goes on and he says that it's really Obama's fault because Attorney General Lynch brought in this Natalia Veselnitskaya character, this Russian lawyer, in January.
00:07:32.000 As I said yesterday, I think that's a bunch of crap.
00:07:34.000 I think the idea that she was brought in as some sort of attempt to
00:07:40.000 Get the Trump team is just silly.
00:07:43.000 There's a little bit of an inherent contradiction there.
00:07:44.000 Yesterday, Trump did a White House, it wasn't really a press conference, but he did kind of a White House press pool.
00:07:50.000 I'm not coming from a place where I want to see all of this blow up on Trump.
00:07:53.000 I'm not interested in that.
00:07:54.000 I think it would endanger any sort of Republican agenda that we have left.
00:08:17.000 If Trump were to completely fold and collapse and this whole thing were to end up being a giant scam, but he's gonna have to do better than this just from any objective point of view.
00:08:26.000 He needs to tell the truth and come clean.
00:08:28.000 I was on Steven Crowder's show yesterday and we were agreeing that one of the things you do in politics is when there's something that's quasi-scandalous, you get out in front of it by explaining it before anyone else has a chance to.
00:08:38.000 So Barack Obama did this wonderfully in Dreams for My Father.
00:08:40.000 There was all sorts of oppo material in there.
00:08:43.000 That really could have damaged him, particularly the idea that when he was in college and high school, he did a little blow.
00:08:48.000 You remember, he said this in his, uh, I did a little blow.
00:08:50.000 Did a little drugs.
00:08:51.000 Wasn't a big deal.
00:08:52.000 And everybody sort of went, oh, well, you know, what an honest guy.
00:08:55.000 As opposed to in 2000, George W. Bush didn't reveal that he'd had a DWI.
00:08:59.000 When that came out, then that actually ended up hurting his, his, or DUI.
00:09:04.000 That ended up hurting his, um, his credibility right before the election.
00:09:08.000 It ended up probably losing him the popular vote, that DWI, uh, DUI.
00:09:12.000 We're good.
00:09:15.000 You have a chance here, if you're the Trump team, to get out in front of this thing and explain what exactly you were doing.
00:09:20.000 They're not doing that very well so far.
00:09:23.000 Meanwhile, you have the people of the Trump administration trying to say to the media, you need to pay attention to real issues.
00:09:31.000 Well, it's hard for people in the media to pay attention to real issues when, again, you keep not telling the truth.
00:09:35.000 So Sebastian Gorka, who I think actually usually does a very good job on the media, he's on with Jake Tapper, and he says, listen, why aren't we paying attention to the fact that people are dying in Syria?
00:09:44.000 People are dying in Syria, that's why, Jake.
00:09:46.000 Why do you have to move on?
00:09:47.000 Do you not care about the devastation, the half a million people killed?
00:09:51.000 Of course I do.
00:09:51.000 Well, we've got life and death issues.
00:09:53.000 Russia is killing some of those people.
00:09:56.000 We've got life and death issues, and if we can create a ceasefire, which we did, with Israel, with Jordan involved, that's what we have to do.
00:10:05.000 We have to move on.
00:10:07.000 Okay, so Gorka is trying to say, let's get back to the issues.
00:10:10.000 Again, the best way to get back to the issues is to actually bring focus back to the issues as opposed to having all of these silly scandals running around.
00:10:18.000 As Charles Krauthammer says, this really is Keystone Cops kind of stuff.
00:10:22.000 Well, I'm not impressed by the story about the lawyer.
00:10:25.000 I think it's a red herring the size of a whale.
00:10:28.000 She was a pawn.
00:10:29.000 It doesn't change the central fact in the scandal.
00:10:32.000 The scandal is that the email received from an intermediary by Donald Trump Jr.
00:10:37.000 said that a Russian government lawyer, the president is wrong, it was not a lawyer, a Russian government lawyer,
00:10:45.000 Would be coming with dirt on Hillary, and that the Kremlin was supporting his campaign, and that the Crown Prosecutor, that's a misnomer, the State Prosecutor in the Kremlin had a trove of documents that they would offer.
00:10:59.000 That's the story.
00:11:01.000 I don't think it's illegal.
00:11:02.000 I don't think anybody is claiming that it's illegal, but it does.
00:11:07.000 The one thing it does that would totally undermine is a six-month story from the White House to which I was sympathetic.
00:11:14.000 That there wasn't any collusion.
00:11:16.000 This was a bungled collusion?
00:11:18.000 Okay, when you've lost Krauthammer, Krauthammer has been very skeptical of the Trump-Russia stuff for months at this point, and the White House needs to do a better job of explaining itself.
00:11:25.000 Now, meanwhile, one of the great ironies in all of this is that the Democrats are now super, super pissed at Russia.
00:11:30.000 So yesterday, Brian Fallon, who's a Hillary spokesperson, he comes out and he says, Mitt Romney was right, we never should have mocked him over the Russia stuff.
00:11:37.000 Yeah, well, thank you.
00:11:38.000 I appreciate it.
00:11:39.000 Five years too late.
00:11:40.000 Thanks for all of that, you jerk.
00:11:42.000 But this is what's happened, is that politics has become so gross that everyone has now switched positions.
00:11:47.000 So you got Paul Begala out there, as Rush Limbaugh used to call him, the forehead out there, saying we should blow up Russia, that we should bomb Russia over this.
00:11:55.000 We were and are under attack by a hostile foreign power and they seem to be abetting that hostile foreign power.
00:12:04.000 We should be debating how many sanctions we should place on Russia or whether we should blow up the KGB or GSU, GRU.
00:12:11.000 I mean, we should be retaliating massively.
00:12:15.000 Because, by the way, if I were a Trump supporter, I would want to retaliate massively because it has tainted, it has tainted his victory.
00:12:20.000 Okay, and so now all of a sudden we should blow up Russia, right?
00:12:24.000 So these are the same people who said it was no big deal in 2012 when Barack Obama wanted to offer flexibility to the Kremlin.
00:12:29.000 Now he says we have to blow up Russia, right?
00:12:32.000 Nancy Pelosi is saying Russia has desecrated our democracy.
00:12:34.000 They've desecrated our democracy.
00:12:36.000 Gummy or dentures all moving around all weird and such.
00:12:40.000 In the month, again, as we celebrate the courage of our founders,
00:12:44.000 Republicans in Congress have become enablers.
00:12:48.000 Okay, we can stop it right there.
00:12:51.000 Okay, and then on the right, so now all of a sudden the Democrats are really anti-Russia.
00:12:55.000 And on the right, you have people like Tucker Carlson, whose show I enjoy.
00:12:58.000 I think Tucker's a really talented guy.
00:13:00.000 But Tucker, yesterday, a couple nights ago, he did a debate with Max Boot that I thought was really not intellectually honest in some ways from Tucker, in which Tucker actually says that Russia is not a top five threat to the United States or her interests.
00:13:14.000 And then he actually ended up defending Iran.
00:13:16.000 He ended up saying, well, when's the last time Iran killed Americans after 9-11?
00:13:19.000 And Max Butz said, well, they killed hundreds of Americans in Iraq.
00:13:24.000 What we have here is IowaHawk, who's hilarious, IowaHawk on Twitter.
00:13:28.000 He says, basically, we're no longer playing in a game with rules.
00:13:30.000 We're playing Calvin Ball.
00:13:32.000 Like from Calvin and Hobbes, where the rules just shift randomly and suddenly you switch sides.
00:13:35.000 And it turns out that you hated Russia five minutes ago, but now you love Russia.
00:13:38.000 Or you loved Russia five minutes ago, but now you hated Russia.
00:13:41.000 Now, the Republican defense to all of this has been the one that I think Richard Grinnell pointed out.
00:13:44.000 Richard Grinnell is a former, I believe he was a former advisor to the UN ambassador.
00:13:50.000 And he says, look, everybody outside of Washington, D.C.
00:13:53.000 doesn't care about this Russia stuff.
00:13:54.000 This is, I think, the bottom line defense being used by a lot of Trump defenders today.
00:13:58.000 I'm not sure it washes.
00:14:00.000 I think I'm the only one that doesn't live in Washington, D.C.
00:14:02.000 here, and people don't care about this.
00:14:04.000 There's such a difference between listening and acting.
00:14:07.000 I think Donald Trump Jr.
00:14:09.000 listened to something that was brought to him.
00:14:13.000 Okay, we can stop it there.
00:14:14.000 Here's I think the point.
00:14:16.000 People on the right want to do this routine where we say, well, if you look at Trump's base, he's not being abandoned by his base.
00:14:22.000 He will never be abandoned by his base.
00:14:23.000 That's why they're called his base.
00:14:24.000 He has like 30% of the population.
00:14:26.000 That's great!
00:14:27.000 Okay, it's great that Trump has a base of 30% of the population.
00:14:29.000 That's good for any Republican president.
00:14:31.000 Fantastic.
00:14:32.000 Okay, the fact is that when you say that the common man doesn't pay attention to the Russia stuff...
00:14:37.000 That's like saying the common person doesn't pay attention to the Hillary Clinton email stuff.
00:14:41.000 Democrats said that for an entire election cycle, and it turns out that two things can happen to cause you to lose elections.
00:14:46.000 One is you lose your base, but the second is that your base decides that they're not that enthused and they're going to stay home.
00:14:52.000 Okay, that's what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
00:14:55.000 It wasn't that her base didn't exist.
00:14:57.000 It existed and it was larger than Trump's.
00:14:59.000 It was that people decided they didn't care enough about her that they were going to go out there and fight for her.
00:15:04.000 Sapping the energy from your base is a problem.
00:15:06.000 And right now, all of this energy and focus being spent on Russia does sap the base.
00:15:10.000 It would be one thing if Trump were pushing some sort of world-shaking policy, and then his people would have something to be enthusiastic about.
00:15:16.000 But right now, there's no world-shaking policy.
00:15:18.000 The only thing that seems to jazz up the base in the absence of policy is Trump tweeting out stuff about Mika Brzezinski's face.
00:15:23.000 Which, maybe that's the strategy.
00:15:25.000 Maybe the idea is that if Trump tweets things out about people we don't like, then we get all excited about it.
00:15:29.000 But I'm not sure that's enough to win over the people who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump, or to get a lot of people out to vote in 2018.
00:15:36.000 You have to motivate your voters somehow.
00:15:38.000 And one way you motivate your voters is by saying, here's all the things I've done.
00:15:42.000 And the other way to motivate your voters is by saying, I'm a better person than the people who oppose me.
00:15:47.000 And when you're in a situation where every day is a new scandal and you can't clearly explain what exactly you're doing, it causes problems for you.
00:15:55.000 And again, I don't even think that this is not coming from a place that I think Trump is guilty of anything.
00:15:58.000 I don't think there's any evidence of that.
00:16:00.000 What I'm saying is, come out, explain what your position is, and you'll save everybody a lot of grief.
00:16:05.000 I mean, listen, I would prefer to spend the day talking about the stupidities of Amanda Marcotte and her idiotic feminism, okay?
00:16:11.000 But I can't do that because of all this stuff, okay?
00:16:14.000 I mean, I can, but I'll have to spend less time on it than I normally would.
00:16:17.000 Okay, before we go any further, before we have on Mark Levin in just a second, first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
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00:17:10.000 It's going to
00:17:11.000 Okay, so.
00:17:31.000 We had the opportunity to speak with Mark Levin, the great one.
00:17:34.000 We spoke with him, I guess this would have been yesterday, and so now I want to play the interview.
00:17:39.000 It's a brand new book out, and Mark is just terrific.
00:17:42.000 I'm a huge fan, so here we go.
00:17:44.000 We are so pleased and honored to welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show one of my ideological mentors and a guy who I think brought a lot of people into the conservative movement, Mark Levin, nationally syndicated talk show host, host of Levin TV, chairman of the Landmark Legal Foundation, and of course author of a thousand best-selling books including Liberty and Tyranny.
00:18:01.000 His new book is Rediscovering Americanism and the Tyranny of Progressivism.
00:18:05.000 I have read it.
00:18:05.000 It is, like all of his other books, a treatise on conservatism that everybody needs to read.
00:18:09.000 Mark, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:18:10.000 Ben, it's a great honor, and let me just say this.
00:18:13.000 I get no more joy than when I watch you on TV kicking some liberal around.
00:18:17.000 I really do enjoy it.
00:18:19.000 Well, I appreciate it.
00:18:20.000 Well, I mean, I have to say that I still recommend many of your older books.
00:18:24.000 Men in Black is still the go-to book for me to recommend when it comes to judicial activism.
00:18:29.000 So I want to talk about your new book, because it really does something that I think we need to do as conservatives right now, which is re-educate
00:18:36.000 Our own side and other people about what our fundamental principles are, because we've gotten so caught up in the partisan bashing, which is fun and necessary, but we've got so caught up in it that sometimes we forget our own central principles.
00:18:47.000 What exactly are we fighting for other than mean tweets about the other side?
00:18:51.000 And so in Rediscovering Americanism, you talk about what the founders would have thought about today's America, and you basically say that they would have thought that the government is unrecognizable.
00:19:01.000 Why do you think that?
00:19:02.000 Well, I do believe that.
00:19:03.000 And so what I do is I go back to the beginning, the Declaration of Independence, and I look at the principles there.
00:19:09.000 Laws of nature.
00:19:10.000 When's the last time we talked about the laws of nature?
00:19:12.000 I was never taught about the laws of nature.
00:19:14.000 I took advanced philosophy and political science and history and all the rest of it.
00:19:19.000 Yet this is the core of our founding.
00:19:20.000 So where do these principles and ideas come from in the Declaration?
00:19:23.000 The founders didn't invent them.
00:19:25.000 What they did invent, though, is a country that was based on them, that had never been done before in world history, and hasn't been done since.
00:19:33.000 So, when I started thinking about what I was going to write, I just started writing.
00:19:38.000 And I didn't have chapters, I wrote the entire book, and then I went back and broke it into chapters as best I could.
00:19:45.000 It's really two forces, and that is this force of the enlightenment of individualism, of freedom, of unalienable rights.
00:19:54.000 What Aristotle talked about, these universal law and truths, these eternal truths, where did the Founders get this from?
00:20:00.000 Well, they tell us.
00:20:01.000 Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, and a whole bunch of others.
00:20:05.000 And so I went back.
00:20:06.000 I've read them before.
00:20:07.000 I went back and read them again.
00:20:09.000 And I tried to pull information from them to inform people who are interested in what the founders were reading.
00:20:16.000 And why is that important?
00:20:17.000 Because when you start to read this material,
00:20:20.000 Even though you and I, we love our country, you really even love it more, because you realize, wow, these ideas are absolutely incredible, and they predate this country, and they go back thousands and thousands of years.
00:20:33.000 And so I felt if more and more people fully understood what we mean, rather than the surface level, you know, I believe in liberty, and I believe what that means, then more and more people can spread the word.
00:20:43.000 Conversely, there's a dark side, and a bleak side, and a miserable side.
00:20:48.000 And that's what we call progressivism.
00:20:49.000 I don't like the word.
00:20:50.000 I wrote a whole book called Emeritopia condemning the word.
00:20:54.000 But to be historically accurate, that's their nomenclature.
00:20:56.000 So I talk about progressivism and the progressive era.
00:21:00.000 And where does that idea come from?
00:21:03.000 And who are their philosophers?
00:21:05.000 And you have to
00:21:23.000 People like Woodrow Wilson and Crowley and Weil and Dewey and so forth and so on.
00:21:28.000 And I explain who they are.
00:21:30.000 I explain what their ideas are.
00:21:32.000 And I quote them.
00:21:33.000 And I quote them a lot.
00:21:34.000 So people don't think I'm making this stuff up.
00:21:37.000 And they attack the Declaration.
00:21:39.000 And they attack these principles.
00:21:41.000 Even the word liberty.
00:21:43.000 The word liberty.
00:21:44.000 Folks need to understand that there's some controversy around this word liberty.
00:21:47.000 You and I, we mean, you know, the circle of liberty that surrounds each individual human being.
00:21:52.000 God-given liberty.
00:21:53.000 God-given unalienable rights, like it says in the Declaration.
00:21:57.000 Again, they talk about laws of nature.
00:21:59.000 Nature is God.
00:21:59.000 What does that mean?
00:22:00.000 Does that mean you have to be religious?
00:22:02.000 No.
00:22:03.000 What it means is, though, that there are things bigger than man.
00:22:05.000 There are ideas, truths, bigger than man.
00:22:08.000 Eternal, universal truths.
00:22:10.000 So if you're born in Washington, D.C., or you're born in Paris, France, you know right from wrong.
00:22:15.000 You know the golden rule.
00:22:16.000 You know you're not supposed to kill people or rob people.
00:22:18.000 That's not because they're laws made by man.
00:22:21.000 It's because these are things we know and we reason through them.
00:22:25.000 And that's what the framers believed when they wrote the Constitution, too.
00:22:29.000 The progressives, however, by name, that's why I quote them, attack these principles.
00:22:34.000 They attack the Declaration.
00:22:36.000 They say the Declaration was a revolutionary document for a revolutionary period, pioneers, throwbacks, but today is today.
00:22:44.000 We can't worry about all these mystical ideas, these eternal truths.
00:22:48.000 We've got to look at the world as it is today.
00:22:50.000 We have to intuit and rationalize and figure out what the truths are and create this society
00:22:57.000 We're good.
00:23:16.000 And this is what I try and get across in the book, and also I interlink the principles, because they are, which is individualism, freedom, private property rights, and constitutional republicanism.
00:23:29.000 You need every one of those elements to be a fulsome human being in order to pursue your interests and so forth.
00:23:38.000 When one is under attack, they're all under attack.
00:23:40.000 And today they're all under attack.
00:23:43.000 Well, Mark, one of the things that is fascinating in your book, and you talk about this with regard to the progressive era, the book, again, is Rediscovering Americanism.
00:23:50.000 One of the things that's fascinating is that the progressives, when they first came around, they were actually very open about the fact that they were attacking the founding, that they thought the Declaration of Independence was passe.
00:23:58.000 Woodrow Wilson did a whole speech in which he talked about how the Constitution of the United States needed to be put aside and shelved because it was just hampering our ability to get things done.
00:24:07.000 Today's left seems to have understood that it is a mistake to attack those terms, and so they're a lot more insidious.
00:24:13.000 You see Barack Obama, I thought his second inaugural address was perfect proof of this, where he started actually quoting the founders to justify precisely the opposite of what the founders would have wanted, and that's why I think it's so important that you distinguish what they would have wanted.
00:24:24.000 But did the founders' language, I mean I love the founders as much as you do, did the founders' language leave the opening
00:24:31.000 For the left to take it and run with it.
00:24:33.000 In other words, when they say things like, we hold these truths to be self-evident, and the left says, well, it's not self-evident to me, but here is a self-evident truth.
00:24:39.000 A self-evident truth is that poor people can't take care of themselves, and so we need a welfare state.
00:24:43.000 Or, it's a universal law of nature, there will be poor people.
00:24:46.000 In other words, did natural law, I know this is a big, kind of abstruse debate between West Coast Straussians and East Coast Straussians, but is there a, didn't the doctrine of natural law that the founders all believed universally,
00:24:58.000 Did that open the door to the possibility of a progressive twisting of that terminology, do you think?
00:25:04.000 Well, you know, they put in place this Constitution, which was the governing manifestation of these principles in the Declaration.
00:25:10.000 So they thought they could do... they did the very best they could to put these checks and balances in place with direct election of the House, the state legislators, legislatures electing the Senate, an electoral college process for the President of the United States,
00:25:25.000 We're good to go.
00:25:43.000 A little bit about Athens and Rome and he says, you know, obviously I'm paraphrasing, he says, you know, John, I've been thinking about Rome.
00:25:52.000 And he said, they had Cicero, great man.
00:25:56.000 They had Cato, great man.
00:25:58.000 They had Brutus, great, great man.
00:25:59.000 These are men who were small R Republicans and who put their lives on the line, challenging the emperor and the system that was in place and the corruption and so forth.
00:26:09.000 And he said, if all those men together,
00:26:12.000 We're good to go.
00:26:21.000 Because the people lacked virtue.
00:26:23.000 There was nothing that could be done to save that society.
00:26:27.000 Even if Caesar had been gone, and those three men ruled, and put in place the Republican form of government, it wouldn't have worked.
00:26:35.000 It was too late.
00:26:36.000 So to answer your question, I don't point to the founders and the language of natural law as the reason why we are where we are.
00:26:46.000 We are where we are, excuse me,
00:26:49.000 We're good to go.
00:27:13.000 That about a third of us want to be a free people, about a third of us don't, and about a third of us don't give a damn.
00:27:19.000 And so that's about where we are today, I think.
00:27:21.000 Which, I mean, the good news is that was exactly the breakdown during the American Revolution and the right guys ended up winning.
00:27:26.000 The bad news is that we could certainly lose.
00:27:28.000 So with that in mind, Mark, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you if you had to give some advice to President Trump right now on what he could be due to further the cause of the causes you're talking about.
00:27:38.000 I'm not sure that President Trump thinks a lot about ideas like natural law or constitutionalism, but
00:27:43.000 He's still, he could be an effective tool for these things if he would do some of the right things.
00:27:46.000 So what do you think, you know, President Trump ought to do at this point to promulgate the sorts of values you talk about in rediscovering Americanism?
00:27:54.000 And on the same page, you know, is there anyone in Congress that can be trusted to forward these values at all?
00:27:59.000 Because obviously Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are doing a pretty shoddy job of it thus far.
00:28:03.000 You know, Paul Ryan called me many months ago when he was pushing his nonsense with this Obamacare.
00:28:11.000 And I had told his people, I don't want to talk to him.
00:28:13.000 Why waste his time?
00:28:15.000 But he insisted.
00:28:16.000 So I spoke to him.
00:28:17.000 First thing he says to me is, I read all your books.
00:28:21.000 And I said, but do you digest them?
00:28:24.000 Because obviously, you read all the books.
00:28:27.000 Do you digest them?
00:28:27.000 And I said, and why are you wasting your time calling me?
00:28:30.000 And for 45 minutes, we had this chat last time.
00:28:34.000 Look, the problem right now with the administration is it's under a full-bore attack, and they're trying to dislodge this president.
00:28:44.000 I don't agree with this president on everything, as you well know, and I backed Ted Cruz in the Republican primary.
00:28:49.000 There are things I do agree with this president on, including his selection of judges, his attack on the regulatory state, and certain other things.
00:28:57.000 But what I cannot accept is the effort by the left
00:29:03.000 I think so.
00:29:23.000 If I were advising the President, I would say, take a closer look at the judiciary, because 40% of these judges were appointed by Barack Obama.
00:29:31.000 We have many vacancies, and Schumer is slow-walking them, and he's slowing them down.
00:29:35.000 I would pull Mitch McConnell in my office, and I would say, all right, dammit, get rid of that filibuster rule.
00:29:40.000 If that's what we have to do, that's what we have to do.
00:29:42.000 We're up against this entrenched, radical, leftist,
00:29:46.000 Mob.
00:29:47.000 And if they're prepared to burn the place down, I'm not prepared to burn the place down, but the filibuster rule is the filibuster rule, and you're going to have to suspend it if we're going to get anywhere.
00:29:57.000 I mean, the Senate, quite frankly, is this absurd entity now, since the 17th Amendment, where we have two people elected directly from the people of each state.
00:30:05.000 Why do we need the Senate?
00:30:06.000 You know, as a side point, I start to ramble.
00:30:09.000 As a side point,
00:30:12.000 I love it when the left says, let's get rid of the Electoral College.
00:30:15.000 We don't need any.
00:30:16.000 Well, let's get rid of the Senate.
00:30:17.000 I mean, the Senate was supposed to represent the state legislatures.
00:30:20.000 Why do we have two senators from every state if they don't represent the state legislatures?
00:30:25.000 But I think he should focus on that.
00:30:28.000 I also think if they don't drop that filibuster, well, he's not going to get much done, and Mitch McConnell's not going to get much done.
00:30:35.000 You know, I've been saying we ought to repeal and replace McConnell.
00:30:38.000 Because he is going to kill the Republican majority in that Senate.
00:30:43.000 So there's no easy answer to that question.
00:30:45.000 As to who we can rely on, I can tell you Mike Lee is a very earnest and studious constitutional conservative.
00:30:55.000 I think Ted Cruz is the same.
00:30:56.000 I think Rand Paul, in most instances, I don't always agree with him.
00:31:01.000 Yes.
00:31:19.000 They don't attack the debt when they're in office.
00:31:21.000 Look at this Obamacare debate.
00:31:23.000 This is a perfect example that I would relate to the book.
00:31:26.000 It's not in the book, but we relate to the principles in the book.
00:31:28.000 The entire debate is on the progressive field.
00:31:32.000 You know, we gotta save Medicaid.
00:31:34.000 Well, who's killing Medicaid?
00:31:35.000 They mean to expand.
00:31:36.000 We've gone from repeal Obamacare to expand Medicaid.
00:31:40.000 But most of us aren't on Medicaid.
00:31:41.000 That's a welfare program.
00:31:42.000 What about the rest of us?
00:31:44.000 And so Ted Cruz offers this incredibly radical amendment, which says, OK, look, offer your damn Obamacare policy to insurance companies, but let them offer whatever they want to the rest of us.
00:31:56.000 Oh, my God, you can't do that.
00:31:58.000 Why?
00:31:59.000 Well, it might hurt Frank and Sally and Damien and this one and that one.
00:32:03.000 In other words, it's a complete abandonment of liberty
00:32:07.000 Thank you.
00:32:15.000 You know, this is the only place where at three in the morning you can walk down the street to a 7-Eleven and buy darn near anything you want.
00:32:22.000 Or, at ten in the morning, go into a grocery store.
00:32:25.000 You've got stuff from all over the country, all over the world.
00:32:29.000 Almost everyone can afford it.
00:32:31.000 We live like kings and queens could never live two hundred years ago.
00:32:35.000 We can get on a jet and fly from one part of the country to another part, really for a fairly inexpensive amount.
00:32:41.000 An air-conditioned luxury at six hundred
00:32:45.000 A mile's an hour, 40,000 feet off the ground, and if you want, they'll serve you peanuts while you're doing it.
00:32:52.000 I mean, think about what the principles of the founding created, right?
00:32:57.000 And think about what they're doing to it, and they attack it all the time.
00:33:01.000 So, I gotta tell you, Ben, my perspective on this is, Washington is lost.
00:33:06.000 We vote, we do the very best we can.
00:33:08.000 This is the design they have created, which is a perversion of what the founders intended.
00:33:14.000 We've got to convince each other as citizens, the way the columnist did, of the greatness of this country, of the disaster of the other side, and if we can't win minds and hearts, then we can't win.
00:33:27.000 The book is Rediscovering Americanism and the Tyranny of Progressivism, another number one New York Times bestseller from Marklevin, who is the author of just a bevy of them at this point.
00:33:36.000 Mark, thanks so much for everything that you do, and thanks so much for joining the show, I always appreciate it.
00:33:40.000 It's a great honor.
00:33:41.000 I love when you fill in for us.
00:33:42.000 My audience loves it, too, and God bless.
00:33:45.000 Thanks so much.
00:33:46.000 Okay, so there it is, the great one, Mark Levin.
00:33:49.000 Now, before we go any further, and I do want to talk about things I like, and I have some pretty epic things I hate, as always today, plus the mailbag, so lots more to get to.
00:33:56.000 I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Policy Genius.
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00:34:55.000 They are a great company and
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00:34:58.000 Okay, so, uh, as I say, before we go any further, I now have to let you go on Facebook.
00:35:02.000 You got an extra long Facebook today, an extra long YouTube today.
00:35:06.000 For those who don't actually watch our show, okay, you should know.
00:35:09.000 It's an audio show, you can listen to it, but it is also a video show, okay?
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00:35:37.000 We have brand new goodies coming as well.
00:35:38.000 Plus, if you get the annual subscription, that $99 annual subscription, you get this.
00:35:43.000 This very mug.
00:35:45.000 I'm not allowed by contract of Steven Crowder to call it a mug.
00:35:48.000 This unbelievable tumbler.
00:35:50.000 Do you see the magnificence of this tumbler?
00:35:52.000 There has never been a tumbler quite like this one.
00:35:55.000 It says upon it, leftist tears, hot or cold, in silver letters that will send a shudder down all leftist spines.
00:36:02.000 It's great for collecting the tears, it's great for drinking the tears.
00:36:05.000 Make sure that if you are going to actually drink tears that they have been sterilized in some way because I don't know, like I wouldn't want anyone to get the disease because of it.
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00:36:13.000 Leftist tears, hot or cold.
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00:36:41.000 Okay, since it's such a busy day, I'm going to go straight to things I like and things I hate at this point.
00:36:45.000 Okay, so, time for a thing I like.
00:36:47.000 So this entire week, thanks to Donald Jr., we have been doing movies and books about fathers who are disappointed in their sons.
00:36:55.000 And today we have a classic of the genre.
00:36:57.000 I'm speaking, of course, of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
00:37:01.000 Uh, this movie is really underrated because Raiders is so good, so people tend to underestimate how good Last Crusade is.
00:37:07.000 Temple of Doom is an awful film.
00:37:08.000 Like, it's a legitimately bad film.
00:37:10.000 Um, and, uh, I mean, Cape Capshaw, man, whew.
00:37:13.000 But, but, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is a truly wonderful film.
00:37:16.000 It's fun, it moves quickly.
00:37:17.000 Uh, I know that, uh, The Daily Wire is on Jeremy Boring.
00:37:21.000 Prefers it to Raiders.
00:37:22.000 I don't think that's allowed.
00:37:23.000 I think that you're not allowed to prefer it to Raiders.
00:37:25.000 The reason being that the entire predicate for Last Crusade is the presence of Indiana Jones before.
00:37:30.000 It stands alone as a film, but you have to know who Indiana Jones is in order for it to work, because the whole premise is that Indiana Jones, as Mathis and I were discussing earlier, the whole premise is that Indiana Jones is the coolest person on the planet, and his father thinks that he's a giant loser nerd.
00:37:42.000 That's the entire premise of the film.
00:37:44.000 It's really fun.
00:37:45.000 Sean Connery, they search for the Holy Grail.
00:37:48.000 And I won't give away spoilers like the spelling of particular versions of God's name.
00:37:52.000 In any case, here it is.
00:37:53.000 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
00:37:55.000 A little bit of the preview.
00:37:56.000 We're about to complete a great quest.
00:37:58.000 The Holy Grail, Dr. Jones.
00:38:02.000 Oh, rats.
00:38:05.000 This is it.
00:38:07.000 Look.
00:38:08.000 The shield is the second marker.
00:38:11.000 We found it.
00:38:12.000 Indiana Jones is on the quest of a lifetime.
00:38:20.000 But for some adventures, one Jones is not enough.
00:38:25.000 Dad?
00:38:25.000 Junior?
00:38:26.000 Don't call me that, please.
00:38:28.000 Follow me!
00:38:31.000 I know the way!
00:38:33.000 A race across three continents.
00:38:36.000 And in this sort of race, there's no silver medal for finishing second.
00:38:39.000 Hang on, Dad!
00:38:42.000 We're going in!
00:38:42.000 Into the homeland of the enemy.
00:38:46.000 Nazis.
00:38:47.000 I hate these guys.
00:38:54.000 It's pretty great.
00:38:56.000 It's awesome, Sean Connery.
00:38:58.000 It's really, really fun.
00:38:59.000 It's also good to do this because I believe yesterday was Harrison Ford's 75th birthday.
00:39:03.000 You're looking pretty good for 75, Harrison.
00:39:05.000 I mean, I hope I look as good as Harrison Ford at any point in his life.
00:39:08.000 I hope I look as good now as Harrison Ford looks at 75.
00:39:10.000 So, well done, Harrison Ford.
00:39:13.000 Great movie.
00:39:14.000 A lot of fun.
00:39:15.000 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
00:39:17.000 And of course it is hilarious that Sean Connery thinks that Indiana Jones is this giant disappointment.
00:39:21.000 Okay, time for some things that I hate.
00:39:28.000 So the first thing that I hate today is this insane piece by some crazy person named Jodi Allard.
00:39:33.000 She's apparently a feminist blogger.
00:39:35.000 First of all, all feminist bloggers are, I don't mean to generalize, but they're all crazy.
00:39:40.000 So, she actually has a piece today called, the title of it is, I'm done pretending men are safe, even my sons.
00:39:48.000 Really.
00:39:48.000 And the entire thing is about how her sons are potential rapists.
00:39:51.000 She says, I have two sons.
00:39:52.000 They're strong and compassionate.
00:39:53.000 The kind of boys other parents are glad to meet when their daughters bring them home for dinner.
00:39:57.000 They're good boys in the ways good boys are, but they are not safe boys.
00:40:00.000 I'm starting to believe there's no such thing.
00:40:02.000 She is talking about her own children being potential rapists because of rape culture.
00:40:07.000 I wrote an essay in the Washington Post last year, during the height of the Brock Turner case, about my sons and rape culture.
00:40:12.000 I didn't think it would be controversial when I wrote it.
00:40:14.000 I was sure most parents grappled with raising sons in the midst of rape culture.
00:40:17.000 Well, no, actually.
00:40:18.000 It turns out that the vast majority of us who grow up as boys in households that have good parents, we're not part of a rape culture because we are taught at a very early age that you're not supposed to rape people.
00:40:29.000 Right, that rape is a bad thing.
00:40:31.000 I thought this was pretty clear rule of Western civilization for the past thousand years or so.
00:40:34.000 Because I didn't think it would be controversial when I wrote it.
00:40:37.000 The struggle I wrote about was universal, I thought, but I was wrong.
00:40:39.000 My essay went semi-viral, and for the first time, my sons encountered my words about them on their friends' phones, their teachers' computers, and even overheard them discussed by strangers on a crowded metro bus.
00:40:48.000 Right, because when you say your sons are potential rapists, that might have some bad ramifications.
00:40:52.000 They're your kids, you stupid idiot.
00:40:54.000 And then she says it was one thing to agree to be written about in relative obscurity, and quite another to have my words intrude on their daily lives.
00:40:59.000 By the way, this is the same lady who wrote a column about how one of her sons was apparently suicidal, with a mother like this.
00:41:05.000 And she says, one of my sons is suicidal, so we sat down and watched 13 Reasons Why.
00:41:11.000 Are you the stupidest person on planet Earth?
00:41:13.000 Okay, have you ever seen 13 Reasons Why?
00:41:15.000 Like, half the show is dedicated to why suicide is a choice that is driven by outside forces.
00:41:20.000 It's not really in your hands.
00:41:21.000 In any case, she says, One of my sons was hurt by my words, although he's never told me so.
00:41:25.000 He doesn't understand why I lumped him and his brother together in my essay.
00:41:28.000 He sees himself as the good one, the one who is sensitive and thoughtful and who listens instead of reacts.
00:41:32.000 He doesn't understand that even quiet misogyny is misogyny and not all sexes sound like Twitter trolls.
00:41:37.000 So he seems like a nice kid, but she's calling him a sexist and a rapist.
00:41:40.000 He's angry at me now, although he won't admit that either, and his anger led him to conservative websites and YouTube channels.
00:41:44.000 Okay, if the son of Jodi Allard is watching this right now, please write me an email.
00:41:50.000 I would be happy to have you intern with us here over at The Daily Wire.
00:41:54.000 I think that you deserve better than what your mother has provided to you.
00:41:57.000 A label as a potential rapist.
00:41:59.000 I don't think you're a rapist.
00:42:00.000 I don't think you're a potential rapist.
00:42:02.000 You seem like a nice person.
00:42:03.000 Your mother, however, seems like she is a heritan.
00:42:06.000 She says, I teeter frequently between supporting my son and educating him.
00:42:09.000 Is it my job as his mother to ensure he feels safe emotionally, no matter what violence he spews?
00:42:13.000 Can she give an example of, like, the violence that her son is spewing?
00:42:15.000 Is he coming home and going, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape?
00:42:17.000 Like, what exactly is he doing?
00:42:19.000 Is he coming home?
00:42:20.000 And he's just saying, I saw a girl on the bus today.
00:42:23.000 You know what I thought?
00:42:23.000 I thought, rape!
00:42:25.000 I'm pretty sure that's not what happened, but when you're a crazy person, then this is what happens.
00:42:30.000 And then she starts talking about her dating life.
00:42:32.000 Okay, why do feminists always feel the need to talk about their dating life like anybody cares?
00:42:35.000 She says, I joined Bumble recently after a six plus year break from dating.
00:42:38.000 I'm not overly interested in dating in the first place, but I'm starved for adult conversation.
00:42:42.000 So dating feels like a necessary evil.
00:42:44.000 Well, no, there's some of us who have friends.
00:42:46.000 I mean, you could do that.
00:42:48.000 It's just Bumble, as I explained to my married friends, is like feminist Tinder.
00:42:51.000 Women have to initiate contact with men, so there's no inbox full of bleep pics every day.
00:42:56.000 But feminist or not, the men are no different from the men anywhere else, and I felt- I quickly felt deflated.
00:43:01.000 All men are- Okay.
00:43:02.000 I have a general recommendation.
00:43:04.000 If you believe that all men or all women are crazy, that everybody's terrible, maybe it's just you.
00:43:09.000 Maybe it's just you.
00:43:10.000 If every relationship you've ever had has gone bad, maybe it's not because all the people you know are terrible.
00:43:14.000 Maybe you suck as a human.
00:43:16.000 Okay, and I'm gonna go with that on this one.
00:43:18.000 She says, My sons won't rape unconscious women behind a dumpster, and neither will most of the progressive men I know.
00:43:23.000 But what all of these men share in common, even my sons, is a relentless questioning and disbelief of the female experience.
00:43:28.000 I didn't realize the common female experience was to be raped while unconscious behind a dumpster.
00:43:33.000 I know a few females, and I don't know any of them who've been raped while unconscious behind a dumpster, at least none who have told me about it, and if they did tell me about that, I would say, can we find the person and hunt them down?
00:43:41.000 Like, that would be my first reaction.
00:43:42.000 Can we tell the police?
00:43:43.000 And if not, is there a way that we can kill this person and get away with it?
00:43:46.000 Like, that seems like the best possi- Like, is that not feminist enough?
00:43:50.000 Do I have to do more than that?
00:43:51.000 I do not want to prove my pain or provide enough evidence to convince anyone that my trauma is merited.
00:43:55.000 Okay, if you accuse someone of rape, you might have to provide evidence of actual rape,
00:44:00.000 You shouldn't just be able to accuse anyone of any crime.
00:44:03.000 Totally insane.
00:44:05.000 Totally insane.
00:44:06.000 Um... Child Protective Services needs to show up, like, right now at this lady's door.
00:44:10.000 Uh, thank God.
00:44:11.000 It sounds like her sons are getting old enough that they get to leave home.
00:44:13.000 Leave now!
00:44:15.000 Leave now, okay?
00:44:16.000 I will try to find a way to put you up in your own apartment.
00:44:18.000 Seriously.
00:44:19.000 Okay?
00:44:20.000 You deserve to get out of there right now, Jodi Allard's children.
00:44:23.000 My God.
00:44:24.000 Okay.
00:44:25.000 Uh, other thing that I hate.
00:44:26.000 So, uh, Conor McGregor is the, uh, he's Irish, correct?
00:44:30.000 He's the Irish, uh, MMA star, uh, who is, uh, going to fight Floyd Mayweather.
00:44:34.000 And what I mean by fight Floyd Mayweather is get knocked out in all likelihood by Floyd Mayweather because it's not, it's not his sport.
00:44:39.000 I mean, he, he's not a boxer, right?
00:44:41.000 He's an MMA fighter.
00:44:42.000 I've been saying for a couple of weeks that I think the best outcome here is that Conor McGregor sticks around for like eight rounds.
00:44:47.000 And then at the very end, when it's clear he's going to lose, he just does a roundhouse kick and to, to Mayweather's face.
00:44:51.000 He just violates all the rules.
00:44:52.000 It would be the greatest thing in boxing history.
00:44:54.000 Roundhouse kick to Floyd Mayweather.
00:44:56.000 In any case, apparently, everybody was very angry because Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor were, like, verbally sparring with each other, which is what people do at these events.
00:45:05.000 That's the whole reason they have these events.
00:45:06.000 They flew in on the same jet, okay, folks?
00:45:08.000 It's a show.
00:45:08.000 And Conor McGregor said this.
00:45:11.000 Floyd is an old, weak...
00:45:21.000 I want you to sing it to me!
00:45:23.000 I want you to sing it to me!
00:45:24.000 And I want you to dance for me!
00:45:27.000 You sing it, you dance!
00:45:29.000 Dance for me, boy!
00:45:35.000 Okay, so this is basically WWE kind of stuff.
00:45:37.000 And Fox Sports win Rob Parker, he says, you know what this is?
00:45:41.000 This just shows that Conor McGregor is racist.
00:45:43.000 Can we call that an international incident?
00:45:45.000 I mean, I gotta admit, and I know that's Conor's M.O.
00:45:52.000 and how he operates and all that, but it just doesn't feel good to me.
00:45:58.000 I have a hard time listening to it.
00:46:00.000 I'm not even talking about the curse words.
00:46:02.000 Just the tone of it.
00:46:05.000 And I'm gonna say this, Skip.
00:46:08.000 It comes off as racist to me.
00:46:29.000 Really?
00:46:30.000 Again, my recommendation is that this fight ends with Conor McGregor actually using MMA rules in violation of the rules, and I think it would just be hilarious if he roundhouse kicks Floyd Mayweather, Mayweather goes down and is knocked out, and then as he's unconscious on the floor, the ref picks up his hand and declares him the victor.
00:46:44.000 The greatest specter in boxing history.
00:46:45.000 Okay, time for some mailbags, so let us do this.
00:46:48.000 Okay.
00:46:49.000 So, Jennifer says, Hey Ben, I'm a big fan of your work.
00:46:52.000 I wanted to get your opinion and insight on the topic of homeschooling.
00:46:55.000 I plan on being a stay-at-home mom and a teacher to my children anyway, so homeschooling is a doable option.
00:46:59.000 Do you think it's the best choice when it comes to different schooling options to pick from?
00:47:02.000 Options such as homeschool, private school, and public school.
00:47:05.000 Um, well, I do not like most public schools.
00:47:07.000 There are some good public schools.
00:47:09.000 Um, I generally prefer private school to homeschool.
00:47:12.000 The only reason being, I think it is important for kids to spend time away from the house.
00:47:16.000 But homeschooling is a wonderful option.
00:47:17.000 My sister was homeschooled for at least a year.
00:47:19.000 I have friends who have been... Alicia Krauss is a friend of mine.
00:47:23.000 She's a homeschool kid, a wonderful gal.
00:47:26.000 So homeschooling seems to work very well, and it's a better option.
00:47:29.000 You have to assess this for your own kids.
00:47:30.000 Some kids don't need the interactive time with other kids.
00:47:33.000 If you are going to homeschool, obviously you have to take an extra measure to make sure that your kids socialize with other kids.
00:47:38.000 But I don't think the chief purpose of school is socialization, as so many people think.
00:47:42.000 I think it's education.
00:47:43.000 Casey says,
00:47:44.000 I was recently arguing rights don't require the labor of others when someone brought up juries.
00:47:48.000 Don't we require the labor of people to be on a jury to fulfill the right to a jury?
00:47:52.000 So, yes, the right to a jury is basically an imposed right.
00:47:59.000 It's not a natural right.
00:48:00.000 I think there are plenty of justice systems that the founders would have embraced.
00:48:05.000 I don't think they believe that there is a quote-unquote natural God-given right to a jury.
00:48:08.000 They believe there's a right to due process of law.
00:48:09.000 In other words, when you have a state that is established for the purpose of protecting rights, there has to be some sort of process of law by which they can convict you.
00:48:16.000 You know, the same question can be asked about court-appointed attorneys.
00:48:21.000 The idea of these kind of rights, this is a sort of positive right, the right to have a jury because you are imposing on others.
00:48:27.000 But as I say, that is only because the state is now invading your normal rights and so we have to protect those rights with some sort of system.
00:48:35.000 So it's not the same as say a right to somebody else's labor for
00:48:40.000 Well, I mean, I think that's a pretty good juxtaposition.
00:48:41.000 I think that if you teach your kids how ridiculous that is, that's a good way to do it.
00:48:45.000 But we have to laugh at this.
00:48:46.000 We have to mock this.
00:48:47.000 Because it is insane.
00:48:48.000 And we tend on the right to do this routine where we don't want to offend people because we on the right tend to be more polite than our counterparts on the left.
00:49:07.000 And so we don't want to offend, we don't want to be the jerks, but I'm sorry, it is absurd that you are suggesting that people can pick their gender, but they can't pick their nose.
00:49:15.000 Vashti, which is, that's a cool name, I haven't heard that, I mean, really, the only time I've seen that is in the Book of Esther.
00:49:21.000 As a conservative college student,
00:49:24.000 I don't think that you're violating your principles.
00:49:31.000 I mean, you're going to pay those loans back.
00:49:33.000 I think that the federal government is violating its principle for being by offering the loans.
00:49:37.000 I'm not sure that you're violating it by taking the loans when you are repaying your loans, meaning that you are doing what you are supposed to do.
00:49:43.000 Now, if you vote in favor of the loans, that's a different thing.
00:49:46.000 If you vote because of the loans, that's a different thing.
00:49:49.000 But no, I mean, I took federal loans.
00:49:51.000 It would make me a hypocrite to say that other people can't take federal loans.
00:49:53.000 I think the entire concept of federal loans shouldn't exist.
00:49:56.000 But that's sort of like saying, I don't think that I should have to pay $800 to the city.
00:50:00.000 I don't think that in order to start a business in the state of California, I should have to pay an $800 licensing fee.
00:50:05.000 But I do it because I have to start a business.
00:50:07.000 Okay, well, when they remove the law, then I'll do that, and I'll fight to remove the law.
00:50:10.000 I'll fight to remove the federal student loans.
00:50:12.000 I think that there is...
00:50:19.000 A difference between doing what you love for a living and doing what you are capable of doing for a living.
00:50:24.000 So, I do think that one of the secrets to happiness is doing something that you love, but I think that you should try and define what you love by something you're good at.
00:50:32.000 Like, in other words, if what you love to do for a living is play basketball and you're really bad at basketball, I don't think that's a recipe for happiness.
00:50:38.000 I think that you should be, you should be, in order to determine
00:50:42.000 Do something that you love and are good at.
00:50:44.000 You love many things.
00:50:45.000 Find something that you love and are good at, because then you will be happy.
00:50:47.000 If you pick something you love and are bad at, you will be upset, because you'll feel the world is screwing you.
00:50:52.000 Asa writes, Dear Ben, Why is climate change such a lefty issue?
00:50:55.000 I've heard you explain the primary principle undergirding the left's policies is equality of outcome, not equal opportunity.
00:50:59.000 Does this principle undergird the policies the left pursues on climate change, and if yes, how so?
00:51:03.000 Okay, so Asa, the answer is yes.
00:51:06.000 It is the remedies for climate change that are a problem for the right.
00:51:08.000 So there are a lot of people on the right
00:51:11.000 Including, there's a guy named Omri, I'm forgetting his last name now, Omri Kass?
00:51:20.000 Anyway, he has a very good piece about what climate change is, if it exists.
00:51:27.000 My own opinion on climate change, by the way, is that climate change does exist, that global warming is happening.
00:51:31.000 We don't know to what extent it's happening, but even if we accept the general
00:51:34.000 I don't think so.
00:51:50.000 My feeling is the best answer for climate change is the same answer that we've given to virtually all other environmental issues, which is you regulate where there are emissions that cannot be prevented any other way, but mostly the market solves this kind of stuff.
00:52:02.000 I mean, the fact is that your car has gotten more efficient.
00:52:04.000 It hasn't gotten more efficient because of CAFE standards, it's gotten more efficient because it's cheaper for people to drive more efficient cars, and because those cars are better.
00:52:11.000 People are buying Teslas right now because they're cool.
00:52:13.000 So I think that market forces can be used
00:52:15.000 In order to push toward a more environmentally friendly world.
00:52:20.000 I don't think that, the same thing is true of nuclear power.
00:52:22.000 I don't think that you need governmental regulation.
00:52:24.000 The left seems to start from the premise that they want governmental regulation and then they reason their way backward.
00:52:28.000 Dylan says, Dear Ben, what is your stance on people who burn election posters from parties they disagree with?
00:52:33.000 Not sure if this occurs in the US, but here in Northern Ireland around 12th of July there are bonfires burned with nationalist party election posters featured prominently on the scrap to be burned.
00:52:41.000 I don't think it should be considered a crime to burn any sort of message.
00:52:45.000 I don't think it should be a crime to burn the flag.
00:52:48.000 I think flag burning is evil, but I don't think that it should be a crime to burn it.
00:52:52.000 I think lots of things are evil, but I'm not enough of a governmental advocate to suggest that we should make everything I don't like illegal.
00:53:03.000 Capitalism involves voluntary exchanges between employer and employee.
00:53:06.000 Yeah, I notice how when I try to get a raise, the employer typically asks, what do you think you're worth?
00:53:10.000 While you have little to no background of what the average performer receives in the company.
00:53:13.000 Do companies or individuals have the means to mitigate this so that employee can get paid what they're worth?
00:53:17.000 Well, you decide what you're worth, right?
00:53:18.000 I mean, this is the market assumes better flow of information.
00:53:22.000 But if there's worse flow of information, you still have the capacity to bargain.
00:53:26.000 Right, so yes, would your life be better?
00:53:27.000 Would your life be easier if you could determine what the other people in your company are being paid?
00:53:32.000 Sure, your life would be better and easier, but it is not the obligation of the company to give you that information.
00:53:36.000 This is why you should go talk to your friends and get a general idea, and why people should refuse to sign contracts that say this.
00:53:43.000 I mean, as a worker, you can say, listen, if there's a confidentiality provision about my pay,
00:53:47.000 I don't want to sign that.
00:53:48.000 I think most companies are probably not thinking that's a huge deal.
00:53:52.000 The fact is that you can get a pretty good metric of what you ought to be paid by just doing a little simple research online, I think, as a general rule.
00:54:00.000 Well, he'd need to actually promulgate some policy, so...
00:54:07.000 My standard for Trump has always been that I need him to actually promulgate conservative policy and I need him not to wreck the conservative brand.
00:54:15.000 Those are my two big things.
00:54:18.000 I think that he has done some heavy work in hurting the conservative brand.
00:54:21.000 He's pushed Judge Gorsuch, which is a good policy, but
00:54:25.000 Yeah, let's put it this way.
00:54:27.000 It's a shorter putt for him to win my vote in 2020 than it was for him to win my vote in 2016.
00:54:31.000 The reason being that in 2016, I still thought that a lot of the damage that would be done by the Republican Party by him being president would be short-term damage and long-term damage.
00:54:44.000 He's already the president now, so a lot of that damage has already been done.
00:54:46.000 It's already in the past, right?
00:54:47.000 A lot of the things that he's done to the conservative brand have already been done, so now we are working from a reality where the conservative brand is what the conservative brand is.
00:54:54.000 What that means is that, is he going to damage things much further, or is he going to make things better?
00:54:58.000 And that's the question when it comes to 2020.
00:55:00.000 Okay, so we will be back here next Monday.
00:55:03.000 We have a surprise for you from Daily Wire that should be coming on Sunday.
00:55:06.000 So keep an eye out for it.
00:55:07.000 It is going to be fully awesome and ridiculous and crazy, as everyone at the office can attest.
00:55:13.000 It is an insane thing that we are going to put out on Sunday.
00:55:16.000 I think you will enjoy it.
00:55:17.000 So check that out.
00:55:18.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:55:18.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.