The Ben Shapiro Show


Ep. 11 - What If Luke Skywalker is Evil?


Summary

Planned Parenthood tweets that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. What does that mean, and why does it matter? Plus, why is it that only women can talk about abortion, and only women who think they re women can discuss abortion? And what does that have to do with transgenderism? And why does that matter, anyway? All that and much more on today's episode of The Ben Shapiro Show! Subscribe to the Daily Wire here. Learn more about your ad choices. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and also consider leaving us a five star review on iTunes. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies. We do not endorse the views of our employers, the opinions of our employees, or any other third party, unless otherwise specified. This episode was produced and edited by Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is a founding partner of The Daily Wire and is a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Huffington Post, and The New York Post. His work has been featured on the New Republic, and is widely syndicated, and he is a frequent guest on conservative radio stations across the country, including SiriusXM, The Rebel Report, The Hill, and many other publications, including Playboy, among other things. Thank you for listening to Ben Shapiro's work, Ben Shapiro s TWITTER and The Atlantic, and you can be reached at and on Instapreneur, is a very good friend of the podcast, too , and you should go to Ben s insta story on or , too , has a good thing to do it's podcast is can you say so much of that is great on Instafeedeedeeded by also is that's a great thing is great is that he does it is that is a great place is great and he also does it's it's also says it's great is great is recommended is also that's great on it's good is also , he also is a he also has it is also good on it is a good is amazing is very that is also he's also that is recommended it's a good is good is that goes it's amazing is also is also great is also I can go out on Instacapped, and so much so is that I also has a thing is also very good is very good and also he also can do it is very much ...


Transcript

00:00:00.000 On Monday, Planned Parenthood unleashed the greatest tweet in the history of the world.
00:00:04.000 Here's what it said.
00:00:05.000 It said, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
00:00:08.000 It's a quote from Gloria Steinem.
00:00:10.000 But what it actually said was, if cis men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
00:00:16.000 They actually added in the cis in little parentheses, even though that's not the original Gloria Steinem quote.
00:00:21.000 What does that mean, cis?
00:00:23.000 Well, for those of you who are unaware of your own gender biases, and you're not a crazy person, the prefix cis has been crafted out of absolute horse manure.
00:00:33.000 And now, it's a shortening of another horse manure world called cisgender.
00:00:38.000 Cisgender is a longer term that supposedly means, according to dictionary definition, it means somebody whose biological sex is in line with the sex they think they are.
00:00:47.000 Or as we used to call it, not being an insane person.
00:00:50.000 This is what being cis means.
00:00:52.000 If you are cis, then I'm cis because I'm a man who thinks I'm a man.
00:00:57.000 But if you're cisgender, this kind of cis prefix is this made-up, schloppity-schlop crap that is designed to suggest that there are perfectly rational and sane people.
00:01:05.000 Who have a sex that is different from their biological sex.
00:01:10.000 So Planned Parenthood has to go out of its way to say that cis men, cis men are the only types of men who can't have babies.
00:01:18.000 This is what they are trying to say.
00:01:19.000 The whole thing is just ridiculous all the way through.
00:01:23.000 Well, what's crazy about all of this, what's craziest, I think, of all, with regard to this cis stuff, is they're basically suggesting that a man who thinks he's a woman is a woman,
00:01:33.000 But a woman who thinks that she's a man is a man.
00:01:36.000 But only women can talk about abortion.
00:01:38.000 So...
00:01:39.000 If you're a woman who thinks she's a man, and you're therefore a man, but you can't get pregnant, can you talk about abortion?
00:01:45.000 Or if you're a woman and you think that you're a man, and you can get pregnant, so you're a pregnant man, can you talk about abortion anymore?
00:01:52.000 It's all so confusing, and this is the problem for the left and people like Planned Parenthood.
00:01:59.000 The entire basis of Planned Parenthood is that women and men are inherently different.
00:02:03.000 So inherently different that only women can talk about women's issues, and men can never talk about women's issues.
00:02:10.000 And then along comes the transgender movement, and the transgender movement says, male, female, these are just gender stereotypes that are foisted upon us by a sexist, horrible society.
00:02:22.000 Well, as you can see, these two things are in pretty significant conflict, right?
00:02:25.000 If men are men and women are women, and so men can't talk about women things,
00:02:28.000 What do you do with a woman who thinks she's a man or a man who thinks that he is a woman?
00:02:33.000 And the answer for the left is you just sort of ignore it.
00:02:36.000 And you come up with dramatically incoherent tweets like the one that Planned Parenthood just did.
00:02:42.000 None of this makes any sense, of course, but the left doesn't make any sense.
00:02:45.000 The only thing that matters is that regular men, you know, like white, straight men, those guys can't talk about lady stuff.
00:02:51.000 But men who think they're women can.
00:02:53.000 And women who think they're men can.
00:02:55.000 So, for purposes of abortion, from now on here on The Ben Shapiro Show, I am no longer a cis man when I discuss abortion.
00:03:01.000 I'm actually a man who thinks he's a woman, and thus I can discuss abortion.
00:03:05.000 After all, works with the logic of the stupid crap that is cisnormative and cisgender and all the rest of it.
00:03:11.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:03:12.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:03:22.000 Alrighty, so here we are, and we are now entering the Halloween season, and this is the official pumpkin of the Daily Wire, and I can't say that I made it.
00:03:31.000 In fact, our producer Jonathan made it, which suggests that we need to give him more things to do in his off hours, because a lot of work went into
00:03:39.000 This is
00:03:59.000 This particular little spiel.
00:04:00.000 I want to talk about the new Star Wars trailer just because everybody else is, so I have to give my take, and I have to make Mathis suffer in the process, and since he works for us and we pay his salary, there's really nothing he can do.
00:04:10.000 He just sort of has to take it.
00:04:12.000 So here is the new Star Wars trailer, and then I want to talk about why I think it's effective, and then I want to get into another piece of entertainment that actually has more ramifications for everyday life.
00:04:21.000 But let's start with the Star Wars trailer, because hey, we don't do anything fun on The Ben Shapiro Show ever, so we might as well do something fun now.
00:04:26.000 So let's do it.
00:04:45.000 Who are you?
00:04:51.000 I'm no one.
00:05:06.000 I was raised to do one thing.
00:05:07.000 But I've got nothing to fight for.
00:05:26.000 Would you start it?
00:05:30.000 There are stories about what happened.
00:05:55.000 The dark side.
00:05:59.000 The Jedi.
00:06:02.000 They're real.
00:06:12.000 The Force.
00:06:16.000 It's calling to you.
00:06:29.000 Just let it in.
00:06:34.000 Okay, so that's enough of ruining Mathis' life here.
00:06:38.000 Um, except that I'm now going to ruin it even further by discussing what we just saw.
00:06:41.000 So, the trailer itself, obviously, this trailer is better than anything that has been nominated for an Academy Award since Lord of the Rings 1.
00:06:50.000 I mean, seriously, because everything that Hollywood produces now is basically garbage except for tentpole films like this one.
00:06:55.000 And the trailer's great, especially with all the nostalgia.
00:06:58.000 I mean, you have the AT-AT walker at the beginning, and you've got
00:07:01.000 Harrison Ford showing up, and Princess Leia showing up, and now I'm totally going to ruin Mathis' life.
00:07:05.000 Well, Mathis, leave for a minute, and then just out of sympathy for you, you can take off for a minute.
00:07:10.000 If you actually want to go, I'm going to let you go right now.
00:07:12.000 Like, seriously, you can go out.
00:07:13.000 He's got in.
00:07:14.000 Okay, fine.
00:07:14.000 So, all the rest of you guys, you understand.
00:07:16.000 Okay, my theory of this trailer and of the poster is that Kylo Ren, who's the guy, not Kylie Ren, who's a member of the Kardashian family, Kylo Ren, who is the Darth Vader-looking
00:07:27.000 Human, who is standing over the melted mask of Darth Vader, is in fact Luke Skywalker.
00:07:33.000 The reason I say this is because if you look at the poster for the new Star Wars film, all the characters are on it, including Han Solo, including Princess Leia, but Luke is nowhere to be found.
00:07:41.000 But there in the background, large as life, is Kylo Ren.
00:07:45.000 I'm gonna go with Luke has been seduced by the dark side, which of course ruins the original trilogy, because the original trilogy is all about Luke Skywalker saving his father from the dark side.
00:07:54.000 We're good to go.
00:08:13.000 Nobody ever said no to him.
00:08:14.000 Nobody ever said no to him.
00:08:15.000 And so he decided to go back and ruin the original trilogy when he added stupid crap like, for example, when he did the remastering of Return of the Jedi.
00:08:23.000 At the very end, you all remember the end of Return of the Jedi?
00:08:25.000 At the end of Return of the Jedi, remember, Darth Vader, he's dead and they've burned his body.
00:08:32.000 And James Earl Jones, it turns out, was somehow a really deformed-looking white guy.
00:08:36.000 And at the very end, you remember that the magical figures of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader show up, right?
00:08:44.000 And Luke sees them.
00:08:46.000 And you remember that the original Darth Vader looks like an old guy, like the guy who's at the end of the movie.
00:08:51.000 Well, because he'd done Episodes I, II, and III, abominations that they are, George Lucas decided to replace old Darth Vader with Hayden Christensen.
00:09:00.000 And if you're Alec Guinness, if you are Obi-Wan Kenobi, you gotta be thinking to yourself, this so blows.
00:09:06.000 In the afterlife, I still look like Alec Guinness.
00:09:08.000 When I was young, I looked like Ewan McGregor.
00:09:10.000 I don't get to look like Ewan McGregor in the afterlife.
00:09:12.000 I'm stuck with Alec Guinness' body.
00:09:14.000 And here, this old jerk, who blew up an entire planet and killed all the Ewoks, this guy, who's like a genocidal dictator, this guy gets to go back to looking like Hayden Christensen.
00:09:25.000 Really not fair of the Force.
00:09:27.000 Totally.
00:09:28.000 He's thinking, I should have joined the dark side.
00:09:29.000 I would have gotten to be, like, sexy and good-looking.
00:09:31.000 Again, after I died, but apparently not.
00:09:33.000 Okay, so that's my take on the new Star Wars trailer.
00:09:35.000 I hope that it lives up to expectations.
00:09:37.000 I don't think it will.
00:09:38.000 Because I think that J.J.
00:09:40.000 Abrams... This is a constant argument I have with Jeremy, who is the managing editor of Daily Wire.
00:09:47.000 He is a big J.J.
00:09:48.000 Abrams fan.
00:09:49.000 I think that J.J.
00:09:50.000 Abrams is a glorified B-director.
00:09:52.000 But we will have to find out.
00:09:53.000 Okay, there's another movie I want to talk about that's been getting some press but not an enormous amount of press.
00:09:58.000 You've seen the advertisements for it all over the place.
00:10:00.000 And this is this movie that they're now featuring over at Netflix.
00:10:03.000 It's called Beasts of No Nation.
00:10:06.000 And it starts Idris Elba, who some people have said might be the next James Bond.
00:10:10.000 He's a black guy, so that's been controversial for some people.
00:10:13.000 For me, I really don't care.
00:10:15.000 Here is the trailer for Beasts of No Nation.
00:10:17.000 I want to talk about this movie because it really is indicative, I think, of where we have gone as a civilization.
00:10:23.000 And I'll explain why after we watch just a little bit of this trailer.
00:10:44.000 What is this thing doing here?
00:10:54.000 What are you doing here?
00:10:59.000 Who is responsible for this thing?
00:11:04.000 Now what are they calling you?
00:11:14.000 I saved your life.
00:11:16.000 I saved your life.
00:11:18.000 I saved your life.
00:11:19.000 Go!
00:11:24.000 All of you that have seen your family killed, you now have something that stands for you.
00:11:32.000 It has put the weapons of this war back in your hands.
00:11:35.000 Okay, we can pause it.
00:11:36.000 So here's the basic premise of this movie, and it is a very, very effective film.
00:11:41.000 The basic premise of this movie is that Idris Elba is sort of a revolutionary colonel, captain, and he is leading a group of child soldiers in what is a civil war in what appears to be Ghana or Nigeria.
00:11:54.000 They don't really specify the country.
00:11:56.000 And there's three forces in the film.
00:11:58.000 There's the government force, there's a rebel force, and then there's this group which is sort of stuck in between fighting both of them.
00:12:04.000 And it's all about Idris Elba as the commander and this little kid, Agu, who's the child soldier, and it really is quite brutal and horrific.
00:12:12.000 I mean, there's a scene where Agu is initiated into
00:12:15.000 This child army by having a machete a guy to death and it's very graphic and it's very brutal.
00:12:21.000 And there's a scene where Idris Elba, who's this kind of charismatic revolutionary leader, molests the lead character who's the kid.
00:12:27.000 And it really is pretty, it's gritty and it's gruesome and it's really terrible, but it's very evocative of what exactly it's like in nations like this.
00:12:35.000 And it seems, you know, I wouldn't know, but it seems about as realistic as it's possible to be on screen with the formation of child armies.
00:12:42.000 The reason I talk about this is because there's one scene in this movie that's- and it's not even a scene, it's really a shot.
00:12:47.000 It's very telling.
00:12:48.000 And that is, at the very beginning of the movie, there's sort of this UN-monitored outpost where this kid is living before the whole thing crumbles and falls apart.
00:12:58.000 And at a certain point, the UN pulls out because the government forces are on the move, and this kid's family is killed.
00:13:03.000 Well, there's a scene later in the film where the kid is now part of the child army, and he's in a truck, and he's holding what appears to be an AK-47, and they're driving down the road.
00:13:13.000 And as they're driving down the road, there's a van coming the other way.
00:13:16.000 And it's a van that is marked UN.
00:13:17.000 It's a UN van, a United Nations van.
00:13:20.000 And in the van are a bunch of white folks, right?
00:13:22.000 The only white folks in the entire movie are in this van.
00:13:25.000 And they're driving in the van, and they're staring out the window, and he stares at them, and they stare at him.
00:13:29.000 And then the van just kind of moves on, and that's the end of that particular scene.
00:13:35.000 And the point is, what are these people doing to help?
00:13:38.000 And the answer is, they're not doing anything to help, of course.
00:13:42.000 They're just observing, right?
00:13:43.000 They're UN observers.
00:13:44.000 They don't do anything.
00:13:46.000 And the reason that this, I think, is important is we have to combine that with an article that was in the Washington Post today by a guy named Michael Garrison.
00:13:54.000 Michael Garrison is a former Bush administration official.
00:13:58.000 He used to write speeches for George W. Bush.
00:14:00.000 And he's talking about American Christianity and the obligations of American Christians to the rest of the world.
00:14:06.000 And he's talking specifically about the refugee crisis.
00:14:09.000 He says, American Christianity has its own self-examination to conduct.
00:14:14.000 The largest humanitarian disaster of our time, involving 4 million Syrian refugees and 7.6 million internally displaced, has mainly befallen Muslims.
00:14:23.000 The response?
00:14:24.000 Charitable giving by Americans to international causes has gone down for two consecutive years.
00:14:29.000 Some Republican presidential candidates seem indifferent to the plight of refugees.
00:14:33.000 We're good to go.
00:14:50.000 Is Christian faith merely a cover for tribalism, or will it demonstrate its essence in service to refugees of another faith who did nothing to deserve their faith?
00:14:58.000 The idea being that American Christians, in order to be super Christian, we have to, and I'm a Jew, but Judeo-Christian people have to take in all of these Muslim refugees.
00:15:06.000 And that's the way to solve their problems, is to take in all of these Muslim refugees.
00:15:10.000 Now, as somebody who's been an ardent advocate of the idea that Muslim countries should take in their own refugees, and that it is not the responsibility of the West to take in every refugee from every part of the world without regard to culture, without regard to upbringing, without regard to values, I find this problematic and offensive.
00:15:28.000 And I want to contrast this with the Beasts of No Nation mentality.
00:15:34.000 Early in the 20th century, at the end of the 19th century, there was a serious belief in most parts of Western civilization that Western civilization had a duty to actually spread itself.
00:15:45.000 That promulgating Western civilization was actually something that was good, something that was worthwhile.
00:15:50.000 And then, thanks to Marxism, the idea became that imperialism, colonialism, this was not a good, hard adventure.
00:15:56.000 All it really was was a way of exploiting the natives.
00:15:58.000 So, for example,
00:16:00.000 Henry Stanley, who was one of the original explorers of Africa.
00:16:03.000 He went there and explored Africa specifically because he felt that the Arab slave trade against black folks was something that could be overthrown if there was Christian influence in Africa.
00:16:14.000 Because Africa at the time was rife with cannibalism and barbarity, and the Arabs who had come down from Northern Africa had come to enslave a lot of the black folks and carry them off in chains.
00:16:22.000 More people were enslaved by Arabs in the Middle East than were ever enslaved by Americans in the pre-Civil War and Civil War period.
00:16:30.000 People don't realize this or care about it because obviously white people are the only people who have ever done anything bad.
00:16:35.000 And whenever we talk about, you know, Western colonialism and imperialism, people immediately go to the racism of Rudyard Kipling's White Man's Burden.
00:16:42.000 You know, it's the white man's burden to spread civilization among the black savages and all the rest of this, which of course is racist because civilization has nothing to do with race.
00:16:50.000 It has everything to do with values.
00:16:53.000 The problem is that in fighting that racist tendency,
00:16:57.000 Western civilization went to the point where we don't feel we have anything to promulgate to the world.
00:17:01.000 We have nothing left to promulgate to the world.
00:17:03.000 And so we now have this sort of dual idea.
00:17:07.000 On the one hand, we're not allowed to go into areas like you see in this movie.
00:17:10.000 It would be imperialist for us to go into those areas, impose order.
00:17:14.000 Install somebody who's capable of imposing order.
00:17:16.000 It would be imperialist for us to actually put people on the ground to try and nation-build, for example, or keep people there for long periods of time to nation-build, as Western civilization frequently did in the 19th and 20th centuries, with its attendant barbarity, but also attendant progress.
00:17:32.000 That would be terrible and barbaric and horrible.
00:17:33.000 There'd be no way to achieve it, and it would just be an example of Western racism and imperialism and colonialism quashing the Native spirit.
00:17:42.000 You're seeing some of the Native spirit right there, and it ain't good.
00:17:44.000 I mean, there are certain areas of the world where the Native spirit is just not good, and that has nothing to do with race, again.
00:17:49.000 There are plenty of white places where the Native spirit ain't good.
00:17:51.000 Just take a look at the
00:17:53.000 Kind of poorer culture in Appalachia, if you don't believe that.
00:17:57.000 So on the one hand, we're not allowed to move Western civilization forward in parts of the world that have cultures that are barbaric and primitive.
00:18:05.000 And on the other side, we're supposed to now, as sort of repentance,
00:18:10.000 To spread Western civilization, we're not allowed to go forward.
00:18:13.000 We have to go backward.
00:18:14.000 To spread Western civilization, we're supposed to take in refugees from non-Western civilizations into our own civilization, and then not assimilate them, not expect that they take in any American or Western values, but simply bring them in and give them stuff.
00:18:27.000 Which again is a Marxist idea that if you give people stuff that magically solves the problem, of course this is untrue.
00:18:32.000 It's just not true.
00:18:34.000 And so you have people saying that Westerners, Europeans, Americans, American Christians have responsibility for taking in Muslims without trying to determine what exactly their ideology is, what their political philosophy is, what their belief system is.
00:18:48.000 They're only there basically as a piggy bank.
00:18:49.000 American Christianity is supposed to be a piggy bank apparently for people like Michael Gerson.
00:18:55.000 And if you say, look, we're happy to take in people who want to imbibe Western culture and participate in Western culture.
00:19:00.000 We're happy to take in Muslims if they're willing to leave behind radical Islam and all of its attendant ideas.
00:19:06.000 They're willing to leave behind the barbaric tribalism that predominates in the Middle East.
00:19:10.000 If you say that, you're a racist and you're terrible, but if you don't take them in, you're also racist and terrible.
00:19:16.000 So you have to ruin your own civilization.
00:19:18.000 You have to bring in a bunch of people from different cultures who have no interest in your culture, but interest in your welfare checks.
00:19:23.000 You have to bring those people in.
00:19:25.000 And what you get in the end is basically what you're seeing in Europe right now.
00:19:28.000 A Europe that is completely weak, has no sense of self, no sense of center, believes that it is solely responsible for all the ills on Earth because of its history of colonialism and imperialism, and then, as a way to atone, is taking in huge numbers of refugees that are destroying the essence of Western liberalism.
00:19:45.000 And you're seeing this in France.
00:19:46.000 And now you're seeing the backlash from the European communities.
00:19:48.000 Sweden is now having a massive far-right movement specifically directed at quashing immigration.
00:19:54.000 You're seeing the same thing in places like Denmark.
00:19:56.000 You're seeing the same thing in places like France.
00:19:58.000 You're seeing it all over the place.
00:20:00.000 And this is what happens when a civilization loses its sense of purpose.
00:20:04.000 If you lose your sense of purpose, you're unwilling to spread your civilization.
00:20:08.000 If you lose your sense of purpose, you're not even willing to spread your civilization within your own borders.
00:20:13.000 And this is what truly upsets me about the kind of complaints of the left.
00:20:18.000 It truly makes me upset when I look at the complaints of the left with regard to beasts of no nation.
00:20:23.000 Because, yes, evil, horrible things are happening all over the world.
00:20:28.000 But if the only solution is for the West to imbibe, take in all of this horrible, all of this evil,
00:20:35.000 And to facilitate it with our tax dollars?
00:20:38.000 And to facilitate it without regard to assimilation?
00:20:41.000 Then how is that stopping this sort of thing?
00:20:43.000 It's making it easier.
00:20:44.000 It's making it easier.
00:20:45.000 In fact, one of the scenes in Beasts of No Nation is really interesting.
00:20:47.000 There's a scene where the dictator, the new dictator of the country, his name is Dada Goodblood, right?
00:20:53.000 He's supposed to meet with Idris Elba, and he keeps Idris Elba waiting.
00:20:56.000 Why?
00:20:56.000 Because there are a bunch of people who have come from the UN and from the West in order to give him money.
00:21:02.000 And they're coming to give him money because they don't want to spread their civilization
00:21:05.000 But they want to stop the conflict.
00:21:06.000 Never mind that this guy's been responsible for genocide.
00:21:09.000 I mean, there are scenes in this movie in which Idris Elba, who is the commander under this guy's rule, is going into cities and literally wiping the cities out.
00:21:17.000 We're talking men, women, children, the whole deal.
00:21:20.000 And here are the Westerners with their bundle of cash.
00:21:23.000 And I'm not sure that the movie means to indict Westernism, except in the sense that it says they're not doing enough, presumably if they gave more cash.
00:21:29.000 But at no point does the movie suggest, well, maybe some outside solutions would be a good thing.
00:21:35.000 Maybe some Western civilization here would be a good thing.
00:21:38.000 And I object to the newfangled idea that Western civilization is supposed to not be a converting force.
00:21:44.000 It's instead supposed to be a retreating force, giving away its wealth to people who don't embrace the basic ideals of Western civilization.
00:21:52.000 And that's how we can truly show that we're good-hearted.
00:21:55.000 I'm not interested in showing that Western civilization is good-hearted.
00:21:58.000 I know that we're good-hearted.
00:22:00.000 I'm interested in spreading the tenets of Western civilization that have made people more prosperous and happy all over the world wherever they're tried.
00:22:06.000 If we don't find an aggressive sense of self here in the West, if we don't find an aggressive sense of self-worth with regard to Western civilization, I promise you there will be more countries that look like beasts of no nation and far less that look like the United States of America.
00:22:19.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:22:20.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.