On Wednesday night, a riot broke out in the streets of UC Berkeley after a speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. It was a vicious and disgusting display of just how fascist many on the campus left have become, and a reminder that the real problem is not "free speech." It's that the left is out of control, and the only thing they care about is "safe spaces" and "microaggressions" in order to delegitimize anyone who doesn't agree with them. Ben Shapiro explains why this is a bad idea, and why we should be worried about what it means for the future of free speech on campus, and what it could mean for the country as a whole. He also explains why the left has been prepared for this sort of thing for a long time, and how it benefits them in the long-term by making them the scapegoat and scapegoat. Ben Shapiro: The issue is not free speech, the issue is the left, and they are out to get their own free speech and are doing it in a fascist, anti-free speech, fascist, hate-filled, fascist way. And they don't even know what they're doing it with it, they just do it because it's what they want to do it, and we're all watching them do it! and they're not going to stop it, so why not do something about it, right? or not do anything about it at all ? we'll be talking about it on The Ben Shapiro Show, right here on The Daily Wire, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller, and The New York Times, and much more! - Ben Shapiro's show on all of it. -Ben Shapiro's take on the latest in this and much, much more - The Daily Mail's reaction to the latest on this Ben's thoughts on it - including a new book out on the matter. . The New Yorker's review of Milo's speech in the new book, "I'm a Good Guy, Not a Bad Guy: What's the Real Thing? - by Milo's Shtick? and his thoughts on what happened at UC Berkeley's response to the Berkeley riots and what happened in the Berkeley and what's going to happen in the aftermath of the Berkeley riot and the reaction to it? - What's going on in the coming days, right and what to do about it? .
00:00:22.000First, the campus left has been engaging in this sort of fascism for at least a year.
00:00:26.000Not every campus leftist group engages in this sort of violence.
00:00:29.000I spoke at Berkeley last year, no problem.
00:00:30.000But a shocking number of campuses have experienced this sort of fascist anti-free speech garbage.
00:00:35.000Iannopolis has been at the receiving end of these sorts of receptions at campuses dotting the country.
00:00:40.000And the riots aren't really about Iannopolis.
00:00:42.000They're about the very concept of allowing someone on campus who the left considers radical.
00:00:46.000Last February, I was met with a near-riot at Cal State Los Angeles.
00:00:49.000At Penn State, students tried to break through locked doors to disrupt one of my speeches.
00:00:53.000I was banned from DePaul in the aftermath of a student disruption against Yiannopoulos and told I would be arrested if I set foot on campus.
00:00:59.000Jason Reilly of the Wall Street Journal was disinvited by Virginia Tech before finally being allowed on campus.
00:01:04.000So this stuff is happening all the time.
00:01:06.000The academic left, second of all, has prepared the way for a lot of this campus fascism.
00:01:12.000Well, because the campus left has built up a pseudo-intellectual bulwark around such fascism.
00:01:17.000They've told students they deserve safe spaces, areas in which their ideas are not challenged in any way.
00:01:22.000They've forwarded the culture of microaggressions, which urges students to see any speech they find offensive as a form of aggression to be countered by other aggression.
00:01:30.000Here's NYU professor Jonathan Haidt on the phenomenon.
00:01:49.000As a professor at Cal State LA posted on his door before my speech there last year, quote, the best response to microaggression is macroaggression.
00:01:57.000This line of thought actually encourages evil.
00:01:59.000As Professor Roy Baumeister writes in Evil Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, hypersensitive people, who often think their pride is assaulted, are potentially dangerous.
00:02:07.000Even when a neutral observer would conclude no serious provocation occurred,
00:02:11.000It is still important to recognize that, in the perpetrator's view, he or she was merely responding to an attack.
00:02:16.000Colleges churn out and reward these oversensitive people.
00:02:20.000Third, writing against speakers you consider radical, it helps those speakers.
00:02:25.000Okay, Yiannopoulos' shtick, it relies on opposition.
00:02:27.000The clips from his speeches are all about triggering members of the campus left, which, by the way, is the easiest thing in the world to do.
00:02:34.000Like or dislike Milo, and I am certainly no fan if you know anything that I've said about him, his provocateur schtick only works if he provokes a response way worse than that which he's engaged in.
00:02:44.000When the left shuts down his speeches, when they riot, when they engage in actual violence, when they pepper spray those who come to hear him and hit them with metal poles, all they're doing is legitimizing Iannopoulos in the public eye and making him the victim and selling him lots of books and making him lots of money.
00:02:59.000President Trump has weighed in via Twitter.
00:03:00.000He says that he will withdraw federal funds from UC Berkeley if they can't maintain free speech principles.
00:03:06.000Spray painting a kill Trump on walls, smashing ATMs, assaulting people.
00:03:10.000That is not appropriate behavior in any civilized society.
00:03:13.000And for those who are doing the spray painting and the smashing and the assaulting to proclaim that they're anti-fascist is patently insane.
00:03:40.000Good guy, and we'll be having on in just a couple of minutes.
00:03:42.000We're also going to be talking more about what happened in Berkeley and what that means.
00:03:45.000Plus, Donald Trump was at the National Prayer Breakfast, so what better time to talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger's ratings on The Apprentice.
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00:05:29.000Another day, another violent outburst.
00:05:31.000And this is becoming more and more common across the country.
00:05:35.000As I say, I've been in the middle of these things.
00:05:37.000Actually, half our staff has been in the middle of these things.
00:05:39.000A lot of our staff was there at Cal State Los Angeles when there was a near-riot last year when I spoke at Cal State LA.
00:05:44.000And the question is, what's driving this?
00:05:46.000Because the truth is, the vast majority of people who are showing up to protest these things have never heard of Milo.
00:05:51.000They've never actually seen anything Milo's done or seen anything that I've done or read anything that they've done.
00:05:55.000They've sort of read headlines from Salon or Slate and that's about it.
00:05:58.000They don't actually do their research.
00:06:00.000If they actually wanted to stop Milo, the easiest way to do it would be to ignore him.
00:06:03.000Milo is sort of like the doomsday monster.
00:06:05.000The more electricity you shoot at him, the more he absorbs it and expands.
00:06:08.000If you actually ignored Milo, he'd probably go away.
00:06:10.000But the fact is that the left can't ignore Milo because they have decided that in the name of their safe spaces, everyone they disagree with must be banned.
00:06:54.000So I think that the election of Trump has made the left in many ways fully insane to the point where civilized behavior is becoming less and less common.
00:07:01.000This, of course, does not apply to everybody who's a liberal.
00:07:05.000But there is this strong strain that's building up in the more extreme circles that say that violence is okay.
00:07:10.000What they say is, somebody's a Nazi, violence against Nazis is okay, therefore I can attack X, right?
00:07:16.000So this is why, the other day, there's a neo-Nazi, a white nationalist is probably fairer, named Richard Spencer, who was punched in the head on the street while he was doing an interview.
00:07:27.000And so the internet lit up with, is it okay to punch a Nazi?
00:07:30.000And the answer is no, it's not okay to punch a Nazi.
00:08:25.000And she's not the only one who's saying this sort of stuff, unfortunately.
00:08:28.000We talked the other day about how at the Screen Actors Guild, David Harbour got a standing ovation for saying that you were going to punch people that you disagree with.
00:08:35.000Joy Behar, just yesterday, she was on The View, and on The View, Whoopi Goldberg's already labeled Trump the Taliban, so here's Joy Behar on The View saying that Democrats ought to bring a rhetorical gun to the knife fight.
00:08:48.000I think their job is to look at what's being brought to them.
00:09:06.000You fight the fights that are good, like pick your battles.
00:09:09.000If you really don't like this candidate, fight against him.
00:09:12.000Okay, so the point here is not that she actually means pick up a gun, but this sort of violent rhetoric has become much, much, much more common.
00:09:20.000Once the violent rhetoric becomes more common, once you label your political opponents the enemy to actually be hurt, and everything is on the table, then that means you're going to get a lot more of this sort of activity.
00:09:28.000Now I do want to say one quick thing about the Berkeley students.
00:09:31.000My guess is that if you look at the footage of these riots, the rioters don't look like Berkeley students.
00:09:36.000They don't look like kids who are lefties at Berkeley.
00:09:39.000It looks like those kids are standing around and then a bunch of anarchists came in from Oakland or from Berkeley or from San Francisco to make trouble.
00:09:45.000They look like WTO protesters from 1999 smashing windows and looting and doing this sort of stuff.
00:09:51.000I don't want to blame all Berkeley students for the actions of a few, but the problem is this sort of mentality is spreading.
00:09:57.000Well, joining us now on the program, I'm pleased to welcome
00:09:59.000Former Assemblyperson for the State of California, Mike Gatto.
00:10:01.000I think he's going to be a statewide candidate for office soon, if I'm not mistaken.
00:10:33.000I mean, nobody should ever, when they're on a publicly funded campus that is paid for by taxpayer dollars, have to have their free speech quelled.
00:10:40.000You could argue maybe it's different on a private campus, but that was a public campus where people sought to clamp down on your free speech.
00:10:45.000The state of California owes you an apology to the extent that I can do it on behalf of the whole state.
00:11:36.000I was talking to a veteran Democratic Congress member from D.C.
00:11:40.000yesterday, and he said, you know, think about it.
00:11:42.000Everything that Trump has done so far in office is designed to appeal to rural Pennsylvania and rural Michigan, all the key areas of the swing states that Democrats lost.
00:11:51.000And then by lighting cars on fire in Berkeley, I'm not sure that we're going to win those hearts back.
00:11:56.000Well I appreciate the honesty and I think that obviously I think the Democratic Party could use more people like you in positions of power saying that because it seems like the Democratic Party is moving in a more extreme direction by embracing some of the candidates they're talking about for the DNC chairmanship.
00:12:09.000There was that event a couple of weeks ago where the DNC chair candidates were saying things like
00:12:14.000As white people, we have to sit down and shut up, and we just have to listen to black people.
00:12:18.000It's my job to shut the other white people up.
00:12:20.000That doesn't seem to me geared toward winning the white middle-class voter in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Wisconsin.
00:12:25.000So I want to talk a little bit about your broader worldview, because the reason that I invited you on in the first place is because we got into this fight, as I've referenced a couple of times,
00:13:18.000Your screed is a gross oversim... See, it's so much more polite when we're in person.
00:13:21.000Your screed is a gross oversimplification, too, akin to medieval mentality of kings and nobles protected us in battle, so nobility is awesome.
00:14:46.000Unless you can actually prove the crime, it's a little bit of a slander to suggest that people are engaged in crime just because they're wealthy.
00:14:53.000There's a lot of companies that when they start out, the regulations are not quite there yet, and they act in a regulatory vacuum, and in many cases they're taking resources that you could argue belong to society, and they are exploiting them to their well-being.
00:15:07.000Well, unless you're talking about people actually going into the commons and drilling for oil in areas that's not owned, for example, then what resource do corporations like Google exploit, or corporations like Microsoft exploit?
00:15:18.000It seems to me that their employees are some of the happiest people on the planet.
00:15:21.000It seems to us that, you know, you and I have great technology because of companies like this, and seeing wealth as an indicator, a red flag for something criminal has occurred, number one sort of lets people who are poor off the hook if they actually commit crime, and number two says that wealthy people are actually the ones who are criminals, when it seems to me that a lot of the people who are wealthy are wealthy specifically because they're engaging in lots of voluntary mutual transactions, which is the way our economy works.
00:15:44.000If it's not voluntary, you and I are on the same side.
00:15:46.000If somebody's actually exploiting somebody else, we don't disagree.
00:15:50.000But if somebody is not exploiting somebody, then what's the problem?
00:15:54.000So you and I are both against the redistribution of wealth, but my point was there's many ways to redistribute it.
00:15:59.000So Rand Paul and Ron Paul both have said to audit the Fed, and I've supported that.
00:16:03.000I think the Federal Reserve, which is a quasi-governmental agency, it's appointed by the president, the governors are appointed by the president.
00:16:09.000I think that their policies have favored those who own lots of stocks and those who own lots of property.
00:16:16.000So you're in favor, like the Pauls are, of a return to the gold standard?
00:16:19.000You know, I think the gold standard, for a long time, served our country just fine.
00:16:23.000I'm actually in favor of a return to the gold standard as well.
00:16:25.000It's real money, and it's tied to something that government can't create.
00:16:31.000Listen, there are some Democratic traditionalists out there, and I think I'm one of them.
00:16:34.000I mean, I think there's nothing wrong with being a small government Democrat.
00:16:37.000And I think there's also nothing wrong with saying that the Federal Reserve's policies have benefitted those who own it.
00:16:43.000When you're lending money at next to nothing and you're inflating these bubbles, the people who tend to own those resources benefit from it.
00:16:49.000So in a weird way, that's a redistribution of wealth, too.
00:16:52.000It's redistribution of wealth by government.
00:16:55.000And as I say, I'm very libertarian on a lot of this stuff, and that is keep the government out unless somebody's rights are actually being exploited.
00:17:00.000Now, I don't want to hit you over the head with your tweets, but I'm going to hit you over the head with your tweets.
00:17:40.000Presidents of both stripes have been doing actually lately where, you know, it looks like the green jobs program or like Trump giving favors to a particular company, which it looks like corporatism.
00:17:48.000That's what old-school European nobility looked like.
00:17:51.000And in fact, Ben Franklin, when it came to his own distribution of wealth at his death, Ben Franklin actually handed virtually all of his wealth to his children.
00:17:57.000He gave a thousand pounds to the city of Philadelphia, a thousand pounds to the city of Boston, and that was it, right?
00:18:01.000So it wasn't like he liquidated all his wealth and said, kids, you're on your own.
00:18:06.000So are you in favor of the idea of a high estate tax taking lots of money away from people who have already been taxed on that money because we don't want their kids having it?
00:18:13.000So I do tend to take the Ben Franklin approach.
00:18:15.000Thomas Jefferson was more of an extremist on the estate tax.
00:18:18.000He didn't think that people should inherit much at all.
00:18:20.000Ben Franklin actually wrote that he thought that the average middle class person should be able to pass on their home, even two homes, three homes, to their kids.
00:18:27.000But he did think that their really, really big estates
00:18:31.000Well, I mean, listen, I'm no Paris Hilton fan, but I also don't think that I have the right to take away grandpa's wealth just because I don't want Paris Hilton to be doing Carl's Jr.
00:18:57.000Yeah, but that is a little bit of postmodern stuff that you might criticize if the left was saying it, because government does have the right to draw lines.
00:19:05.000When we elect the government, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, we are saying, please draw the lines.
00:19:10.000I think an estate tax would be much more fair than an income tax.
00:19:26.000There was estate taxes and there was tariffs.
00:19:28.000And I think if we could come back to some sort of system where we relooked at our tax code and said, hey, this is more fair.
00:19:34.000We're going to break up large estates, we're going to tax sins, and we're going to rely on some sort of tariffs to penalize the worst abusers of slave labor in third world countries.
00:19:47.000I think that would be a better system than what we have now.
00:19:49.000OK, that's interesting because, you know, look, I think it's immoral to tax people twice.
00:19:53.000So if you're going to have an income tax and then you're going to steal money that I've already paid taxes on.
00:19:57.000One of my, I mean, you have children, I assume.
00:20:05.000And one of the reasons that I work really hard is because I would like to pass on lots and lots of money to my children so they don't have to work so hard, which is part and parcel of the American dream.
00:20:13.000It's not just I work hard, I get ahead.
00:20:14.000It's I work hard, I get ahead so my kids don't have to work quite as hard to get ahead.
00:20:18.000And when it comes to inherited wealth, I think there's this vast misnomer that the people who are the wealthiest in our society
00:21:18.000Yeah, see, to me, I don't think that those fortunes should be broken up.
00:21:20.000I think the key is to protect the system itself so that those fortunes can't impact government.
00:21:25.000And that means, you know, having a smaller government in total.
00:21:27.000Because the problem is, once you get to the point where the government can confiscate estate wealth, you know that the government is so corrupt that there are going to be some estates that somehow escape, and there's going to be some estates that get it.
00:22:06.000Now you're talking about, you just look at the bottom line, you say, okay, you made more than $7 million, you made $2 million, the $7 million guy,
00:22:13.000Maybe you cut it off at a billion dollars.
00:22:14.000But the point is, I just think, I'm a traditionalist, and I think our founding fathers believed in this system, which was, yeah, you let the person pass on three, four, five houses to their kids, that's fine.
00:22:25.000You let them pass on their cars and their bank accounts.
00:22:27.000But maybe the person who starts to look like a Russian oligarch, because they've got so much power and so much money, we probably don't want that in America.
00:23:16.000So, if you love comedy, I mean, if the political system isn't enough comedy for you and you just love comedy and you want more of it, CISO is the place to be.
00:24:26.000Okay, so, as you say, the situation in Berkeley is really ugly.
00:24:31.000I want to show you some of the footage from Berkeley so that folks know what we're talking about.
00:24:34.000Last night, here's some of the people shooting off fireworks at public buildings last night at Berkeley.
00:24:55.000And you can see it's it's black block I mean, that's what they call themselves because they wear all black and they're they're basically terrorists and the police
00:25:05.000This is the experience that we had at Cal State LA as well, by the way.
00:25:08.000The cops were basically told to stand down because they didn't want to promote violence, they didn't want to have a violent clash, so instead you let the rioters run roughshod.
00:25:15.000There's more of this here as I'm shooting off some flares.
00:25:35.000All righty, so you can see it got really, really ugly last night, and we'll talk a little bit more about that.
00:25:41.000Plus, we have the mailbag coming up, but in order for you to see that, you have to go over to dailywire.com right now and become a subscriber.
00:25:47.000You can watch the rest live, become part of the mailbag.
00:25:49.000We're going to do live mailbag questions today.