The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 247 - The Left Gets Violent at Berkeley

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? .

00:00:00.000 On Wednesday night, Milo Yiannopoulos stopped by University of California at Berkeley to do his shtick.

00:00:05.000 Leftist protesters, joined by a large contingent of anarchist rioters, promptly gave him everything he could ever hope for.

00:00:11.000 A riot, complete with violent destruction of property, large objects set on fire, and Yiannopoulos supporters beaten in the streets.

00:00:17.000 It was a vicious and disgusting display of just how fascist many on the campus left to become.

00:00:21.000 A few thoughts.

00:00:22.000 First, the campus left has been engaging in this sort of fascism for at least a year.

00:00:26.000 Not every campus leftist group engages in this sort of violence.

00:00:29.000 I spoke at Berkeley last year, no problem. 0.97

00:00:30.000 But a shocking number of campuses have experienced this sort of fascist anti-free speech garbage. 0.72

00:00:35.000 Iannopolis has been at the receiving end of these sorts of receptions at campuses dotting the country. 0.78

00:00:40.000 And the riots aren't really about Iannopolis.

00:00:42.000 They're about the very concept of allowing someone on campus who the left considers radical.

00:00:46.000 Last February, I was met with a near-riot at Cal State Los Angeles.

00:00:49.000 At Penn State, students tried to break through locked doors to disrupt one of my speeches.

00:00:53.000 I 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.

00:00:59.000 Jason Reilly of the Wall Street Journal was disinvited by Virginia Tech before finally being allowed on campus.

00:01:04.000 So this stuff is happening all the time.

00:01:06.000 The academic left, second of all, has prepared the way for a lot of this campus fascism.

00:01:10.000 Why is all this happening right now?

00:01:12.000 Well, because the campus left has built up a pseudo-intellectual bulwark around such fascism.

00:01:17.000 They've told students they deserve safe spaces, areas in which their ideas are not challenged in any way.

00:01:22.000 They'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.

00:01:30.000 Here's NYU professor Jonathan Haidt on the phenomenon.

00:01:32.000 He says,

00:01:49.000 As a professor at Cal State LA posted on his door before my speech there last year, quote, the best response to microaggression is macroaggression.

00:01:57.000 This line of thought actually encourages evil.

00:01:59.000 As Professor Roy Baumeister writes in Evil Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, hypersensitive people, who often think their pride is assaulted, are potentially dangerous.

00:02:07.000 Even when a neutral observer would conclude no serious provocation occurred,

00:02:11.000 It is still important to recognize that, in the perpetrator's view, he or she was merely responding to an attack.

00:02:16.000 Colleges churn out and reward these oversensitive people.

00:02:20.000 Third, writing against speakers you consider radical, it helps those speakers. 1.00

00:02:24.000 You idiots! 1.00

00:02:25.000 Okay, Yiannopoulos' shtick, it relies on opposition. 1.00

00:02:27.000 The 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.

00:02:32.000 He relishes this publicity.

00:02:34.000 Like 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.

00:02:44.000 When 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.

00:02:59.000 President Trump has weighed in via Twitter.

00:03:00.000 He says that he will withdraw federal funds from UC Berkeley if they can't maintain free speech principles.

00:03:05.000 That's actually appropriate.

00:03:06.000 Spray painting a kill Trump on walls, smashing ATMs, assaulting people. 0.94

00:03:10.000 That is not appropriate behavior in any civilized society. 0.99

00:03:13.000 And for those who are doing the spray painting and the smashing and the assaulting to proclaim that they're anti-fascist is patently insane. 0.69

00:03:19.000 Forget Iannopoulos.

00:03:20.000 The issue is the left and they are out of control.

00:03:22.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:03:23.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:03:28.000 Okay, tons to get to today.

00:03:30.000 In just a few minutes, we're going to be having on former Assemblyperson from the state of California, Mike Gatto.

00:03:34.000 He and I got into a Twitter spat a few weeks ago.

00:03:36.000 I'm going to be having on to discuss that.

00:03:38.000 We'll talk capitalism, we'll talk Berkeley.

00:03:40.000 Good guy, and we'll be having on in just a couple of minutes.

00:03:42.000 We're also going to be talking more about what happened in Berkeley and what that means.

00:03:45.000 Plus, Donald Trump was at the National Prayer Breakfast, so what better time to talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger's ratings on The Apprentice.

00:03:52.000 Yes, really.

00:03:53.000 This is the world in which we now live.

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00:05:27.000 Okay.

00:05:27.000 All right, so here we are.

00:05:29.000 Another day, another violent outburst.

00:05:31.000 And this is becoming more and more common across the country.

00:05:35.000 As I say, I've been in the middle of these things.

00:05:37.000 Actually, half our staff has been in the middle of these things.

00:05:39.000 A 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.

00:05:44.000 And the question is, what's driving this?

00:05:46.000 Because the truth is, the vast majority of people who are showing up to protest these things have never heard of Milo.

00:05:51.000 They've never actually seen anything Milo's done or seen anything that I've done or read anything that they've done.

00:05:55.000 They've sort of read headlines from Salon or Slate and that's about it.

00:05:58.000 They don't actually do their research.

00:06:00.000 If they actually wanted to stop Milo, the easiest way to do it would be to ignore him.

00:06:03.000 Milo is sort of like the doomsday monster.

00:06:05.000 The more electricity you shoot at him, the more he absorbs it and expands.

00:06:08.000 If you actually ignored Milo, he'd probably go away.

00:06:10.000 But 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.

00:06:17.000 So you have the mayor of Berkeley

00:06:19.000 I mean, that's basically their motto.

00:06:20.000 So the idea that there's people coming in who are going to disagree with that

00:06:48.000 And then they have to be shut out.

00:06:49.000 That sort of has bled down.

00:06:51.000 Unfortunately, it's bled.

00:06:53.000 It's now coming from the top.

00:06:54.000 So 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.

00:07:01.000 This, of course, does not apply to everybody who's a liberal.

00:07:03.000 It doesn't apply to every Democrat.

00:07:05.000 But there is this strong strain that's building up in the more extreme circles that say that violence is okay.

00:07:10.000 What they say is, somebody's a Nazi, violence against Nazis is okay, therefore I can attack X, right?

00:07:16.000 So 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. 0.77

00:07:27.000 And so the internet lit up with, is it okay to punch a Nazi? 0.58

00:07:30.000 And the answer is no, it's not okay to punch a Nazi.

00:07:33.000 It isn't. 1.00

00:07:33.000 Because by the same logic you can punch a Nazi, you should be able to kill a Nazi, right? 1.00

00:07:37.000 If you're violating someone's bodily integrity on the basis of their political viewpoint, you are doing something uncivilized and wrong. 0.98

00:07:42.000 But there's an actual argument over, can you punch the Nazi?

00:07:45.000 Okay, so a lot of the left says, great, Richard Spencer got punched in the face, that's just terrific.

00:07:49.000 And then they say, well Milo is Richard Spencer.

00:07:52.000 And then they say, well, Trump is Richard Spencer.

00:07:54.000 And they say, well, Shapiro is Richard Spencer.

00:07:55.000 And pretty soon it's bled down to Mitch McConnell is Richard Spencer.

00:07:58.000 Anyone I disagree with is Richard Spencer, and Richard Spencer is Hitler. 0.97

00:08:01.000 Therefore, I can use violence against them.

00:08:03.000 Sarah Silverman tweeted today that she wants basically a violent uprising. 0.97

00:08:07.000 She says, fascists should get overthrown.

00:08:09.000 We'll use the military to overthrow. 0.98

00:08:11.000 Wake up and join the resistance, all caps.

00:08:13.000 Once the military is with us, fascists get overthrown. 0.78

00:08:15.000 Mad King and his handlers go bye-bye.

00:08:18.000 An articulate statement from one of the world's most brilliant political commentators, Sarah Silverman.

00:08:24.000 Yeah.

00:08:25.000 And she's not the only one who's saying this sort of stuff, unfortunately.

00:08:28.000 We 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.

00:08:35.000 Joy 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.

00:08:48.000 I think their job is to look at what's being brought to them.

00:08:50.000 That's how it played out.

00:08:52.000 You know, the Democrats always go to a gun fight with a knife.

00:08:55.000 Let them go with a gun this time. 0.57

00:08:57.000 I'm sick of it.

00:08:59.000 I'm sick of it being okay for the goose, but not the gambler.

00:09:02.000 The problem is the people are the only ones who suffer.

00:09:04.000 We need to keep moving forward.

00:09:06.000 You fight the fights that are good, like pick your battles.

00:09:09.000 If you really don't like this candidate, fight against him.

00:09:12.000 Okay, 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.

00:09:18.000 As I say, that's not a good thing.

00:09:20.000 Once 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.

00:09:28.000 Now I do want to say one quick thing about the Berkeley students.

00:09:31.000 My guess is that if you look at the footage of these riots, the rioters don't look like Berkeley students.

00:09:36.000 They don't look like kids who are lefties at Berkeley.

00:09:39.000 It 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.

00:09:45.000 They look like WTO protesters from 1999 smashing windows and looting and doing this sort of stuff.

00:09:51.000 I don't want to blame all Berkeley students for the actions of a few, but the problem is this sort of mentality is spreading.

00:09:57.000 Well, joining us now on the program, I'm pleased to welcome

00:09:59.000 Former Assemblyperson for the State of California, Mike Gatto.

00:10:01.000 I think he's going to be a statewide candidate for office soon, if I'm not mistaken.

00:10:05.000 What are you running for now?

00:10:06.000 Well, I haven't decided yet.

00:10:07.000 I think politics is a little bit up in the air right now.

00:10:09.000 Okay, so he's running for governor.

00:10:10.000 So Mike Gatto is a longtime Assemblyperson from the State of California.

00:10:14.000 He and I got into a Twitter spat the other day, and that's why I'm having him on.

00:10:17.000 So I think a good place to start is with what's happening in Berkeley.

00:10:20.000 What do you make of the hubbub of the chaos?

00:10:22.000 What is a riot that happened in Berkeley last night?

00:10:24.000 Well, first of all, I was in office when you were at Cal State LA last February, and I want to apologize.

00:10:28.000 I want to start by apologizing on behalf of the state of California for what you went through.

00:10:32.000 I appreciate it.

00:10:32.000 Thank you.

00:10:33.000 I 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.

00:10:40.000 You 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.

00:10:45.000 The state of California owes you an apology to the extent that I can do it on behalf of the whole state.

00:10:49.000 Well, thank you.

00:10:49.000 I appreciate it.

00:10:51.000 It's not your job to do it on behalf of the whole state, obviously.

00:10:53.000 You didn't do it.

00:10:54.000 I only like to put responsibility where it lies, but I appreciate that.

00:10:57.000 So, yeah, I mean, I think that the first place to start is that this is why I like having people who disagree on the show.

00:11:02.000 I'm going to start doing this a lot more often now that we can have guests.

00:11:05.000 And I think that that's fun because it's fun to have the discussion and it's really negative what happened last night.

00:11:12.000 Before we get to what we were spatting over on the internet, which was a lot of fun, I do want to get to it because it's kind of a kick.

00:11:18.000 I want to ask you, Assemblyman Gatta, what do you make of, how should the Democrats treat the accession of President Trump?

00:11:25.000 So a lot of people seem to be going kind of nuts over this.

00:11:28.000 What do you think is the best way for Democrats to deal with this?

00:11:30.000 Because obviously I think that this sort of extreme rhetoric and tactics, I'm not sure this is going to be productive.

00:11:36.000 Correct.

00:11:36.000 I was talking to a veteran Democratic Congress member from D.C.

00:11:40.000 yesterday, and he said, you know, think about it.

00:11:42.000 Everything 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.

00:11:51.000 And then by lighting cars on fire in Berkeley, I'm not sure that we're going to win those hearts back.

00:11:56.000 Well 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.

00:12:09.000 There was that event a couple of weeks ago where the DNC chair candidates were saying things like

00:12:14.000 As white people, we have to sit down and shut up, and we just have to listen to black people. 0.99

00:12:18.000 It's my job to shut the other white people up. 1.00

00:12:20.000 That doesn't seem to me geared toward winning the white middle-class voter in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Wisconsin.

00:12:25.000 So 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,

00:12:32.000 We're good to go.

00:12:56.000 I don't know.

00:13:18.000 Your screed is a gross oversim... See, it's so much more polite when we're in person.

00:13:21.000 Your screed is a gross oversimplification, too, akin to medieval mentality of kings and nobles protected us in battle, so nobility is awesome.

00:13:29.000 Did I write that?

00:13:30.000 You did, actually.

00:13:31.000 Sorry about that, Mike.

00:13:34.000 So maybe you'd like to explain where that comes from.

00:13:37.000 I asked you, so what makes Bill Gates a medieval feudal lord? 0.96

00:13:42.000 Well, first of all, I never gained as many Twitter followers, or I never got my behind spanked as much as when I tried to troll you. 0.78

00:13:48.000 So your followers are very, very... Enthusiastic? 0.89

00:13:52.000 Yes.

00:13:53.000 But the point I was trying to make is this.

00:13:55.000 So I'm a traditionalist.

00:13:56.000 Believe it or not.

00:13:57.000 There's a democratic traditionalist.

00:13:59.000 I know that our founding fathers believed in small everything.

00:14:01.000 They believed in small government.

00:14:02.000 They believed in small concentrations of wealth.

00:14:05.000 They thought that if we had the return of nobility in this country, that we'd be in a really bad place.

00:14:10.000 We'd look like those countries in Europe that people had left.

00:14:13.000 We would have this great concentration of power.

00:14:14.000 It would start to seem like nobility.

00:14:16.000 And that's what that reference was.

00:14:18.000 And I do believe that there are times in history where the wealthy have more and they start to look like Russian oligarchs.

00:14:24.000 And nobody would disagree that Russian oligarchs are kind of like nobility.

00:14:28.000 They can control government.

00:14:29.000 They have the power of life and death in certain towns and in certain provinces.

00:14:33.000 And that's not good for our American way of value.

00:14:35.000 Well, you and I agree on the idea that oligarchy is bad, obviously, but I'm not comparing Bill Gates to a Russian oligarch.

00:14:40.000 I'm not saying he is, too, but there is a saying that all great fortunes come from some crime.

00:14:44.000 I don't think that's true, though.

00:14:46.000 Unless 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.

00:14:53.000 There'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.

00:15:07.000 Well, 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?

00:15:18.000 It seems to me that their employees are some of the happiest people on the planet.

00:15:21.000 It 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.

00:15:44.000 If it's not voluntary, you and I are on the same side.

00:15:46.000 If somebody's actually exploiting somebody else, we don't disagree.

00:15:50.000 But if somebody is not exploiting somebody, then what's the problem?

00:15:54.000 So you and I are both against the redistribution of wealth, but my point was there's many ways to redistribute it.

00:15:59.000 So Rand Paul and Ron Paul both have said to audit the Fed, and I've supported that.

00:16:03.000 I think the Federal Reserve, which is a quasi-governmental agency, it's appointed by the president, the governors are appointed by the president.

00:16:09.000 I think that their policies have favored those who own lots of stocks and those who own lots of property.

00:16:16.000 So you're in favor, like the Pauls are, of a return to the gold standard?

00:16:19.000 You know, I think the gold standard, for a long time, served our country just fine.

00:16:23.000 I'm actually in favor of a return to the gold standard as well.

00:16:25.000 It's real money, and it's tied to something that government can't create.

00:16:28.000 So why are you a Democrat?

00:16:29.000 I don't understand.

00:16:31.000 Listen, there are some Democratic traditionalists out there, and I think I'm one of them.

00:16:34.000 I mean, I think there's nothing wrong with being a small government Democrat.

00:16:37.000 And I think there's also nothing wrong with saying that the Federal Reserve's policies have benefitted those who own it.

00:16:43.000 When 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.

00:16:49.000 So in a weird way, that's a redistribution of wealth, too.

00:16:51.000 No, I totally agree.

00:16:52.000 It's redistribution of wealth by government.

00:16:55.000 And 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.

00:17:00.000 Now, 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.

00:17:04.000 So here's one more.

00:17:05.000 This is you talking about inherited wealth.

00:17:08.000 And again, things get dicey on Twitter in a way that they don't when we speak to each other face-to-face.

00:17:12.000 So the implication here seems to be

00:17:22.000 We're good to go.

00:17:40.000 Presidents 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.

00:17:48.000 That's what old-school European nobility looked like. 0.71

00:17:51.000 And 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.

00:17:57.000 He gave a thousand pounds to the city of Philadelphia, a thousand pounds to the city of Boston, and that was it, right?

00:18:01.000 So it wasn't like he liquidated all his wealth and said, kids, you're on your own.

00:18:06.000 So 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?

00:18:13.000 So I do tend to take the Ben Franklin approach.

00:18:15.000 Thomas Jefferson was more of an extremist on the estate tax.

00:18:18.000 He didn't think that people should inherit much at all.

00:18:20.000 Ben 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.

00:18:27.000 But he did think that their really, really big estates

00:18:31.000 Well, 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.

00:18:37.000 commercials.

00:18:57.000 Yeah, 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.

00:19:05.000 When we elect the government, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, we are saying, please draw the lines.

00:19:10.000 I think an estate tax would be much more fair than an income tax.

00:19:13.000 I think.

00:19:13.000 So do you want to remove the income tax?

00:19:15.000 If you're in favor of removing the income tax in favor of a small estate tax, then maybe I'm with you.

00:19:20.000 Yeah, our country survived for the first 150 years on primarily three taxes.

00:19:24.000 There was a sin tax.

00:19:24.000 It was the whiskey tax, right?

00:19:26.000 There was estate taxes and there was tariffs.

00:19:28.000 And 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.

00:19:34.000 We'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. 0.95

00:19:47.000 I think that would be a better system than what we have now.

00:19:49.000 OK, that's interesting because, you know, look, I think it's immoral to tax people twice.

00:19:53.000 So if you're going to have an income tax and then you're going to steal money that I've already paid taxes on.

00:19:57.000 One of my, I mean, you have children, I assume.

00:19:59.000 Yeah.

00:20:00.000 I mean, how many kids do you have?

00:20:01.000 I have two and a third on the way.

00:20:02.000 Okay, well congratulations.

00:20:03.000 That's exciting.

00:20:03.000 So I have two under three.

00:20:05.000 And 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.

00:20:13.000 It's not just I work hard, I get ahead.

00:20:14.000 It's I work hard, I get ahead so my kids don't have to work quite as hard to get ahead.

00:20:18.000 And when it comes to inherited wealth, I think there's this vast misnomer that the people who are the wealthiest in our society

00:20:23.000 All of them inherited their wealth.

00:20:25.000 And actually, when you break it down, that's not really true.

00:20:27.000 According to 2012, there's the Forbes 400.

00:20:29.000 And 35% of the Forbes 400 was born poor or middle class.

00:20:34.000 22% were born upper middle class.

00:20:36.000 That means 57% were born either poor, middle class, or upper middle class.

00:20:41.000 11.5% inherited more than a million dollars.

00:20:43.000 7% inherited more than 50 million, so that would be Paris Hilton.

00:20:47.000 And 21% inherited enough money to just stay on the list, right?

00:20:49.000 So tax the 7%. 0.99

00:20:51.000 When I got the tweets back with our exchange from your followers, a lot of people said, hey, I'm just a middle class guy.

00:20:56.000 Do you want to take my wealth?

00:20:57.000 The answer is no.

00:20:58.000 I do not want to take that wealth.

00:21:00.000 I'm the same way.

00:21:01.000 I work very hard so that my children will have a better life.

00:21:03.000 And by the way, I'm not a career politician.

00:21:05.000 I really have had jobs and I have a job now and I'm working very hard.

00:21:08.000 But I do think we do run this risk of returning to this era of nobility if we don't break up the vast, vast fortunes.

00:21:16.000 It's that 7% or 6% you talked about.

00:21:18.000 Yeah, see, to me, I don't think that those fortunes should be broken up.

00:21:20.000 I think the key is to protect the system itself so that those fortunes can't impact government.

00:21:25.000 And that means, you know, having a smaller government in total.

00:21:27.000 Because 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.

00:21:36.000 Yeah, but they confiscate.

00:21:37.000 Sales tax, they confiscate.

00:21:38.000 Income tax, they confiscate.

00:21:39.000 So many things.

00:21:40.000 We have to have tax.

00:21:41.000 We have to pay for the crumbling roads in L.A.

00:21:43.000 that are never paved.

00:21:44.000 Right, why punish me just because I made a lot of money?

00:21:47.000 Well, it's not punishing you because you made a lot of money.

00:21:49.000 What it's trying to do... It sort of is.

00:21:50.000 You're only hitting me if I'm really, really wealthy.

00:21:52.000 Yeah, but I mean, listen, that's how a lot of tax codes are. 0.99

00:21:55.000 I know they suck, yeah. 0.99

00:21:56.000 Well, they do. 1.00

00:21:57.000 They do.

00:21:58.000 But if you think about it, the wealthy guy who buys a Rolls-Royce, he pays more in sales tax than someone like me who doesn't own a car.

00:22:03.000 Right, but he has a choice to buy that car, right?

00:22:06.000 Right.

00:22:06.000 That's a little bit different.

00:22:06.000 Now 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,

00:22:13.000 Maybe you cut it off at a billion dollars.

00:22:14.000 But 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.

00:22:25.000 You let them pass on their cars and their bank accounts.

00:22:27.000 But 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.

00:22:33.000 And by the way, this type of

00:22:35.000 This type of people ignoring this, politicians in power ignoring this for so long is why Donald Trump won all these Midwestern states.

00:22:41.000 It's because he actually talked to people and said, look, I'm going to try to return good jobs to your class.

00:22:47.000 I think that's right.

00:22:47.000 I think it's also, I think it's ironic that you say Donald Trump is an example of that because Donald Trump is actually part of that 7%.

00:22:53.000 A crap load of money.

00:22:56.000 All right, well, thank you so much for stopping by.

00:22:57.000 It really is a pleasure to have you, and it's always fun to have a cordial conversation with somebody with whom I disagree.

00:23:03.000 So thank you for the time, and thanks for coming in.

00:23:05.000 And look out for him.

00:23:07.000 He's going to run for governor, even though he says he's just considering it.

00:23:09.000 So make sure that you keep an eye on that.

00:23:11.000 Well, we have to say thank you to another one of our sponsors.

00:23:14.000 These are our sponsors over at CISO.

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00:23:26.000 CISO is

00:23:27.000 I think so.

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00:23:49.000 My wife and I have been watching one of their shows called Harmon Quest, which is really funny.

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00:24:26.000 Okay, so, as you say, the situation in Berkeley is really ugly.

00:24:31.000 I want to show you some of the footage from Berkeley so that folks know what we're talking about.

00:24:34.000 Last night, here's some of the people shooting off fireworks at public buildings last night at Berkeley. 0.80

00:24:55.000 And 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 1.00

00:25:02.000 Where are the cops in all this? 0.89

00:25:03.000 What are the cops doing?

00:25:05.000 I have no idea.

00:25:05.000 This is the experience that we had at Cal State LA as well, by the way.

00:25:08.000 The 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.

00:25:15.000 There's more of this here as I'm shooting off some flares.

00:25:35.000 All righty, so you can see it got really, really ugly last night, and we'll talk a little bit more about that.

00:25:41.000 Plus, 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.

00:25:47.000 You can watch the rest live, become part of the mailbag.

00:25:49.000 We're going to do live mailbag questions today.

00:25:50.000 Yay! 0.99

00:25:51.000 That's very exciting.

00:25:52.000 So we're going to check that out today.

00:25:53.000 Go to dailywire.com.

00:25:55.000 $8 a month will get you a subscription. $8.

00:25:57.000 A month.

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00:26:01.000 That deal is ending soon.

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00:26:04.000 We are the most popular conservative podcast in the nation.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 03, 2017

Ep. 247 - The Left Gets Violent at Berkeley

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