The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 259 - Do You Get Extra Credit For Experiencing Tragedy?

A new study doesn t prove a correlation between loosening same-sex marriage laws and teen suicide rates in states that legalized gay marriage in 2013 and 2014. Plus, we have a listener mailbag. Daily Ware is a new podcast from Dailyware.co/DailyWare. Click here to become a supporter of Daily Ware and get 10% off your first month with discount code: CROWN10 at checkout. Subscribe to Daily Ware to receive a FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint to help you get a better deal on your first round of the 401(k) and get access to early-bird pricing. Use the discount code CROWN20 at checkout to receive $10 off the first month, and get 20% off the second month if you sign up for a CROWN 20-day free trial! Want more Daily Ware? Check out Daily Ware at DailyWare.co.nz/OurAdvertisers and become a Friend of the Force to receive ad-free versions of our best new episodes throughout the week. Thanks to our sponsors Daily Ware, Caff Monster Energy, Vevolution, and The Motley Fool. Ben Shapiro, Sarah Downey, and Molly Keyser at The Daily Mail. Today's Mailbag is a 15-minute mailbag about CPAC, CPAC and CPAC. Join us on Mailbag! To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurGoodbye. We'll be looking out for new sponsorships! Subscribe To Our New Year's Day Offers! Become a Friend Of The Force? Subscribe & Review Our Sponsored by VaynerMedia? Learn more about our Sponsorships & Support Our New Music is a New York Times Besties! Get Exclusive Discounts & More! Check out our New Music: Join Us On 7/27/29/30/8/9/19/30 Learn More About Our New Month's New Music From Our New Song Outtro Song From Our Sponsors Will We'll Be Recorded Live On The Same-sex Marriage & More Get a Free 7/6th Day Special Promo Code And More Join Our First Listen To Our First Episode Of The Final Episode Of Our First Day Of The Week? Subscribe And Review Our Music Is Here! And We'll See You'll Hear Our First Official Release Soon!

00:00:00.000 So, you've read the headlines today.

00:00:02.000 A brand spanking new study has found that doing away with traditional marriage laws has supposedly reduced suicide rates among gay teenagers by a whopping 14% in states that have embraced same-sex marriage.

00:00:12.000 Here are just some of the glowing headlines.

00:00:19.000 Legalizing same-sex marriage was associated with fewer youth suicide attempts, new study finds.

00:00:23.000 The Guardian.

00:00:24.000 Drop-in teenage suicide attempts linked to legalization of same-sex marriage.

00:00:28.000 USA Today.

00:00:28.000 Study.

00:00:29.000 Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage was legalized. 0.67

00:00:32.000 These headlines, which are just a tiny sampling of the blanket media coverage this study has received,

00:00:37.000 The study printed in JAMA Pediatrics concludes that same-sex marriage policies would be associated with more than 134,000 fewer adolescents attempting suicide every year.

00:00:42.000 There's only one problem.

00:00:43.000 The study really does not prove that.

00:00:57.000 The study shows a basic correlation between loosening same-sex marriage law and suicide rate, but it does not show that same-sex marriage policies reduced adolescent suicide attempts as the study's conclusions state.

00:01:07.000 In fact, the study itself acknowledges, quote, In other words, they say they know same-sex marriage policies impacted suicide attempts, but they have no idea how.

00:01:23.000 Well then.

00:01:24.000 They also failed to rule out some of the most basic confounds for any sociological study like this.

00:01:29.000 Socioeconomic status of the students themselves.

00:01:31.000 Is it possible the students are committing suicide at a lower rate because their parents are making more money, for example?

00:01:37.000 Is it possible that socioeconomic status also has an outsized impact on particular groups?

00:01:42.000 Or, how about the social acceptance of gays and lesbians, without the legislative question?

00:01:46.000 The study admits openly they couldn't check either of those confounds out.

00:01:49.000 They said, quote,

00:01:50.000 We also could not control for unmeasured individual-level characteristics, including socioeconomic status, or for unmeasured state characteristics that may change over time, such as religious affiliation or acceptance of religious minorities and sexual minorities.

00:02:03.000 Also, the study fails to explain why non-LGBT students would see their suicide rates decline in states that approve same-sex marriage.

00:02:09.000 How exactly is that supposed to work?

00:02:11.000 Some straight kid doesn't kill himself because same-sex marriage just got approved?

00:02:14.000 The research data shows variability in suicide rates in states over time as well.

00:02:18.000 Why would the suicide rate drop precipitously between 2005 and 2007 among states that only legalized same-sex marriage in 2013 or 2014?

00:02:26.000 The study doesn't explain.

00:02:27.000 The study also averages out state data rather than showing a serious trend common to all states.

00:02:32.000 That means a serious decline in suicide rate in Hawaii could wash out an increase in suicide rates in Delaware.

00:02:37.000 Look at the charts.

00:02:38.000 They're pretty messy.

00:02:39.000 And there's a reason for that.

00:02:40.000 The study says, quote,

00:02:54.000 Yet, their conclusions are bold.

00:02:55.000 They say, quote,

00:03:14.000 So much for caution.

00:03:15.000 Here's the bottom line.

00:03:16.000 The study shows correlation, not causation.

00:03:18.000 It openly ignores basic data that would be necessary in order to rule out confounding factors.

00:03:22.000 It also averages data in order to draw conclusions that truly are state-specific.

00:03:26.000 The study acknowledges its limitations, then draws extraordinarily strong conclusions.

00:03:30.000 And, of course, the media runs with us.

00:03:32.000 This is how cautious science becomes utterly uncautious conventional wisdom.

00:03:37.000 Maybe same-sex marriage lowers suicide rates.

00:03:39.000 Maybe it doesn't.

00:03:40.000 This study doesn't prove it one way or another, but don't let the media tell you that.

00:03:43.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:03:44.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:03:49.000 Okay, lots to get to today.

00:03:50.000 We're going to talk a little bit about CPAC, or as Kellyanne Conway puts it, TPAC.

00:03:54.000 She says, now Trump Political Action Conference.

00:03:56.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

00:03:57.000 Plus, we have the mailbag today.

00:03:58.000 Woo! 0.99

00:03:59.000 This is why you need to subscribe, so you can be part of the mailbag.

00:04:01.000 We're going to have an extra juicy, long mailbag today.

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00:04:09.000 So check that out and become a subscriber at DailyWare.com.

00:04:11.000 But first, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Lyft.

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00:05:27.000 Okay, so let's begin with what's going on at CPAC, aside from somebody apparently killing themselves and Richard Spencer being thrown out of the proceedings.

00:05:34.000 So CPAC is always kind of a zoo.

00:05:35.000 I've been to CPAC a bunch of times.

00:05:37.000 It's always a lot of fun.

00:05:39.000 This year, it should be particularly fun because it's Trump-ier, right?

00:05:42.000 It's Trump-ier zero.

00:05:44.000 So that means that everybody is very excited, as well they should be.

00:05:46.000 There's a Republican president.

00:05:47.000 There's a Republican House.

00:05:48.000 There's a Republican Senate.

00:05:49.000 There should be a lot of talk about policy.

00:05:51.000 There should be a lot of talk about conservatism.

00:05:53.000 It is called, after all, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

00:05:57.000 Except that Kellyanne Conway just showed up there, like a few minutes ago, and apparently she said, she's making her first public appearance in weeks, she said that, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC.

00:06:06.000 She was asked, how has Trump affected the conservative movement?

00:06:08.000 She said, I think by tomorrow this will be TPAC, meaning the Trump Political Action Conference, and then she added that conservatism was, quote, sclerotic and dusty.

00:06:17.000 Sclerotic and dusty.

00:06:19.000 So, let's start with that.

00:06:22.000 No conservative political action conference should probably be advertising from one of its lead speakers that the founding ideology and founding idea upon which it's based is sclerotic and dusty.

00:06:32.000 The hero worship for Trump is obviously over the top.

00:06:35.000 I've been saying this for a long time.

00:06:36.000 Call him when he's... Praise him when he's right.

00:06:38.000 Celebrate him when he's right.

00:06:39.000 Put on the MAGA hat when he's right.

00:06:40.000 When he's wrong, say that he's wrong.

00:06:42.000 But your philosophy should be what guides you, not your adherence to Trumpism.

00:06:46.000 And I'm getting a lot of flack this morning because I made the same point about Tucker Carlson.

00:06:49.000 So Tucker Carlson over at Fox News

00:06:51.000 Whose show is really very entertaining because he basically has on some idiot from the left every so often and then he hammers them into the ground and it's really entertaining stuff and he does the Tucker Carlson patented bemused face kind of while he's on split screen and he's really good at it and he's a very talented host and he's obviously getting huge ratings. 0.53

00:07:07.000 One of the things that the Tucker Carlson says in this Atlantic interview is that he has no set ideology. 0.82

00:07:13.000 I mean, it's important to note about Tucker that when he started out early on as the Atlantic Reports, on CNN's Crossfire, he was basically a mainline partisan conservative.

00:07:22.000 And then after he left CNN in 2005, he went libertarian, and now he's going full populist.

00:07:27.000 And so Carlson was asked about this.

00:07:28.000 Here's what he said.

00:07:29.000 He said, I'm not much of an economic conservative.

00:07:31.000 I'm not conservative at all on foreign policy.

00:07:34.000 And then he said, so he was asked, well, why did you shift all your positions? 1.00

00:07:36.000 He says, if your politics don't change when circumstances do, you're an idiot, you're a reactionary. 1.00

00:07:41.000 And he says, my views are not super interesting. 1.00

00:07:44.000 I have a feeling that some of Tucker's views I'm sure shifted because the political ground map changed because of Trumpism, because of this nationalist populism.

00:07:53.000 This idea that you're a reactionary if you stick to your principles, but you're not a reactionary if you shift them in reaction to events is definitionally wrong.

00:08:00.000 Reactionary means that you're reacting to events by shifting your principles and your philosophies.

00:08:04.000 Now listen, Tucker can do whatever he wants, but it is dangerous for the movement as a whole to simply shift its philosophy based around whatever Trump wants that day or whatever events happen that day.

00:08:13.000 That's not a philosophy that's worth upholding.

00:08:15.000 That's not a set of values that's worth upholding.

00:08:17.000 And so I think that we ought to be careful, before we fall into the idolatrous trap of turning CPAC into TPAC, of recognizing that Trump is only important insofar as he advances conservative principles.

00:08:29.000 When he breaks from those conservative principles, he shouldn't be celebrating TPAC, right?

00:08:33.000 If TPAC and CPAC are the same thing, then let's just call it CPAC.

00:08:36.000 And if TPAC is something different than CPAC, then maybe that ought to be called out a little bit.

00:08:42.000 So that's a preliminary note on CPAC.

00:08:45.000 It looks like it's gonna be a fantastic event.

00:08:46.000 Looks like a lot of fun stuff is gonna be happening there, despite a lot of the confusion that surrounded it because of everything that happened with Milo.

00:08:53.000 Apparently, Richard Spencer showed up and he was immediately tossed out.

00:08:56.000 That is a good idea.

00:08:58.000 And it's very funny.

00:08:59.000 A lot of people have been talking this morning about the idea that if you don't let certain people speak at your event, this is called no platforming.

00:09:05.000 No, no platforming is when there is a state group

00:09:09.000 That would be no platforming.

00:09:11.000 It's also no platforming if you have a group that is dedicated to free speech, like say a university that says in its mission statement that we're dedicated to free speech and they're banning certain people.

00:09:19.000 That would be no platforming.

00:09:21.000 It's not no platforming for a conservative group to not have Bernie Sanders as the keynote speaker.

00:09:25.000 In fact, it's the opposite of no platforming.

00:09:27.000 Okay, no platforming is- if you think that no platforming means that you have a right to sit in my chair and take over my show, for example, or you have a right to take over CPAC's main stage, or you have a right to take over a historically black university and you're David Duke,

00:09:42.000 Right?

00:09:42.000 You don't have a right to do that.

00:09:43.000 It doesn't mean that once you're invited, you should be tossed out.

00:09:45.000 If somebody invites you, then that is no platforming to disinvite them.

00:09:48.000 But it is really, really, really silly to make the contention that you have a right to someone else's distribution mechanism for your message.

00:09:55.000 That's actually the Fairness Doctrine, right? 0.81

00:09:56.000 That's something the conservatives oppose.

00:09:58.000 The left has been saying for years that talk radio should be hit with the Fairness Doctrine because it's all right-wingers.

00:10:03.000 And the right has been saying, no, these are all private companies.

00:10:05.000 They should be allowed to say and do what they want.

00:10:07.000 You can't hold both ideas in your mind at once because they don't mesh.

00:10:11.000 Okay, so no platforming is a bad thing if you actually define it the way it's supposed to be defined.

00:10:15.000 If you define no platforming as everybody should be allowed to take over any stage that they want at any time, that's just silly. 0.81

00:10:21.000 That's just silly.

00:10:22.000 And it's actually indicative of your opinion on violation of rights. 0.67

00:10:26.000 You're okay with violating rights so long as somebody's saying something that you want them to say.

00:10:29.000 Okay.

00:10:30.000 All of that said, the big issue of the day is actually not happening at CPAC.

00:10:34.000 Around the country, CPAC is not.

00:10:36.000 It doesn't really make a blip around the country.

00:10:38.000 What does make a blip is all these town hall uprisings.

00:10:40.000 So there's a lot of talk about paid protesters supposedly going into town hall meetings and ripping on Republican Congress people, trying to intimidate them into leaving Obamacare in place.

00:10:50.000 Among the people pushing these things is Michael Moore.

00:10:51.000 Here's Michael Moore talking about the wonders of these town hall protests.

00:10:55.000 You can see, just watching the footage there, that nobody's being paid.

00:11:00.000 They are there because they love this country, and they're coming out.

00:11:03.000 And you know what?

00:11:03.000 You're just seeing, really, the first week of these town halls.

00:11:06.000 Well, that's what's crazy to me.

00:11:07.000 I mean, when you look at, you know, we were going back and looking at footage.

00:11:10.000 We're talking about this today.

00:11:11.000 The big town hall thing was August in 2009, because that was the August recess, and that's when those town halls happened, people getting yelled at, and there was a bill that was about to be passed, and the mobilization.

00:11:21.000 This is only a month in.

00:11:22.000 Right, so this is way... No, no, this makes the Tea Party look like preschool.

00:11:26.000 I mean, seriously. 0.98

00:11:28.000 That's silly.

00:11:29.000 I mean, I love the left claiming the Tea Party was bad, but what's happening now is good. 0.53

00:11:33.000 Listen, everybody has the right to protest, but the fact that the media continually downgrade, and I know that there was a reporter from Politico, I think, who was downgrading the Tea Party, claiming that was all fake, but this is all real.

00:11:43.000 No, no.

00:11:44.000 Now, I will say it's a mistake for right-wingers to immediately assume that all of this is fake, that it's all astroturfed.

00:11:49.000 There's this tendency on both sides to do this.

00:11:51.000 That the Tea Party was AstroTurfed by the Koch Brothers, and that all these protests are AstroTurfed by other groups.

00:11:56.000 If there's evidence of that, then show me the evidence of that.

00:11:58.000 Let's not just throw out the idea that it's all AstroTurfed without a lot of evidence of that.

00:12:01.000 I haven't seen tons of evidence of that.

00:12:03.000 I've seen some evidence that some people are AstroTurfed, but the idea that everybody in all of these rooms is AstroTurfed, I don't think that's right.

00:12:09.000 It's difficult to mobilize that many people on the basis of paying them five bucks an hour.

00:12:13.000 Sean Spicer basically said this, though.

00:12:16.000 He came out and he said a lot of this is just manufactured.

00:12:18.000 I think there's a hybrid there.

00:12:20.000 I think some people are clearly upset.

00:12:22.000 But there is a bit of professional protest or manufactured base in there.

00:12:27.000 But obviously there are people that are upset.

00:12:29.000 But I also think that when you look at some of these districts and some of these things, it is not a representation of a member's district or an incident.

00:12:40.000 It is a loud group, small group of people disrupting something, in many cases, for media attention.

00:12:46.000 No offense.

00:12:48.000 It's just, I think that necessarily, just because they're loud, doesn't necessarily mean that there are many.

00:12:53.000 And I think in a lot of cases, that's what you're seeing.

00:12:56.000 And there's truth to some of that.

00:12:58.000 Just because a group is very loud doesn't mean there are a lot of them.

00:13:00.000 The alt-right is very loud, it doesn't mean they're a huge, huge force.

00:13:03.000 But it's a political mistake for spokespeople for presidents to go out there and say that when you can see a protest on TV, it's all fake, it's all astroturfed, it makes it look like a denial of reality.

00:13:13.000 I said that, by the way, way back when, okay?

00:13:14.000 Robert Gibbs was the press secretary under Barack Obama, and here's what he said about town hall protests directed against President Obama's Obamacare.

00:13:22.000 Is it your contention, is it the White House contention, that the anger that some members of Congress are experiencing at town hall meetings, especially over health care reform, is manufactured?

00:13:32.000 I think some of it is, yes.

00:13:35.000 In fact, I think you've had groups today, conservatives for patients' rights, that have bragged about organizing and manufacturing that anger.

00:13:46.000 Okay, so again, it was bad when Gibbs says it, I'm not a big fan.

00:13:49.000 When Spicer says it, just politically speaking, it's not smart.

00:13:52.000 And it's especially not smart because it plays directly into the hands of the protesters.

00:13:54.000 So, for example, here's one woman who comes out at one of these town hall events and she says, look, I'm not a paid protester, I'm here just to talk to you.

00:14:03.000 Thank you, Senator Cotton, for being here today.

00:14:06.000 First of all, I'm Mary Story from Fayetteville, and I'm not a paid protester.

00:14:22.000 Mary, can I address that point that you just made?

00:14:25.000 I don't really care if anybody here is paid or not.

00:14:27.000 You're all Arkansans, and I'm glad to hear from you.

00:14:35.000 I know there's been some talk about that in the media.

00:14:39.000 Some politicians have said that.

00:14:41.000 I just want to say thank you to everyone for coming out tonight, whether you agree with me or disagree with me.

00:14:47.000 This is part of what our country is all about.

00:14:50.000 Okay, so, you know, good response here by Senator Cotton.

00:14:53.000 Much better response than the response you got from Sean Spicer.

00:14:56.000 But it does put people in an awkward position when you say, everybody here is paid, and somebody gets up and says, I'm not paid.

00:15:01.000 So, these town hall events, I want to talk a little bit more about them and what they're doing.

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00:15:52.000 And it really is great.

00:15:53.000 I mean, basically, at night my wife comes home from having, you know, worked on people who are dying, because she's a doctor, and we sit down in front of Seeso and we just

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00:16:40.000 Okay, so...

00:16:41.000 Back to these town hall events.

00:16:42.000 So these town hall events have basically become a way for the left to put sympathetic faces on TV to talk about how terrible it would be if they repeal Obamacare.

00:16:52.000 So here's an example of this.

00:16:55.000 A woman gets up and she's asking Tom Cotton about her husband and I just want to play this because I think that it's indicative of what exactly the media are trying to do and the sort of narratives that come into play here.

00:17:05.000 We're going Medicare my way! 0.75

00:17:10.000 Not your way.

00:17:12.000 My way.

00:17:13.000 I've got a husband dying and we can't afford it.

00:17:16.000 Let me tell you something.

00:17:18.000 If you can get us better coverage than this, go for it.

00:17:23.000 Let me tell you what we have.

00:17:25.000 Plus a lot of benefits that we need.

00:17:28.000 We have $29 per month for my husband.

00:17:36.000 Can you beat that?

00:17:39.000 Can you?

00:17:40.000 With all the congestive heart fares and open heart surgeries and his... We're trying.

00:17:44.000 $29 per month.

00:17:44.000 And he's a hard worker.

00:17:45.000 Now, $39 for me.

00:17:57.000 Okay, so, the reason that I play this is because I think this is what the media are looking for.

00:18:01.000 What they're looking for is exactly this.

00:18:03.000 They're looking for a woman to get up there and say, my husband's dying, keep Obamacare. 1.00

00:18:06.000 And, obviously, your heart goes out to the woman whose husband has a serious health problem.

00:18:11.000 Obviously.

00:18:12.000 Obviously.

00:18:12.000 But to pretend that she has extra moral authority because she's experiencing tragedy, it's just not true.

00:18:18.000 And it's something the left likes to play, but only selectively.

00:18:20.000 So, after 9-11, they said that the widows of 9-11, the Jersey Girls, as they called them, they said that they had

00:18:27.000 Impeccable moral authority, because they had spouses who died on 9-11, therefore they should be making policy for the whole country.

00:18:32.000 And you heard this from Maureen Dowd, when, I think it was Code Pink, when Cindy Sheehan, who had a son who died in Iraq, when she started talking, Maureen Dowd immediately said that she had absolute moral authority, not just moral authority, God-like moral authority to determine what policy should be and what policy would be.

00:18:49.000 But when it comes to Pat Smith, I mean, Michelle Malkin makes this point, and she's right.

00:18:52.000 When it comes to Pat Smith, the mother of Sean Smith, who was killed in Benghazi, she comes out and says, my son was killed in Benghazi, and that's a problem, and the entire media ignores her.

00:19:00.000 Where'd the moral authority go?

00:19:01.000 It's just gone.

00:19:01.000 Zoop!

00:19:02.000 Out.

00:19:02.000 Right?

00:19:03.000 No more moral authority.

00:19:03.000 It's been debunked.

00:19:05.000 And the reason for that is because the left likes to use tragedy as a club with which to beat its enemies, but it will not allow there to be a common rule about tragedy.

00:19:13.000 You know why?

00:19:14.000 Because tragedy can't be a common rule.

00:19:15.000 Because the vast majority of people in life have experienced some form of tragedy or another.

00:19:20.000 And it doesn't make them experts on the topic.

00:19:22.000 It doesn't mean that they should actually create the policy.

00:19:26.000 In fact, there's a good case to be made that if you've experienced tragedy on a particular score, you should be the person who's least likely to make the policy.

00:19:33.000 The logic being that if you're a doctor and your son comes into the waiting room with a cancerous tumor, you shouldn't be the one to operate on him.

00:19:40.000 You're too close to the situation.

00:19:42.000 Your empathy is skewing how you're actually going to treat the situation.

00:19:46.000 It's why we all take doctor's advice rather than researching it on our own and then just determining that we're going to do X, Y, or Z. Like, we do our own research, but then we combine that empathy with actual expertise and expert advice.

00:19:57.000 There's a guy named Professor Paul Bloom at Yale University.

00:19:59.000 He's written an entire book on the fact that empathy makes for bad policy.

00:20:02.000 He says, emotional empathy is a different matter when it comes to guiding our moral judgments and political decisions.

00:20:08.000 Recent research in neuroscience and psychology shows that empathy makes us biased, tribal, and often cruel.

00:20:14.000 Why?

00:20:15.000 Because if you have empathy for this lady right here, maybe you're being cruel to the millions of people who are forced to buy health insurance that they can't afford, or forced off of health insurance that they could afford.

00:20:24.000 And this is what Bernie Sanders said the other day.

00:20:26.000 He says, you know, what good is it to have the right to buy health care if you can't afford it?

00:20:30.000 And the answer is, number one, it is the market system that makes health care affordable.

00:20:33.000 But number two, it's a lot worse to me to have a system where you can afford health care and you're not allowed to get it because of Bernie Sanders.

00:20:40.000 That seems worse to me.

00:20:42.000 What Professor Bloom says is, empathy is activated when you think about a specific individual, the so-called identifiable victim effect, but it fails to take broader considerations into account.

00:20:50.000 Which is why people will give tons of money when they see a wounded baby sealed during a hurricane, but they won't give any money to hundreds of thousands of people being slaughtered in Syria, because one is an identifiable victim, and the other is not an identifiable victim.

00:21:03.000 The point being here that when you form policy for millions of people, for millions of people, then it is imperative that you put your empathy to the side so that you can make a good policy.

00:21:12.000 Doesn't mean you shouldn't be empathetic.

00:21:14.000 Doesn't mean you shouldn't feel for this lady.

00:21:15.000 But this idea that the left keeps trotting out victims, and then we're supposed to make policy based on the fact that certain policies have certain effect, but the statistical impact is either small or is balanced out by other factors,

00:21:28.000 That's really a bad way to make policy, but this is what the left is trotting out.

00:21:32.000 In clip 16, we get this from another woman. 0.99

00:21:34.000 She does the same sort of thing. 0.91

00:21:35.000 My family has been in the Ozarks since the 1800s.

00:21:39.000 We are historically a Republican family.

00:21:41.000 We're a farming family.

00:21:42.000 We're an NRA family.

00:21:44.000 We're an Army family.

00:21:45.000 Aside from inheriting their patriotism and their work ethic, I unfortunately inherited an incurable genetic connective tissue disorder.

00:21:55.000 I qualify for Medicare, but unfortunately it's useless for me, since only two of my doctors, who are the only doctors in over a 500-mile radius who are familiar with my condition, accept Medicare.

00:22:07.000 Without the coverage for pre-existing conditions, I will die.

00:22:12.000 Will you commit to replacements in the same way that you have committed to the repeal?

00:22:23.000 And she gets a standing ovation for the question.

00:22:26.000 Not even for the answer, right?

00:22:27.000 Just for the question.

00:22:28.000 And again, the idea is that her suffering confers a certain level of value to her opinion.

00:22:33.000 Again, you have to feel awful for this person.

00:22:35.000 You have to feel terrible for this person.

00:22:38.000 And I promise you that if she started a charity fund, people would raise tons of money for her because, again, that identifiable victim effect means that our empathy for her means that we would help her out.

00:22:47.000 But shifting, crafting a broad public policy around one person and their suffering and their tragedy is just not, it's just not good public policy.

00:22:54.000 It just isn't.

00:22:55.000 It just isn't.

00:22:56.000 So it's also worthwhile noting, by the way, that all these Republicans have already said that they want pre-existing conditions to be covered, which is something with which I disagree, because that doesn't actually look like insurance anymore.

00:23:08.000 But, you know, that's because I'm talking about broad public policy, not about having to win re-election when you've got these sort of sympathetic stories being trotted out on a routine basis.

00:23:16.000 Okay, before we go to break here,

00:23:18.000 I've said before that everybody needs to subscribe to dailywire.com.

00:23:22.000 $8 a month, you can subscribe, you can be part of the mailbag today.

00:23:25.000 And that's going to be a really solid mailbag, so we're going to get into that in just a little while.

00:23:29.000 If you subscribe right now, you can be part of this week's mailbag.

00:23:31.000 We do take live questions on the mailbag, so we'll do all of that.

00:23:33.000 But, right now, if you subscribe annually, you also get a free copy of the DVD of the Arroyo.

00:23:40.000 And I've been talking about this fictional film that takes place on the border, and I wanted to show you some of the trailer, so you know what you're getting when you subscribe.

00:23:47.000 You ever been to Mexico?

00:23:49.000 Looks just like this.

00:23:51.000 Same land, same sky.

00:23:56.000 Everybody wants to be here.

00:23:59.000 You ever wonder about that?

00:24:02.000 Over 1,500 in the last six weeks.

00:24:07.000 That's just on my land.

00:24:08.000 That's just the ones I've counted.

00:24:11.000 We ain't got no problems at all to hear the politician tell it.

00:24:14.000 I get it.

00:24:15.000 Times are hard in our community.

00:24:17.000 We all want a magical cure to our problems.

00:24:20.000 Found another dead kid on my land.

00:24:24.000 Third one this year.

00:24:25.000 Coyotes do pretty much as they please.

00:24:27.000 Did you hear about that mess up in Phoenix?

00:24:32.000 A whole family slaughtered by the cartels.

00:24:35.000 What am I supposed to do, Ed?

00:24:36.000 It's not my job to enforce federal law.

00:24:40.000 Then whose job is it?

00:24:42.000 Hell, ain't nobody gonna help us down here.

00:24:44.000 Not Uncle Sam, nobody.

00:24:46.000 We ain't nothing but a nuisance to them.

00:24:47.000 Except when it comes time to write the check.

00:24:51.000 Maybe it's time we helped ourselves. 1.00

00:25:09.000 If you hurt my family... You should have told that boy to shoot me on sight. 0.99

00:25:13.000 Hello! 1.00

00:25:18.000 Hello!

00:25:20.000 Don't! 0.57

00:25:21.000 I was trying to avoid the O.K.

00:25:26.000 crime.

00:25:36.000 So as you can see, it's really good.

00:25:38.000 We're going to be live streaming it on Facebook, the entire movie, so you can get a taste of it on Friday.

00:25:43.000 So check that out.

00:25:43.000 And right now, if you get that annual subscription, you get a free copy of The Arroyo.

00:25:47.000 Okay, so that ends our Facebook and YouTube today.

00:25:51.000 But go over to dailywire.com and subscribe or listen later at iTunes.

00:25:54.000 We are the largest conservative podcast in the nation.

The Ben Shapiro Show - February 24, 2017

Ep. 259 - Do You Get Extra Credit For Experiencing Tragedy?

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