The Ben Shapiro Show - Ep. 31 - How to Talk To Your Leftist Relatives on Thanksgiving

00:00:00.000 Here we are.

00:00:00.000 It's the day before Thanksgiving.

00:00:01.000 I want to give all of you a little bit of Thanksgiving Day advice.

00:00:04.000 We'll get to that.

00:00:05.000 We'll also get to the latest in the Middle East, plus a brand new segment that I'm ripping off from Andrew Klavan.

00:00:12.000 I'll tell you what that is.

00:00:13.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:13.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:20.000 Okay, so tomorrow is Thanksgiving.

00:00:23.000 And on Thanksgiving, it's the day that we all get together with relatives that we despise because we have blood relations with them.

00:00:29.000 And they come over and they annoy us.

00:00:31.000 And typically, the people who come over for Thanksgiving who are annoying, it's never right-wingers.

00:00:36.000 Because right-wingers are perfectly happy.

00:00:38.000 To talk about movies and music and sports and religion.

00:00:43.000 They're perfectly happy to talk about the things that we sort of culturally share.

00:00:46.000 It's always the leftist in the room who needs to feel some sense of moral superiority who brings up politics.

00:00:52.000 I've never yet been in a family situation with members of my extended family who are on the left where I'm the one who brings up politics.

00:00:59.000 I never do it.

00:01:00.000 I happen to be in a career field in which everybody thinks that they're an expert, so most people want to talk politics with me when I'm out in public.

00:01:07.000 It's like being a musician where everybody thinks they're a musician and so they want to talk music with you or you're an actor, you're in Hollywood.

00:01:13.000 Everybody has written a script that they buried in their sock drawer and then went to wait tables over a coffee bean.

00:01:18.000 And there's certain professions where everybody wants to talk to you.

00:01:21.000 Like if you're an engineer, you never have to deal with this.

00:01:24.000 It has never happened to you where you've walked into a dinner party and somebody was like buttonholing you about engineering.

00:01:29.000 It just has never happened and it never will happen.

00:01:31.000 But if you're in politics, it happens a lot.

00:01:33.000 And if you're right-wing and you're political at all, it will happen at your family dinner.

00:01:36.000 So, a couple of pieces of advice for your Thanksgiving tomorrow.

00:01:41.000 First piece of advice.

00:01:42.000 Here's how to deal with the leftist who comes over to your house and wants to talk politics on Thanksgiving.

00:01:48.000 Don't invite them.

00:01:49.000 Like, seriously, I know everybody acts like you have to invite—why?

00:01:53.000 Why?

00:01:54.000 It's an accident of birth, it's an accident of genetics, just because that person happens to be your nephew. 0.97

00:01:59.000 The kid's a little schmuck, I mean, you don't want him there, so just tell him you don't want him there, and tell his parents that if he's gonna come, 0.98

00:02:05.000 You just keep it on the down low about his politics. 0.99

00:02:07.000 You're happy to talk about anything else.

00:02:08.000 We'll talk football. 0.99

00:02:09.000 But if he's going to be a jerk, then don't invite them. 1.00

00:02:12.000 And you'll have a much better time. 0.99

00:02:13.000 Because it turns out that you're supposed to be with people you're thankful for, not people who you wish would suddenly be dropped into the middle of Syria.

00:02:20.000 You really don't want to clutter your life with folks that you don't like.

00:02:25.000 One of the most liberating phrases in all of the English language is this three-word phrase.

00:02:30.000 I don't care.

00:02:32.000 And it's true. 0.56

00:02:33.000 I mean, there are just too many people in life you shouldn't care about.

00:02:35.000 This is one of the things that I taught.

00:02:37.000 I'm proud I taught my wife a few things.

00:02:39.000 My wife has taught me many things.

00:02:40.000 But one of the things that I taught my wife, and I think women tend to fall into this trap more than men, which is you have to be nice to everybody.

00:02:47.000 No, you don't.

00:02:48.000 You have to be polite to everybody, but you don't have to be nice to everybody.

00:02:51.000 Because the truth is, nice means I'm going to go out of my way for you. 1.00

00:02:54.000 Nice means that I'm going to invite you into my home so that you can be a jerk to me. 0.99

00:02:59.000 No, actually, that's not real. 0.99

00:03:01.000 I remember that after my wife and I got engaged, she had a friend who lived in the same co-op living facility in which she lived, and they'd become sort of friendly because this girl was really needy and she had no friends.

00:03:13.000 And so my wife, being a nice person, decided that she'd be friends with this person.

00:03:17.000 And this person was really needy and really obnoxious.

00:03:20.000 And right after we got engaged, my wife sent a mass text to all her friends, you know, I'm engaged.

00:03:25.000 And this girl wrote back, how dare you? 1.00

00:03:28.000 And what she meant by how dare you was, why are you telling everybody at once, why didn't you tell me specifically?

00:03:32.000 And my wife was really upset about it, and my fiancé was really upset about it, and I said to her, you should just write back, I'm done with you.

00:03:38.000 Right?

00:03:38.000 Like, enough!

00:03:39.000 There's no time for you.

00:03:41.000 My life is too full.

00:03:42.000 There's only a certain number of breaths you get to take on this planet, and wasting breath on people you don't like is just a complete waste of time.

00:03:48.000 If she did that, it's made her life that much better.

00:03:50.000 And the truth is that when you have kids, this is particularly true.

00:03:54.000 General rule once you have kids.

00:03:55.000 Anybody whose means your children should not be part of your life. 1.00

00:03:58.000 Anyone.

00:03:59.000 Okay, I'm talking friends, I'm talking family.

00:04:01.000 Once they cross your kids once, done.

00:04:04.000 Done.

00:04:04.000 If they don't treat your kids well, you don't need those people in your life.

00:04:07.000 If they try to manipulate your kids, you don't need them in your life.

00:04:09.000 Then the same is true of politics.

00:04:10.000 If they insist on coming over to your house and waxing philosophic over the writings of Howard Zinn, just don't do it.

00:04:16.000 Thanksgiving is a nice day.

00:04:17.000 It's a day you should be enjoying. 1.00

00:04:18.000 It's not time you should have to spend rebutting all the stupid, idiotic talking points they got from Vox.com or in a Barack Obama email. 0.99

00:04:25.000 The number one question I always get from people, because I'm good in debate, is, how do you debate folks on the left? 0.99

00:04:30.000 And the first answer I always give is, why are you debating them in the first place?

00:04:34.000 You need to figure out why you're involved in the conversation in the first place.

00:04:37.000 If you can't answer that, you shouldn't be having the conversation.

00:04:39.000 That's true on Facebook, that's true on Twitter, and it's true in your daily life. 0.95

00:04:43.000 Now, if you can't avoid it, if it's your mom, right, and you have to invite your mom over because otherwise she's going to be lonely in the old age home or something, and you've got to invite her over and she just starts being a jerk, and then what you should do, obviously, is try and swivel the conversation elsewhere. 0.95

00:04:59.000 And if it really does come down to a basic conversation about policy, you can have a basic conversation about policy, but the minute anybody says racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, accuses you of Islamophobia, the conversation is over, and you should either swivel the topic, or they should get out. 0.96

00:05:14.000 Or, preferably, again, my favorite solution, don't come over at all.

00:05:18.000 You're not needed.

00:05:18.000 No one asked you here.

00:05:21.000 Eat your tofurkey in your mom's basement while watching pornography online and crying to yourself about your lack of turkey. 0.95

00:05:28.000 Right?

00:05:28.000 I mean, that can be their Thanksgiving.

00:05:30.000 It doesn't have to be yours.

00:05:31.000 So those are my brief Thanksgiving Day tips, and that's particularly true on a day when the left really hates Thanksgiving.

00:05:37.000 I mean, every year we have this routine about how the settlers, the pilgrims, were really terrible people, and they came over and they exploited the Native Americans. 0.79

00:05:45.000 This is the same routine we now have

00:05:46.000 On Columbus Day, right, Columbus Day is about European colonialism coming to the Western Hemisphere.

00:05:52.000 Let me tell you something, folks.

00:05:53.000 All the people who are sitting around bitching about Western society and Western civilization coming to America, they can go live in a place where there is no Western civilization.

00:06:04.000 There are time machines.

00:06:05.000 There are time machines.

00:06:06.000 They're called airplanes.

00:06:07.000 All you have to do is fly to primitive parts of the planet and live there. 0.99

00:06:10.000 And it turns out they suck.

00:06:11.000 There's a reason you want to live here with your iPhone and with your computer and with your electricity and with your running water and with your toilet, right? 0.99

00:06:17.000 There's a reason that your lifespan is approximately 80 years here in the West, where in some parts of the world it's like 35 years.

00:06:24.000 And it turns out you wouldn't want to go back to living in a time where the indigenous peoples of America were your rulers. 1.00

00:06:30.000 If you could have chosen to live now, after several hundred years of development in the West, including colonialism and colonization,

00:06:39.000 Or you could live back in primitive, more innocent times. 0.96

00:06:42.000 You'd be a fool to live back in primitive, more innocent times, because innocent times usually involved cannibalism, and not knowing how to write, and not having any sort of sanitation of any type, and not knowing how a wheel was used. 0.97

00:06:56.000 I mean, it actually is true. 0.98

00:06:57.000 Steven Crowder has a very funny video today about this.

00:06:59.000 It's true, when the pilgrims got here.

00:07:02.000 Not only was there no written language.

00:07:03.000 There wasn't.

00:07:04.000 There was no written language for Native Americans up until the 19th century.

00:07:08.000 And that was because one of the Native Americans worked with Westerners to develop the written language.

00:07:13.000 Sequoia is his name.

00:07:14.000 That's why, you know, the sequoia trees are named after sequoia.

00:07:16.000 Sequoia is the one who invented written language for many Native American dialects.

00:07:21.000 Okay, in the year 1800 AD, right?

00:07:24.000 And there's been human writing for a lot longer than that, right?

00:07:27.000 I mean, the Bible was written a thousand BC.

00:07:29.000 So this is a...

00:07:31.000 We're now 1818.

00:07:32.000 There's still no writing over here.

00:07:34.000 They also didn't have the wheel.

00:07:35.000 There was no wheel, okay?

00:07:36.000 In 1400, in 1600, there was no wheel.

00:07:39.000 The Native Americans did not know how to use a wheel or what a wheel was for, which is hard on the back, let's be frank.

00:07:45.000 So, you know, Thanksgiving is a great day.

00:07:47.000 It's a great thing.

00:07:48.000 The untold part of Thanksgiving that people generally don't know, it's becoming a little more well-known because Rush Limbaugh's talked about it.

00:07:54.000 But the part of Thanksgiving that people don't know is, of course, that Thanksgiving is an anti-communist holiday, too, because people act like when the settlers got here, they didn't know how to farm, as though no one in England had ever farmed before, right?

00:08:07.000 Like, the Dutch and the British, none of them knew how to farm, right? 1.00

00:08:11.000 They just, they sat around and the food just descended from them in parcels, like on Lost.

00:08:15.000 No, it turns out that they knew how to farm, it's just when they came to the United States, and then America, when they came to the New World,

00:08:22.000 They decided that they weren't going to farm in the traditional manner where everybody had their own little field.

00:08:26.000 Instead, they were going to have a commune, right?

00:08:28.000 Everybody was going to share the work in common.

00:08:30.000 Everybody was going to share the product in common.

00:08:32.000 And just like every other communist system ever, this thing fell apart within two years, right?

00:08:37.000 People just started being lazy, and they wouldn't work, and they wouldn't do their job.

00:08:40.000 That's why they were starving.

00:08:41.000 And a huge percentage of them started.

00:08:42.000 There wasn't any food.

00:08:43.000 And so the Native Americans came around, and they said, okay, well, we'll give you some seed corn. 0.51

00:08:47.000 And it's not that they taught them how to farm.

00:08:48.000 They just said, here's some food. 1.00

00:08:50.000 Also, you guys are idiots. 1.00

00:08:52.000 And the pilgrims said, oh, you know what? 1.00

00:08:54.000 This is kind of dumb. 0.93

00:08:55.000 They got rid of the communist system, and they went back to private ownership of property. 0.98

00:08:59.000 And because they did that, there was not a need for another charitable Thanksgiving.

00:09:03.000 At that point, they actually were able to grow their own food and survive, and that's why it became a successful

00:09:07.000 Settlement.

00:09:08.000 So there's your there's a little bit of Thanksgiving background for you.

00:09:10.000 Okay, on to the politics of the day.

00:09:13.000 So President Obama met with Francois Hollande yesterday, the president of France, and President Obama talked a little bit about what was going on in the world.

00:09:21.000 He said, in what has now become one of the most overused lines in American politics, we are all French now.

00:09:27.000 Here's President Obama talking with Francois Hollande.

00:09:32.000 Nous sommes tous français.

00:09:34.000 It was a show of solidarity, as President Obama declared, we are all French, embraced French President Francois Hollande, and then vowed to crush ISIS.

00:09:43.000 It cannot be tolerated, it must be destroyed, and we must do it together.

00:09:48.000 Okay, he said that we're all French now.

00:09:50.000 He also said that we're all French now comes from, you know, originally we're talking, it comes from JFK going to Berlin in the middle of the blockade of Berlin during his presidency and saying, Ich bin ein Berliner, right?

00:10:03.000 I am also a Berliner, which...

00:10:05.000 Oddly, also means he's a sausage. 0.78

00:10:07.000 That was one of the jokes at the time, is that a Berliner was a sausage, but people understood what he meant. 0.77

00:10:11.000 So now everybody does this thing where we're all French.

00:10:13.000 And Obama also said in this press conference something really bizarre.

00:10:17.000 He also said that France, they're doing a wonderful job of getting over the terrorist attacks, because they're showing the world that they're not afraid.

00:10:23.000 They're going out in places, and they're shopping again, and they're having mass gatherings.

00:10:29.000 And I thought to myself, this is such a bizarre notion.

00:10:31.000 How the left thinks you actually defeat terror is so weird.

00:10:35.000 Like, Bush did the same thing, by the way.

00:10:36.000 He always used to say, we can't let the terrorists win.

00:10:38.000 Go shopping.

00:10:39.000 And I thought to myself, wait a second.

00:10:41.000 Like, if we don't go shopping, the terrorists think that they won?

00:10:43.000 Like, do the terrorists really care if I don't go out on Black Friday?

00:10:47.000 If I don't go to a ball game?

00:10:48.000 Do the terrorists go, ha ha ha ha ha!

00:10:50.000 These men, they have not gone to the Dutcher game!

00:10:53.000 No, the terrorists don't. 1.00

00:10:54.000 They want me to convert to Islam or die. 0.99

00:10:55.000 That's their basic goal.

00:10:56.000 If I don't do one of these two things, they have not achieved their goal.

00:11:00.000 Right, so me not going to a Dodger game is not actually that high on their list of priorities.

00:11:04.000 And we've heard this from Bush, we heard from Obama now.

00:11:07.000 Go out, gather in public places.

00:11:09.000 First of all, at the same time that Obama is praising the French for going out and gathering in public places, his State Department yesterday issued a worldwide travel advisory telling Americans not to go gather in public places, in places like France.

00:11:21.000 So there's that, which is weird.

00:11:22.000 But beyond that, it's so funny, they'll say things like, if we compromise our open values, then we will lose.

00:11:28.000 Okay, during World War II, we actually rationed things.

00:11:31.000 There were actual rations.

00:11:33.000 You weren't allowed to buy things.

00:11:34.000 During World War II, you were rationed on your fabric, you were rationed on your coffee, you were rationed on your chocolate, right?

00:11:40.000 We actually interned people of Japanese descent.

00:11:43.000 Did that mean that the Japanese ended up winning?

00:11:45.000 No, the Japanese got crushed, right? 0.87

00:11:46.000 And so did the Germans. 0.98

00:11:48.000 So the idea that winning the war is living your life as normal is just, it's a weird idea and it's a very, it's just moral preening is really what it is. 0.97

00:11:56.000 President Obama went on to say, and this was the most, every day President Obama says the stupidest thing that has ever been said. 0.99

00:12:03.000 Like every new day brings a new stupid thing that is stupider than anything that has come before. 1.00

00:12:08.000 There is an episode of Family Ties in which Michael J. Fox playing Alex P. Keaton, he says, you know, every day I wake up and I think, how could I possibly get any smarter? 1.00

00:12:16.000 And then I wake up the next morning and I think, how could I have possibly been so stupid? 1.00

00:12:19.000 Well, President Obama is basically the same way, except everything that he says is dumber than it was the day before. 1.00

00:12:24.000 He said the stupidest thing I have ever heard, I think, a human being say, which is saying I've heard a lot of stupid crap. 1.00

00:12:29.000 Here is President Obama saying what would be a rebuke to ISIS terrorists. 1.00

00:12:35.000 And next week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference.

00:12:46.000 What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.

00:12:59.000 What are we talking about?

00:13:05.000 What? 1.00

00:13:06.000 Sorry, there are no words for this stupidity. 1.00

00:13:16.000 What a rebuke that will be. 1.00

00:13:18.000 ISIS will really quake in its boots then. 1.00

00:13:20.000 I mean, they'll look at us and they'll say, wow, those guys, they're talking about crippling their own economies in order to spend the next hundred years lowering the global climate by one degree Celsius.

00:13:29.000 Wow!

00:13:30.000 I can't believe we thought we could take these guys on.

00:13:33.000 That's the idea?

00:13:34.000 That's the terrible rebuke to ISIS?

00:13:36.000 A powerful rebuke to the... I can think of a better powerful rebuke.

00:13:39.000 The powerful rebuke would be all these guys in a room saying, okay, we're gonna bomb the smithereens out of them.

00:13:43.000 You know what a powerful rebuke would be? 1.00

00:13:44.000 A hellfire missile hitting them between the eyes. 0.93

00:13:46.000 That's a powerful rebuke.

00:13:47.000 I'm pretty sure a powerful rebuke is not... Guys, we really need to sign this Kyoto Protocol routine, you know?

00:13:52.000 Like, what we really need to do is make sure that everybody on Earth doesn't use their air conditioning too much.

00:13:58.000 Because let's be real, let's be real.

00:14:00.000 That is going to cause more hurricanes.

00:14:07.000 Honestly, God, it's as though the President of the United States is a child, and he thinks that he, along with all of his friends, are going to get together and play Barbies, and this is a rebuke to the terrorists.

00:14:15.000 They're going to get the Barbie dollhouse, and they're going to bring out Barbie and Skipper with their little car, and they're going to drive it around.

00:14:21.000 They're going to go, see, we showed you.

00:14:24.000 You showed them what?

00:14:25.000 You showed them what?

00:14:25.000 That you can get together in a room and talk?

00:14:27.000 They knew that already.

00:14:28.000 And by the way, you talking about climate change, they don't care.

00:14:31.000 You think that they care about you talking about climate change?

00:14:33.000 You have got to be kidding me.

00:14:35.000 But Obama is just, he is now in total disconnect from reality.

00:14:38.000 I mean, we have now reached the point of complete and total disconnect from reality.

00:14:42.000 And the disconnect continued.

00:14:43.000 President Obama says, you know what would really mean that we lost is if we don't uphold our ideals.

00:14:48.000 What are those ideals? 1.00

00:14:49.000 We'll let the feckless, idiotic president of the United States explain. 1.00

00:14:54.000 There have been times in our history, in moments of fear, 0.99

00:14:59.000 When we have failed to uphold our highest ideals, and it has been to our lasting regret, we must uphold our ideals now.

00:15:13.000 Each of us, all of us, must show that America is strengthened by people of every faith and every background.

00:15:21.000 Again, so we weaken our ideals unless we are strengthened by people of every faith and every background.

00:15:27.000 Every background?

00:15:28.000 How about ISIS?

00:15:28.000 Let's start with an easy one.

00:15:30.000 How about ISIS?

00:15:30.000 Are we strengthened by more people with ISIS?

00:15:33.000 Every faith?

00:15:34.000 Every background?

00:15:35.000 Are we strengthened by more people with ISIS?

00:15:36.000 Very simple question.

00:15:38.000 At what point does this nonsense finally stop?

00:15:41.000 Because if you truly believe that America is strengthened by people of every philosophy and every ideology, that means America is meaningless.

00:15:48.000 It means America is totally meaningless and there's nothing worth preserving.

00:15:51.000 We may as well just welcome ISIS in. 1.00

00:15:53.000 I mean, that's what they want anyway.

00:15:54.000 Why don't we just let them all in? 0.98

00:15:56.000 Well, just forget Syrian Muslim refugees. 1.00

00:15:57.000 We'll just give tickets to the United States, to ISIS, because after all, we are all strengthened by our common diversity.

00:16:04.000 We're strengthened by the fact that we don't have a common ideology.

00:16:07.000 The only thing that holds us together is that we have nothing in common.

00:16:09.000 Just utter tripe and nonsense from President Obama, but all of this is cover for actual cowardice, because the truth is...

00:16:16.000 As I mentioned yesterday, there really is only one country on planet Earth, there really is, that has an interest in wiping out ISIS, and that's the United States.

00:16:23.000 We have the power and the interest to wipe out ISIS.

00:16:25.000 All of the regional, all of the various regional countries have no interest in wiping out ISIS.

00:16:30.000 Turkey doesn't want to wipe out ISIS because ISIS is Sunni. 0.97

00:16:33.000 If they wipe out ISIS, then presumably the Shia will take over that area because Assad is waiting. 0.99

00:16:39.000 Bashar Assad has no interest in wiping out ISIS because he's using ISIS

00:16:42.000 As a cover to destroy the Free Syrian Army who are his real enemies.

00:16:45.000 Iran has no interest in wiping out ISIS because they get to play good guys playing ISIS. 0.90

00:16:50.000 Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all Sunni.

00:16:52.000 They're afraid that if they wipe out ISIS that presumably the Shia will take over. 0.85

00:16:57.000 Plus they have ISIS presence in their own countries.

00:16:59.000 The Russians have no interest in wiping out ISIS. 0.97

00:17:01.000 Again, they're using ISIS as cover to bomb the Free Syrian Army on behalf of Bashar Assad.

00:17:06.000 And they're using it as cover in order to provoke a conflagration with Turkey, which is what you saw yesterday.

00:17:11.000 This conflagration with Turkey, which as I mentioned yesterday, is designed by the Russians in order to peel Turkey off from NATO. 0.88

00:17:17.000 Putin has for a very long time, the dictator of Russia, for a long time he's wanted to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which was constructed in the aftermath of World War II in order to fight the Soviet Union,

00:17:29.000 He wants to take that apart.

00:17:30.000 He figures the easiest way to take that apart is to attack one of the country members of NATO and then have the rest of NATO go, oh, well, we can't do anything about that.

00:17:39.000 And then he's now set the predicate, which is NATO is not always going to respond to aggression against one of its member states.

00:17:45.000 So nobody has an interest in doing anything about ISIS except us.

00:17:48.000 And Obama won't do it, because he thinks that the polls don't support the idea of a long-term occupation.

00:17:53.000 This is why what's always so interesting to me is when we hear that President Obama is a brave and decent leader.

00:17:59.000 We hear that he really is willing to stand up in the face of what?

00:18:03.000 True leadership here would be, like, I'll tell you who was actually a leader, at least when it came to this.

00:18:08.000 George W. Bush did a very unpopular surge in Iraq.

00:18:11.000 It was unpopular at the time that it happened.

00:18:13.000 He knew it had to happen, so he did it.

00:18:15.000 It pacified Iraq and led to what would have been victory if Obama hadn't purposefully lost that war.

00:18:20.000 That's actual leadership and courage.

00:18:22.000 Obama has none of that.

00:18:24.000 Instead, he's going to sit aside and he's just going to moan.

00:18:27.000 So President Obama talked about what the Russians are doing.

00:18:30.000 And it's as though, I mean, I've said before, President Obama is basically a commenter at Salon.com or Huffington Post.

00:18:36.000 He's not even a columnist.

00:18:37.000 He's not of that quality.

00:18:38.000 He's just a commenter who sits in the comment sections.

00:18:41.000 Turkey, like every country, has a right to defend its territory and its airspace.

00:18:44.000 I think it's very important right now for us to make sure that

00:19:07.000 Both the Russians and the Turks are talking to each other, find out exactly what happened, and take measures to discourage any kind of escalation.

00:19:17.000 Okay, so he says they have to discourage all the escalation.

00:19:20.000 Well, what the President neglects to mention there is the fact that Russia was bombing there in the first place is a direct affront to the United States, because the fact is the only reason they were bombing up near the Turkish border, there's no ISIS by the Turkish border.

00:19:32.000 The only people by the Turkish border are the Free Syrian Army, the people we armed.

00:19:36.000 Right, the other day when the Russian helicopter got shut down, it was shot down with U.S.

00:19:39.000 weapons.

00:19:40.000 It was a U.S. 0.94

00:19:41.000 weapon that hit a Russian helicopter.

00:19:42.000 And he's sitting there pretending that this has nothing to do with us, that we were completely unrelated to any of this.

00:19:47.000 It is kind of amazing.

00:19:48.000 The Republicans on the other side, they're doing a slightly better job of responding to this.

00:19:52.000 Marco Rubio, senator from Florida, he says that the U.S.

00:19:55.000 should respond to this assault on Turkey, and we should defend Turkey because otherwise NATO is done.

00:19:59.000 He's basically right.

00:20:00.000 Here's Marco Rubio.

00:20:02.000 It's important for us to be very clear that we will respond and defend Turkey if they come under assault from the Russians.

00:20:08.000 Otherwise, the entire NATO alliance comes into question.

00:20:11.000 And that is exactly right. 0.93

00:20:12.000 I mean, the problem, of course, is that now, President Obama, thanks to his ridiculous, terrible leadership, Turkey, which once used to be an allied member of NATO, Turkey's now a radical Islamist country. 0.94

00:20:22.000 President Erdogan over there is an actual Islamist. 0.99

00:20:25.000 He funnels money to terrorists. 0.98

00:20:27.000 He backs terrorists in the Gaza Strip.

00:20:29.000 He's been

00:20:30.000 Okay, so I want to move now to a little bit of domestic politics.

00:20:32.000 I saw a good idea today.

00:20:52.000 But it demonstrates the racial gap in the country.

00:20:55.000 There's a good idea, and it was proposed by a group of black U.S.

00:20:58.000 lawmakers and other prominent figures on Tuesday.

00:21:01.000 They called on the Feds to declare a national holiday to mark what they called Abolition Day, which is the official end to the nation's use of slavery.

00:21:09.000 It would happen on December 6th.

00:21:10.000 That's the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 13th Amendment banning slavery and involuntary servitude.

00:21:17.000 And Judge James Wynn, who's a member of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, he said, I totally agree with this idea.

00:21:22.000 I mean, the idea of having a day celebrating the end of slavery in the United States I think would be a wonderful thing.

00:21:34.000 I really do.

00:21:35.000 Now, the problem comes in when you realize what the actual drive of the organizers for this is.

00:21:41.000 The organizers say that it's in response to racial injustices and conflicts still facing the country.

00:21:48.000 Right?

00:21:48.000 So they don't want Abolition Day to just be a celebration of the fact that Western civilization, unlike every other civilization on planet Earth, actually ended slavery itself.

00:21:56.000 We didn't impose an end to slavery on anyone else.

00:21:59.000 We did it ourselves.

00:22:00.000 Western civilization rooted out slavery at the time.

00:22:04.000 Again, slavery was not illegal in Saudi Arabia until 1962.

00:22:08.000 In living memory, there was still slavery in Saudi Arabia, and there still is slavery in many Islamic countries.

00:22:14.000 That's not a civilization that has done away with slavery.

00:22:17.000 In Judeo-Christian culture, we did it away with slavery a long time ago, and we've been moving toward doing away with slavery since, really, the Constitution banned importation of slaves.

00:22:27.000 Jefferson, who was a slave owner, signed an act in 1807 that banned the importation of slaves.

00:22:32.000 The idea of celebrating a Western civilization for doing such a moral and grand thing, and hundreds of thousands of people died to achieve this, and this is also true for Britain, which ended the slave trade in Africa and policed the high seas trying to shut down the slave trade in the name of Christendom.

00:22:46.000 You know, all of that would be something worth celebrating, but we can't do that, of course, without proclaiming that the injustices of slavery basically still live on in us, and we're still suffering from all of this.

00:22:56.000 The latest iteration of all of this is what's happening

00:22:59.000 Over in Chicago, there's this terrible shooting tape that happened in Chicago.

00:23:06.000 There's a guy named Laquan McDonald, is I guess his name.

00:23:08.000 And Laquan McDonald is a 17-year-old.

00:23:10.000 And this happened, I think, back in November of last year, so it's been a year.

00:23:16.000 And Laquan McDonald, there was a call

00:23:19.000 By somebody at McDonald's, I believe, and the police were called because he was waving around a knife.

00:23:25.000 They knew he had a knife, and he was acting crazy.

00:23:27.000 It turns out that he was on PCP, which is angel dust, which is a drug that makes you essentially invulnerable to pain.

00:23:33.000 It dulls your pain receptors.

00:23:35.000 And so they called the cops on him, and what the cops said is that he approached them with a knife.

00:23:41.000 And for a year, no tape is released.

00:23:44.000 For a year, Mayor Rahm Emanuel basically blocks the tape from being released.

00:23:48.000 He says it's inappropriate to release the tape at this time, and there are calls for the tape to be released because there's suspicion that, in fact, the kid was shot not really for a good reason.

00:23:58.000 Rahm Emanuel shut down the release of the tape.

00:24:00.000 It was about a week before his re-election campaign.

00:24:03.000 So he shut down the release of the tape because he was in a very hot and heavy battle with his political opponent, who I believe was another Democrat in the city of Chicago.

00:24:10.000 And if the tape had been released, he probably loses.

00:24:12.000 Here's what the tape ended up looking like when they released it.

00:24:15.000 And this, of course, has been used as evidence that America is always, always a vast racist infrastructure of terror.

00:24:29.000 So here in the middle of the screen, you can see Laquan McDonald.

00:24:31.000 He's kind of jogging down the street, and there's already a cop car there, and he's getting kind of close to the cop car.

00:24:37.000 He's got something in his hand.

00:24:38.000 You can see a glinting in his hand, and it could be a knife.

00:24:42.000 He's kind of walking away from the cops, and then you see one of the cops shoot him, and then you see all the puffs of smoke because the cop shoots him about 16 times and empties the clip into him.

00:24:51.000 And apparently one of the other cops, who was there at the time,

00:24:54.000 Was telling him to stop shooting, and he wanted to reload his clip.

00:24:57.000 It looks sort of like a panic shoot, right?

00:24:59.000 It looks sort of like he's within distance, right?

00:25:02.000 I mean, he's relatively close to the cop car.

00:25:04.000 It looks like maybe that cop got scared and decided that he was afraid the guy was gonna turn and charge him with a knife or something, and I'm gonna put him down right now.

00:25:11.000 The problem, of course, is that he's walking away from the cops when this happens.

00:25:14.000 So this tape comes out now.

00:25:16.000 And the police had gone into McDonald's, and they had confiscated McDonald's.

00:25:20.000 McDonald's had some surveillance tape of the kid, and the police apparently confiscated that as well, which was sort of suspicious.

00:25:26.000 And that police officer is now about to undergo first-degree murder charges for this, which, based on what we're looking at, looks at least justified.

00:25:34.000 It may be an overcharge.

00:25:35.000 First-degree murder may be an overcharge, but at least looks like, at the very least, manslaughter and an unjustified kill.

00:25:43.000 Because in this particular case, it doesn't look like the guy is charging the police officer.

00:25:48.000 So naturally, everybody says this is racism.

00:25:51.000 Everybody says that it's all just absolute racism.

00:25:54.000 Mayor Rahm Emanuel, now under fire, he says that he's just trying to keep Chicago from boiling over.

00:25:59.000 The mayor of Chicago, who of course was President Obama's leading political lackey, he can get away with this sort of thing because he's a Democrat.

00:26:06.000 Here's Rahm Emanuel, the guy who hid the tape for a year.

00:26:09.000 The incident, the actions, and the video will be debated and discussed in the days ahead.

00:26:16.000 Appropriate.

00:26:17.000 But we as a city of Chicago, all of us, also have to make an important judgment about ourselves and our city as we go forward.

00:26:26.000 Will we, in my view, rise to this moment that this incident demands of all of us in this city?

00:26:34.000 And my view is, this episode,

00:26:37.000 Can we use it?

00:26:49.000 We're good to go.

00:27:09.000 First of all, maybe this wasn't racism.

00:27:11.000 Did that ever occur to people, that when cops shoot people, that it isn't always racism?

00:27:15.000 Is it possible that the guy just perceived a threat that wasn't there, and it's unjustified, and he should go to jail, but it's not because of the color of the kid's skin?

00:27:21.000 It's because he had received a call that the kid was on PCP, impervious to pain, essentially, and that the kid's walking around carrying a knife, not obeying cop orders.

00:27:28.000 They're yelling at him in that tape to get down on the ground.

00:27:30.000 He's not doing it.

00:27:31.000 That's not justifying his activity, but is it possible it has nothing to do with racism and everything to do with just a bad cop doing a bad job?

00:27:38.000 Or the same thing with regard to Walter Scott in South Carolina, where a black guy was running away from the cop and the cop shot him. 0.99

00:27:44.000 Is it possible that it's just because the cop is a jerk, the cop's a bad guy, or the cop made a bad decision? 0.99

00:27:49.000 Does it always have to be racism? 0.99

00:27:51.000 Well, you know, here's Rahm Emanuel, and his incompetence is part of what's leading to all of the unrest, because after all, if he had released this tape immediately, right, if it didn't take a year, if this tape had come out immediately and he had said, we need to get to the bottom of each and every case,

00:28:05.000 But instead what it looks like is it looks like a white infrastructure led by Rahm Emanuel is attempting to cover up a bad kill of a black kid, right?

00:28:14.000 So political corruption now looks like racism.

00:28:16.000 Right?

00:28:16.000 Cops who do what cops do, which is basically to cover for fellow officers, that now looks like racism as opposed to typical sort of cop activity, which may or may not be good given the circumstances.

00:28:28.000 Right?

00:28:28.000 Everything is now construed as racism.

00:28:29.000 So you say, should we build bridges or are we going to build walls?

00:28:32.000 Well, last night we saw on Fox News, it's going to be walls, right?

00:28:37.000 This happened on Megyn Kelly's show last night.

00:28:42.000 Listen, you're going to have guys like this, you know, they want to instigate, they want to create a... What is he instigating, Bernie?

00:28:48.000 I'm sorry, I got interrupted.

00:28:50.000 Richard, look at him.

00:28:51.000 This cop out there accused of doing nothing wrong, trying to keep the peace.

00:28:55.000 This guy is having a silent protest with his police officer.

00:28:58.000 This is his First Amendment right.

00:28:59.000 He gets right in the face and stares him down?

00:29:01.000 This cop hasn't done anything wrong.

00:29:02.000 That is his First Amendment right, Megan.

00:29:04.000 To get in a cop's face and stare him down?

00:29:07.000 This is his First Amendment right.

00:29:09.000 I don't understand.

00:29:10.000 You think that's fine?

00:29:11.000 You have no problem with this?

00:29:12.000 This is his first and right, the biggest problem here... It's not a question of what his constitutional rights are, it's a question of what's appropriate.

00:29:19.000 And I see nothing wrong with this.

00:29:21.000 I think what is inappropriate is this prosecutor took 13 months to prosecute this individual when this police officer had 18 different complaints against him from citizens of Chicago.

00:29:31.000 And no one here, as far as I can tell, is defending that officer.

00:29:36.000 The question is whether it speaks to a greater narrative, as some allege, and this moment here.

00:29:42.000 So there are two questions here.

00:29:44.000 One is, is the shoot bad?

00:29:45.000 And everybody agrees the shoot's bad.

00:29:46.000 I've yet to meet somebody who doesn't agree the shoot's bad.

00:29:48.000 And the second is, what's the reaction to all this?

00:29:50.000 And the reaction to all of this is more behavior like this.

00:29:54.000 And, you know, Richard Fowler is there, and I've debated Richard Fowler before.

00:29:57.000 Richard Fowler is there saying that, you know, the kid is doing nothing wrong.

00:30:00.000 It's his First Amendment right.

00:30:01.000 That's true.

00:30:02.000 But let's just be clear about something.

00:30:05.000 A culture in which you disobey cops, in which you think that cops are out to get you, is not a culture that is likely to end with less violence between you and the cops.

00:30:12.000 So this kid isn't acting violently toward the cop, but the fact is he's being incredibly confrontational toward the cop, and there are people who are watching this sort of stuff, and they're thinking, okay, we have to stand up to every white cop. 0.50

00:30:22.000 Every white cop now has to be stood up to, and it is now point of honor, especially among teenage boys.

00:30:27.000 Every teenage boy, black, white, green, we're all like this.

00:30:30.000 Every teenage boy

00:30:31.000 believes in the the quote the quote-unquote point of honor right there is an honor culture among teenage boys and that is if confronted i will i will have to stand up to you because you're an authority figure and if instead of respecting authority figures because you because they're trying to keep you safe you stand up to them because you think that they're racist and that's something that's being pushed by the entire infrastructure based on occasional

00:30:54.000 Terrible situations like what just happened in Chicago.

00:30:56.000 That's how you get people shutting down the causeway, which is what happened in Chicago yesterday.

00:31:00.000 That's how you get riots in Ferguson. 0.82

00:31:01.000 And none of that ends with less violence between white officers and black folks. 0.95

00:31:07.000 Okay, so I've decided I'm gonna start ripping off Klavan. 1.00

00:31:10.000 I love Klavan's show.

00:31:12.000 I really enjoy—don't let him hear that—but I really enjoy Clavin's show.

00:31:15.000 And I think that I enjoy his literate references at the end of the shows where he does his stuff-I-like routine.

00:31:22.000 I've bought a lot of the books he's recommended.

00:31:24.000 I really enjoy them.

00:31:25.000 But it was—so I thought I would do stuff-I-like also.

00:31:29.000 But then Lindsay reminded me that I'm me and Clavin's Clavin, so I really should do what she suggests.

00:31:33.000 I should do stuff I hate.

00:31:34.000 Stuff I hate.

00:31:35.000 So, we will, we'll do stuff I hate.

00:31:37.000 At the end of every show, we'll have a little segment where we talk about stuff that I personally despise and I can't stand and I think that you should avoid at all costs.

00:31:44.000 So, a quick Thanksgiving note, number one on my list of things that I hate, anything having to do with Howard Zinn needs to immediately be canned.

00:31:52.000 I'd use a different word, but I don't like cursing.

00:31:54.000 So, it immediately needs to be canned.

00:31:56.000 Howard Zinn writes history, a people's history of the United States.

00:32:00.000 It's recommended by the

00:32:02.000 Geniuses who wrote Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

00:32:06.000 It's just, they are constantly referencing Howard Zinn and there's a people's history of the United States on their shelf and they're constantly talking about how America's terrible and that's what a people's history of the United States is.

00:32:16.000 It's all about how the United States is founded in racism and slavery.

00:32:21.000 The people's history part of it is supposed to be, here's the perspective of American history from the victims.

00:32:26.000 Okay.

00:32:26.000 If we're going to do that routine, then there has never been any progress in the history of humanity.

00:32:30.000 Because it turns out that virtually all movements, good, bad, all movements, have some victims.

00:32:37.000 Right?

00:32:37.000 The Civil Rights Movement had victims.

00:32:38.000 These people may have deserved it, but the Civil Rights Movement had victims.

00:32:41.000 Right?

00:32:42.000 Bull Connor lost his job eventually.

00:32:43.000 George Wallace lost his presidential career.

00:32:46.000 Right?

00:32:47.000 But you don't write it from his perspective because it's a moral thing, the civil rights movement.

00:32:50.000 Well, it turns out Western civilization, the United States, is essentially a moral place, and writing from the perspective of, here are all the people who are dispossessed and therefore all of American history is terrible and false and horrible, it's not a nuanced attempt to say, here are the costs and here are the benefits.

00:33:05.000 That is acceptable.

00:33:06.000 What it is, is instead, here are all the costs and none of the benefits. 1.00

00:33:09.000 That's Howard Zinn, and that's how you end up with an entire generation of idiot children who think that America is a terrible, horrible place. 1.00

00:33:16.000 Other things that I hate. 1.00

00:33:19.000 Here's a second thing that I hate.

00:33:20.000 It's a heaping dose for Thanksgiving.

00:33:23.000 So we've talked about Adele on this program before.

00:33:26.000 I don't hate Adele.

00:33:27.000 I think that Skyfall is a good song.

00:33:28.000 I think Hello is a mediocre song.

00:33:30.000 But what I do hate is when there is an artist who is okay, an artist who is somewhat talented, and then all of a sudden it's Jesus.

00:33:39.000 Right?

00:33:39.000 All of a sudden, everybody on planet Earth has decided that this artist is just the greatest person who has ever lived, they descended from the clouds, and they have come to bequeath us their talent.

00:33:48.000 And this is what has happened with Adele, right?

00:33:50.000 And it's happened for two reasons.

00:33:52.000 One is because she has, some of her songs are tuneful, and the other reason is because she's overweight.

00:33:57.000 If Adele looked like all the other pop stars, then people would not be so obsessed with Adele.

00:34:01.000 It's the same thing that sort of happened to, uh, what was the name of that, that...

00:34:04.000 That girl who sang the song all about how being overweight was okay. 1.00

00:34:09.000 Megan Trainor.

00:34:10.000 Yeah, Megan Trainor.

00:34:10.000 So it's the same thing with Megan Trainor, right?

00:34:12.000 She has some talent, but all of her songs sound the same, and she's really famous because she's fat, right?

00:34:17.000 I mean, if she were skinny, then there's a new thing on the left that says we have to stop all body shaming. 1.00

00:34:23.000 Body shaming is terrible.

00:34:24.000 Okay, I agree.

00:34:25.000 We shouldn't make people feel bad about how they look.

00:34:28.000 However, there is also a thing called reality.

00:34:30.000 Men will be more attracted to you if you're in shape. 0.96

00:34:32.000 Okay, let's just get real.

00:34:33.000 It turns out that men are attracted to attractive women, and that's just the way that it is.

00:34:36.000 And women can fight against that standard and say it's sexist and say it's terrible, and men will continue having sex with the most attractive women. 0.99

00:34:42.000 That's just how reality is.

00:34:44.000 In any case, there's something that... Among the things that I hate, along with Adele, is Jimmy Fallon.

00:34:50.000 Jimmy Fallon... 1.00

00:34:51.000 is an absolute, he's just, he's an asshat. 1.00

00:34:55.000 I mean, there's no other way to put it. 0.99

00:34:56.000 He's just, he has what we, what some of us colloquially call a douche face. 0.82

00:35:02.000 And what I mean by that is that there are certain people where you just look at their face and you feel like they need to be punched.

00:35:06.000 And Jimmy Fallon, I'm not calling for actual violence against Jimmy Fallon.

00:35:10.000 That's a joke, sort of.

00:35:12.000 And Jimmy Fallon is, he's just one of these guys who, I don't know how he ever got ahead because every time he does a comedy bit, Jimmy Fallon, he can't help but break.

00:35:20.000 It's not cute.

00:35:20.000 He does it for every single skit.

00:35:22.000 Every skit he has ever done, he breaks.

00:35:24.000 It's like the old Johnny Carson shows where Carol Burnett couldn't hold it in and just started laughing.

00:35:28.000 But Jimmy Fallon thinks everything on earth is so funny that he has to break in every single skit.

00:35:34.000 This is the combination of things that I hate together in one video.

00:35:37.000 Here's Adele and Jimmy Fallon, and they're gonna do this.

00:35:40.000 This thing has gotten millions of hits.

00:35:42.000 It happened overnight, and it's already gotten millions of hits.

00:35:45.000 It's Adele singing Hello.

00:35:47.000 Hello!

00:36:17.000 It's me.

00:36:20.000 I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet.

00:36:25.000 To go over everything.

00:36:30.000 They say that time's supposed to heal ya.

00:36:33.000 I ain't done much healing.

00:36:36.000 Hello?

00:36:37.000 Can you hear me?

00:36:41.000 Okay, so we can stop this, alright.

00:36:44.000 So Jimmy Fallon, for those who can't see, Jimmy Fallon is literally sitting there with like the wooden block that you had when you were in third grade and it was instrument time.

00:36:51.000 And he's hitting it, not on beat by the way, he's like trying so hard to hit it on the correct rhythm.

00:36:58.000 And then there's the whole band, there's the guy with the ukulele in the back, and you see the guy with the, I don't even know, what is the instrument the guy's playing with the, it's the mouth piano.

00:37:04.000 He's got these, he's blowing into it and he's got the little keyboard there.

00:37:08.000 And you've got the guy with the kid's xylophone.

00:37:11.000 And oh, isn't it cute?

00:37:12.000 Oh, isn't it charming?

00:37:14.000 Okay, so the reason that I despise this is because there is this tendency now that everything becomes cuter and more charming and more wonderful when you do it like a simple person.

00:37:29.000 Like, these people presumably are all skilled musicians.

00:37:31.000 They're capable of playing actual instruments, right?

00:37:34.000 But they're not, and so it's cute.

00:37:35.000 They're playing a little kid's xylophone, and it's cute, and it's nice.

00:37:39.000 Well, for me, I prefer to see skill.

00:37:41.000 Like, if Adele were to sing this song, this mediocre song, if she were to sing this with a full orchestra, it wouldn't get as many hits.

00:37:47.000 But this is cute, and it's twee, and it's charming, because all of these people are dumbing down for the audience so that even you can play this on a xylophone.

00:37:56.000 Okay.

00:37:57.000 The even you can do this, to me, is a bad measure of art.

00:38:00.000 In fact, it's the worst measure of art.

00:38:02.000 It's what I say about modern art. 0.99

00:38:04.000 If even I can do it, it's crap. 0.99

00:38:06.000 Right? 1.00

00:38:06.000 That's the way that it works. 1.00

00:38:07.000 If I read a book, and even I can do it, but not me, because I'm an actual professional writer, like, if even I could do it, and I'm an illiterate,

00:38:15.000 Then it's not a good book.

00:38:32.000 So here they all are, you know, rocking out to these children's instruments.

00:38:36.000 And once again, it's the dumbing down of art.

00:38:38.000 It's the idea that art is somehow better if it's more simple, if it's more simplistic.

00:38:42.000 And it's just not something that I particularly buy.

00:38:45.000 So there you are.

00:38:46.000 Stuff I hate.

00:38:48.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:38:49.000 Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

00:38:50.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - November 25, 2015

Ep. 31 - How to Talk To Your Leftist Relatives on Thanksgiving

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