The left has to find somebody to blame for Hurricane Harvey. Joel Osteen gets himself in trouble in Houston. Plus, we ll talk about the latest from Berkeley and yes, there are developments. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, and you may not know the difference in this studio, but it is 1,000 degrees in here and our air conditioning is broken, so if you see me and I look like I am sweating copiously, it s because I am made of ice and steel, it's all the same. Nonetheless, we will soldier through because that's the kind of people we are, and it's just like Normandy, because on the left, everything is like Normandy. In any case, we'll talk about everything having to do with Joel Osteos, whether or not he actually barred people from his giant Lakewood Church in Houston, there's a lot of talk online about that, and the Left's obvious and deep desire to peg Hurricane Harvey on someone and something beyond weather. We ll talk all that stuff, and much more, on this show by Ben Shapiro. Enjoy! -Ben Shapiro Subscribe to Ben Shapiro's newest podcast, The Weekly Standard, wherever you get your shows. Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! Like, comment and subscribe on whatever you're listening to, you'll get 7 days free of the latest episode of the Weekly Standard's new podcast, "The Weekly Standard" coming soon! and a discount code: CRITIQUE. to receive $50 off your first set of sheets plus free shipping when using promo code "Ben Shapiro's BONUS" when you sign up for the offer is in full-service. If you decide to become a supporter of the show, you get $50 and get a discount of $50 or more. You'll also get a free copy of "The Ben Shapiro show! Ben's Weekly Standard issue of "Ben's Law Firm" and I'll get $25 and other perks like that too get a chance to review the show that includes a $25 promo code, and other things like that's also receive $25 or a $50 discount, and they'll get a shot of Ben's full-up and other such thing, and all that's a discount, too get that'll be entered into that'll get that, plus they'll receive that too, plus I'll receive all that?
00:00:17.000So you may not know the difference at all, but it is 1,000 degrees in this studio.
00:00:21.000Our air conditioning is broken today, so if you see me and it looks like I'm sweating copiously, or if it doesn't look like I'm sweating at all because I'm made of ice and steel, it's all the same.
00:01:26.000grocery store and and outside in the parking lot there's some skeezy guy who's selling sheets you're like oh it's a thousand thread count i'm sure it's great no it turns out it's made of plastic and it's a tarp what you need is the organic cotton sheets over at bowlandbranch.com they don't make you pay the expensive retail price so you're paying about half the price you would for twice the quality of these kinds of sheets you can try them for 30 nights if you don't like them you can send them right back for a full refund if you don't like them and i promise you you will like them everyone who sleeps on bowl and branch sheets that i've talked to
00:02:49.000There are people in the Jewish community who do something similar.
00:02:51.000They do this routine where it's like, well, if you give a lot of charity, then you will surely prosper, and you will do better in life, and there will be material benefits.
00:02:57.000There's certain behavior I think that you follow, secular or religious, and you're more likely to prosper.
00:03:06.000Don't blow it all on booze and strippers.
00:03:09.000These are obvious things that if you follow God's plan, or basic human morality, you're more likely to be prosperous, but that's not really the baseline of prosperity gospel.
00:03:17.000Prosperity gospel says God wants you to be wealthy, God wants you to be rich, and therefore,
00:03:22.000If you pray hard enough and give enough charity, and you act in a gospel-forward manner, then you will inevitably become wealthy or rich, because God wants you to be rich.
00:03:31.000Joel Osteen has made a fortune off of this.
00:03:34.000He lives in a $10.5 million home in Texas.
00:03:37.000He also has a show, a televangelism show, that's watched by some 42 million people a week, I guess.
00:03:49.000It holds 17,000 people and it is packed every Sunday.
00:03:52.000So, with all of this going on with Joel Osteen, with his belief system, there's no question that a lot of people are looking for a reason to jump on him.
00:04:01.000When it came out online that Joel Osteen had said we are shutting down services for Saturday and Sunday over at the church and we're basically closing the premises.
00:04:08.000And a lot of people said, well, hold on, why aren't you using this as a shelter?
00:04:13.000Why aren't you using this as a place where people can go and sleep, you know, blow up some air mattresses, hand out some food, you're a church.
00:04:37.000Nice and dry over there by August 27th, August 28th.
00:04:39.000Here's a picture of what it looked over by Lakewood Church.
00:04:42.000A lot of people were blasting Osteen over all of this, but then Osteen's church released some photos of parts of the premises and what they look like, and you can see that some parts of the premises are flooded, right?
00:04:55.000You can see here that this thing looks like it's about under two feet of water, this pillar over here.
00:05:02.000Looks like there's about six inches of water in the parking lot.
00:05:05.000So clearly they're not getting off scot-free.
00:05:07.000But everybody is eager to jump on Osteen.
00:05:08.000So critics of Osteen are eager to jump on him because they think that his preaching of the gospel is materialistic and non-spiritual.
00:05:14.000And a lot of people on the left are eager to jump on any pastor whatsoever.
00:05:18.000So I think that before people on the right religiously make common cause with people on the left
00:05:23.000who dislike religion generally against Osteen, they should take into account what's really going on here.
00:05:28.000A lot of people on the left would have bashed any church, any major church, that didn't open its doors because they're looking for an opportunity to bash religious people.
00:05:35.000That said, Osteen should have known better than all of this, obviously.
00:05:39.000Osteen should have known that there are people who are going to look at the prosperity of his church, how big it is, and say he should have been doing more throughout all of this.
00:06:05.000His particular actions in this case, because I'm just not sure that his actions in this particular case are worthy of ire.
00:06:11.000I don't have enough information, and from what I'm seeing, according to the city and according to Osteen, it doesn't look like he was shutting his doors.
00:06:16.000I mean, there have been prior disasters.
00:06:18.000I think during Hurricane Rita, he opened his doors to people who are looking for shelter.
00:06:26.000They're saying it has nothing to do with social media.
00:06:27.000I'm sure it does have something to do with social media.
00:06:29.000That said, the ire seems to me somewhat overblown and Osteen should have known better because people are out to get him and people are out to get religious communities, even ones that I am not a fan of his gospel, but still.
00:06:41.000Religious leaders have to know that there is a double standard when it comes to religious leadership.
00:06:45.000The things a secular leader would do and stink at are not going to be taken the same way if a religious leader does them because they're just held to a higher standard, particularly people who are already sort of
00:06:58.000They're suspected of prospering off the Gospels.
00:07:03.000Okay, so with the Osteen thing out of the way, I want to talk a little bit about the left's perspective on the hurricane itself.
00:07:08.000So the left has been jumping to conclusions about the hurricane, looking for somebody to blame.
00:07:12.000A few years back, during Hurricane Katrina, I think it was Pat Robertson,
00:07:17.000Actually, it was John Hagee, who was an evangelical pastor, and he suggested that during Hurricane Katrina, the reason for Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans had to do with God being unhappy with New Orleans.
00:07:27.000There were suggestions like this after 9-11.
00:07:28.000There were suggestions like this during some hurricane seasons in the late 90s.
00:07:32.000There were religious leaders who would come out and say this sort of stuff.
00:07:35.000Jerry Falwell, I believe, said it about 9-11.
00:07:37.000This idea that God was angry, and therefore he punished particular people with the weather, or he punished particular people with nature.
00:07:44.000And people on the religious side of the aisle and people on the secular side of the aisle came out and said, that's inappropriate.
00:08:02.000The secular left said, how dare you attribute the sins of the people, attribute the hurricanes or the natural disasters to the sins of the people?
00:08:12.000The truth is that the secular hard left is just as religious as some of the people on the hard right.
00:08:19.000They're just as eager to look for some cause outside of the weather to explain what just happened in Houston.
00:08:26.000And this is a tendency of the human mind is to jump to a conclusion, these kind of just-so stories about why things happen the way they do.
00:08:33.000Sometimes you feel like you can see God's hand in the universe and you feel like it's relatively clear.
00:08:37.000You know, the fact that Hitler didn't move on Dunkirk seems like a pretty clear God's hand in history moment.
00:08:43.000When it comes to natural disasters, which are happening constantly around the world, it seems a little bit much to me to attribute those to God wanting to take revenge on particular populations.
00:08:53.000But the secular left, which hates that,
00:08:55.000is perfectly willing to ascribe the hurricane to other things.
00:08:57.000So their current god is, of course, global warming.
00:09:00.000So there's been a whole spate of articles about how global warming is what caused this hurricane.
00:09:04.000Never mind that hurricanes have actually been down in recent years.
00:09:08.000There was a hurricane gap for a while where it seemed like the number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States had dropped pretty significantly.
00:09:16.000The left said that that was due to global warming.
00:09:18.000Now the left is saying that the size of this hurricane is due to global warming.
00:09:42.000So Politico has a long article today about how global warming is to blame for all of this.
00:09:46.000There are a bunch of people on the left who have been tweeting out that global warming is to blame for all of this.
00:09:51.000That it's because of all these evil oil companies in Texas that all this is happening.
00:09:56.000Cenk Iyger, who I've debated, obviously, at Politicon.
00:09:59.000He tweeted out, US taxpayers should help people of Houston in light of this tragedy, but not one dime to oil companies who helped cause it in the first place.
00:10:06.000The suggestion being that oil companies drilling and providing a good service to people who need oil, they are responsible for the size and the scope of this hurricane.
00:10:15.000Politico has a long article, as I say today, all about how global warming is the problem.
00:10:20.000Their article is titled, Harvey is what climate change looks like.
00:11:04.000It has to do instead with urban planning.
00:11:05.000That has nothing to do with global warming.
00:11:07.000I'm going to explain why this global warming stuff really is evidence-less in just a second, even according to some of the left's favorite sources.
00:11:13.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at the USCCA.
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00:12:22.000Okay, so the left is trying to blame global warming for all of this.
00:12:26.000As I say, Politico has a long article about this.
00:12:27.000They say Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey isn't a class by itself.
00:12:33.000By the time the storm leaves the region on Wednesday, an estimated 40 to 60 inches of rain will have fallen on parts
00:12:39.000Of Houston, so much rain has already fallen that the National Weather Service has had to add additional colors to its map to account for the extreme totals.
00:12:49.000They say this is already the worst rainstorm in US history.
00:12:52.000Okay, so the idea here is that global warming has made the world warmer.
00:12:55.000This is what's causing this increased intensity of storms.
00:13:20.000Even if you accept the IPCC's kind of average temperature increase, which they say is going to increase about 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, it's still unclear from most scientists what percentage of that is due to human activity.
00:13:32.000It's unclear what the solution to that is.
00:13:34.000And it's unclear that you can actually attribute individual weather events like this to global warming itself.
00:13:39.000Now I'm going to quote you the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the government agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.
00:13:45.000It says, quote, it is premature to conclude that human activities and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.
00:13:57.000That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations and are not yet confidently modeled.
00:14:11.000So they said that, you know, there's not enough information to know at this point what the story is going to be.
00:14:16.000They say anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will likely cause tropical cyclones to have substantially higher rainfall rates than present-day ones, with a model projecting an increase of about 10 to 15 percent for rainfall rates, averaged within about 100 kilometers of the storm center.
00:14:42.000The Atlantic has a very similar piece today talking about how climate change intensified Hurricane Harvey, but buried, it's like paragraph 21 of this piece, it says, All of this said, a storm like Harvey could have happened even if there was no climate change.
00:14:55.000Planning experts have long fretted over the possibility of a major hurricane striking Houston.
00:14:59.000Harvey is also a powerful hurricane, forming in one of the most hurricane-friendly regions of the world at the peak of hurricane season.
00:15:05.000Storms similar to it would form in any climate.
00:15:08.000Okay, this is a leftist publication, The Atlantic, saying all of this.
00:15:12.000They say it's unclear what effect climate change is having on hurricane formation across the greater Atlantic Ocean.
00:15:18.000So the idea that this is definitely attributable to global warming is just not backed.
00:16:00.000There's a University of Tampa professor who was fired, I don't think he should have been fired for this, but he was fired for tweeting today that the hurricane happened to Trump supporters.
00:16:19.000And again, I think there's a broader point to be made here, which is that the left is looking for some way to attribute bad things that happen in the world to the right.
00:16:26.000We're constantly looking to government as the answer to all of our problems.
00:16:30.000This demonstrates, I think, the problem.
00:16:52.000Even religious people who don't believe in prosperity gospel understand that it's not God's job to make you prosperous.
00:16:57.000It's your job to make you prosperous in acting in accordance with God's law.
00:17:01.000Maybe you'll be more prosperous, maybe you won't.
00:17:03.000Okay, there are no guarantees in any of this.
00:17:05.000This is what a lot of religious people believe.
00:17:07.000Even those of us who are deeply religious understand that they're, as we would say in Judaism, tzaddikim, they're righteous people who are poor.
00:17:14.000Being righteous has no guarantee that God is going to grant you wealth in this life.
00:17:20.000But the left is so religious about government that they believe that if they just pay homage to government, if they hand over all their cash, if they give government control over the economy, that somehow hurricanes like this will be prevented.
00:17:31.000Major hurricanes have been taking place on planet Earth for the last several million years.
00:17:34.000The idea that you are going to sit around and say the government is certainly going to fix all of this if we just give it enough power is really silly.
00:17:42.000But, you know, that's the left's worship.
00:17:44.000That's the hard left's worship, is trying to blame things that happen around them on someone or something so that they don't have to take into account the fact that there's some randomness to the universe that they're simply not going to be able to prevent.
00:17:55.000It's the same thing that Joe Biden used to say about how we could cure cancer if we just got government on the right page.
00:18:00.000I'm pretty sure that the impediment to curing cancer is not will to cure cancer.
00:18:03.000I'm fairly certain that everybody wants to cure cancer.
00:18:07.000But, again, when you worship at the altar of government, then you tend to think that it's going to prevent all of your problems if you just, if you just hand over all your money.
00:18:16.000Katie Tuer is a reporter over at NBC News, and she was asking Senator Ted Cruz about funding for Hurricane Harvey.
00:18:23.000He's backed funding for Hurricane Harvey.
00:18:25.000He did not back a bill that would have funded Hurricane Sandy because there was a lot of pork in it.
00:18:30.000Again, the premise of the question seems to be the government can solve all the problems if stupid Republicans would just get out of the way.
00:18:35.000Watch Cruz Schellacker on this question.
00:18:37.000A lot of people are pointing out that you voted against aid for Sandy after that catastrophic storm up in the Northeast, that package back in 2012.
00:18:49.000And they're pointing at you and saying you're asking for money now when you weren't willing to help the people in the Northeast.
00:19:23.000The reason that it was laden with pork is because, again, Democrats think that government is God, and they think that if they just donate all their money to the government, prosperity gospel will come upon them.
00:19:30.000So for all the critiques of Joel Osteen's perspective, at least Joel Osteen's perspective still calls for some sort of worship of a higher power.
00:19:37.000The higher power the Democrats worship, apparently, is the government itself.
00:20:32.000In times like these, when you're in a non-air-conditioned studio frying your bleep off, that is when you need a hot or cold tumbler so you can sip the icy water of the gods.
00:20:42.000So make sure that you go get that Tumblr for a $99 annual fee or go over to iTunes or SoundCloud later, Spotify, any of the places that post podcasts.
00:20:49.000You can get access to The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:20:57.000We are the largest and fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:21:07.000So a real split is now emerging with regard to Antifa on the left.
00:21:10.000There's some people in Antifa on the left who are willing to disown Antifa.
00:21:14.000It is amazing to me, by the way, that every Republican legislator in the country, every one of them, was forced to come out and personally denounce what happened in Charlottesville, but no Democrat legislator I'm aware of has been forced to denounce Antifa.
00:21:25.000No one seems to be asking these questions.
00:21:27.000I think Jake Tapper actually has asked some people on CNN.
00:21:29.000But aside from Tapper, I haven't seen anybody being asked this question regularly.
00:21:36.000Should it be considered a criminal group?
00:21:37.000Should the police be doing more to stop all of this?
00:21:40.000The police in Berkeley did a really crappy job on Sunday.
00:21:43.000It was obvious they did a crappy job on Sunday.
00:21:45.000The Washington Post reported that they were supposed to block off entrances to the park where this rally, this free speech rally was taking place.
00:21:52.000Instead, they just allowed Antifa to run roughshod over them and they said, well, we don't want this to become violent.
00:21:57.000Now, the mayor of Berkeley is calling on UC Berkeley to cancel free speech week itself.
00:22:02.000So on Monday night, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Araguin, this is Hank Barry in writing for Daily Wire,
00:22:08.000Ereguen is a committed leftist and he urged UC Berkeley to cancel the university's plans for a free speech week in September that happens to coincide with speeches planned by speakers who target the left.
00:22:18.000Ereguen asserted, quote, I don't want Berkeley being used as a punching bag.
00:22:21.000I'm concerned about these groups using large protests to create mayhem.
00:22:24.000It's something we've seen in Oakland and Berkeley.
00:23:15.000I assume that it'll sell out almost immediately thanks to people like you.
00:23:18.000If you want to go and register for notification as soon as the tickets become available, we should pack the house and demonstrate that free speech still matters.
00:23:25.000You can go over to YAF.org for all of the information there.
00:23:27.000But the fact that the Berkeley mayor is saying openly that he doesn't want these free speech events in his city is really disgusting and demonstrative of the fact that there is a rioter's veto of which leftist government officials approve.
00:23:39.000And it's not just limited to Berkeley.
00:23:41.000You remember Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the Baltimore mayor, saying when there are riots in Baltimore that she wanted to give the rioters space to destroy.
00:23:49.000The way that this works, this sort of inside-outside game, is that you have a bunch of rioters who show up to shut down speech you don't like, and then you say, oh, you know what, my police just couldn't control it.
00:23:56.000I guess that we just can't have these events anymore.
00:24:25.000I want all the people who are coming to hear me speak protected.
00:24:27.000I don't want any of those people assaulted.
00:24:29.000And if they are assaulted, if the police don't do their jobs, if they're told to stand down as apparently they were on Sunday, by the Berkeley PD higher-ups, or by the mayor, or by the Berkeley administration,
00:24:40.000Then Congress should move fully and forthwith to withdraw funding from UC Berkeley as well as any federal funding connected to the city of Berkeley overall in accordance with law.
00:24:50.000And that's something that needs to happen as soon as possible.
00:24:53.000And the left should be calling out for this as loudly as I am.
00:25:27.000Eric Gwynne has said, quote, I'm very concerned about Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and some of these other right-wing speakers coming to the Berkeley campus because it's just a target for BlackBlock to come out and commit mayhem on the Berkeley campus and have that potentially spill out on the street.
00:25:38.000He said, I obviously believe in freedom of speech, but there's a fine line between freedom of speech and then posing a risk to public safety.
00:26:07.000My government, the government under which I have lived my entire life, except for three years in Harvard, I've lived my entire life in California.
00:26:15.000That government is not going to protect my free speech rights or the freedom of assembly of people to hear me, or people like Milo, or people like Ann Coulter, is really repulsive, really disgusting.
00:26:26.000And that obviously has nothing to do with my belief in their message, because I don't believe in the message of some of the people that I just mentioned.
00:26:32.000So again, Berkeley just doing a horrific job doing what it's supposed to be doing.
00:26:37.000So, we'll keep you updated on all of that.
00:26:41.000Meanwhile, President Trump landed in Texas, just demonstrating the ire of the left when it comes to the situation in Texas.
00:26:47.000People are apparently very, very upset with Melania Trump.
00:26:50.000She landed and she was wearing high heels.
00:26:52.000Apparently this is some sort of big deal.
00:26:53.000She was wearing stilettos, I guess, for five seconds, and then she changed her shoes.
00:26:57.000Okay, everyone who's getting on her back for changing her shoes, is this like a big deal?
00:27:00.000Like, am I supposed to think this is a big deal?
00:27:02.000My wife changes her shoes every time we go to synagogue.
00:27:05.000She wears the shoes that are comfortable to walk in, and then she changes into the shoes that are pretty.
00:27:09.000I mean, I think that women are silly for doing this, but still, is this a big deal?
00:27:14.000But the left has made this a huge big deal.
00:27:22.000When George W. Bush did a flyover because he didn't actually want to land and create a security problem in New Orleans, then he was a bad guy.
00:27:29.000But when Trump flies to Texas, he's also a bad guy.
00:27:51.000This is why his approval rating is down.
00:27:52.000It demonstrates that if Trump would just stick to the good stuff, he could actually be quite a popular president.
00:27:56.000You know, hurricanes like this boost the president's popularity.
00:28:00.000They always boost the popularity of the president of the United States in power.
00:28:03.000Barack Obama's popularity was boosted by Hurricane Sandy so much he probably won re-election.
00:28:08.000Donald Trump is doing a good job with the hurricane.
00:28:10.000I just wish he would get out of his own way.
00:28:11.000What do I mean when I say get out of his own way?
00:28:13.000Well, he was doing a joint press conference with Finland's president yesterday, and he was asked about the pardon of Joe Arpaio, and here's what he had to say about it.
00:28:22.000Well, a lot of people think it was the right thing to do, John.
00:28:24.000And actually, in the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally.
00:28:30.000You know, the hurricane was just starting.
00:28:33.000And I put it out that I had pardoned, as we call, as we say, Sheriff Joe.
00:28:38.000Okay, so why are you saying that he was doing it for the ratings?
00:28:42.000I assume what he was saying here is that he wasn't trying to bury this under the hurricane, the arpaio pardon under the hurricane, but the way that it comes out, he's talking about using the hurricane as a way to get attention for his arpaio pardon.
00:28:52.000Not very good wording by the president, but I'll take it that what he actually meant here
00:28:57.000is not that he wanted higher ratings for the Arpaio pardon, but that he actually was not doing it to hide the Arpaio pardon.
00:29:04.000CNN, of course, does it the exact wrong way.
00:29:06.000Dana Bash comes out and she says, it's abhorrent.
00:29:08.000Clearly he was doing it for the ratings.
00:29:16.000Even if he is tongue-in-cheek, which I don't think he was.
00:29:19.000The notion of the President of the United States saying that he announced something because ratings were high, or people were fleeting their homes, excuse me, fleeing their homes, underwater, and some people losing their lives, is a point.
00:29:37.000Okay, again, this is overwrought stuff from the media, but Trump has to know that's the way this is going to go.
00:29:44.000Again, he keeps making some boo-boos that are not really great.
00:29:48.000He came out the same day, and he was asked about Russia again.
00:29:51.000Once again, it's not difficult for him just to condemn Russia.
00:29:53.000There's a big story that came out from the New York Times.
00:29:55.000It doesn't really hold a lot of water, as far as I can see, but the story seems to suggest that there was a Trump associate who boasted to another Trump associate that Trump had a deal that was pending in Moscow, and because of that deal with Moscow, Vladimir Putin was going to lend his support to Trump for the presidency and get Trump elected.
00:30:10.000It could just be braggadocio by one of Trump's associates, but it would be good if Trump would condemn Russia every so often.
00:30:15.000He still seems to have a tough time doing it.
00:30:17.000Here is Trump being asked about Russia as a security threat.
00:30:21.000Mr. Trump, would you consider Russia as a security threat?
00:30:26.000Well, I consider many countries as a security threat, unfortunately, when you look at what's going on in the world today.
00:30:32.000As you know, a few weeks ago, our great Vice President Mike Pence, who's right here, was in the region and spent quite a bit of time there.
00:30:42.000We consider that a very, very important part of the world.
00:30:47.000We have a great relationship with Finland.
00:30:50.000And so I would consider many countries threats, but these are all threats that we'll be able to handle if we have to.
00:30:56.000Hopefully, we won't have to handle them, but if we do, we will handle them.
00:31:00.000Okay, again, I think that, you know, when President Trump says there are many threats, it would be good if he would just say Russia is a threat.
00:31:06.000Obviously, Russia is a threat to Finland.
00:31:42.000Lost, I would say, some of his luster, but was the leading philosopher of the foundation of the country was John Locke.
00:31:50.000John Locke's Second Treatise on Government is a masterwork.
00:31:53.000It is all about why men are deserving of a government that protects their individual rights.
00:31:59.000John Locke really is the great propagator of the notion that we have rights in spite of government and government is instituted in order to maintain those rights.
00:32:07.000He exists in opposition to Thomas Hobbes.
00:32:09.000Hobbes says that men in a state of nature beat the living crap out of each other, and you need government in order to ensure that men don't beat the crap out of each other.
00:33:09.000Over at UCLA, we used to prank the horse sometimes.
00:33:11.000In any case, there are a bunch of leftists who now think that the horse's name has to be changed because the name of the horse is Traveler.
00:33:19.000Okay, and the USC Black Student Assembly co-director Sophia Jackson thinks that the name of the horse should be changed.
00:34:25.000Because there's a picture of a Puritan pointing a gun at a Native American.
00:34:30.000So, they spoke with faculty and other scholarly experts.
00:34:33.000They said the stonework depicted violence toward local Native American inhabitants, so the university decided to relocate the stonework.
00:34:38.000It had been rested by the York Street entrance to the Sterling Memorial Library, but after that entrance, which hadn't been used for a long time, was reopened, the head librarian and the university's Committee on Art and Public Spaces decided that the carving's presence at a major entrance to Sterling was not appropriate.
00:34:52.000Instead, they're removing it, and they're moving it elsewhere.
00:34:54.000They've decided to move the carving and contextualize it.
00:34:59.000They said the layer covering the original stonework will be removed as well.
00:35:04.000They said we have to create a setting that clearly communicates that the content of the image is not being honored or even taken lightly but rather is deserving of thoughtful consideration and reflection.
00:35:15.000It turns out that the Puritans, who settled the area in which Yale is located, actually did go to war with the Native Americans on a relatively frequent basis.
00:35:25.000That is not a call for violence against Native Americans today, and if you think it is, that's because you're dumb.
00:35:30.000But to ignore the history of the region, or move it into the back room because it's uncomfortable, seems to me completely counterproductive and stupid, but that's what our college campuses have become.
00:35:39.000Okay, time for a little bit of deconstructing the culture, because it is a Tuesday.
00:35:43.000Today we're actually going to do a pure deconstructing the culture.
00:35:46.000Katy Perry has a new song that is typically garbagealicious, called Swish Swish.
00:35:59.000Apparently there are a bunch of Taylor Swift references in the Swish Swish music video, so she's in some sort of cat fight with Taylor Swift, who also wrote a garbage song targeting Katy Perry.
00:36:09.000Called look what you made me do or something.
00:36:11.000It's it's it's an awful song like I gave it a listen just to see how awful it was and I think that swish swish is a better song than then Tyler than Taylor Swift's Response song, but that's like saying that certain types of feces are less offensive than other types of feces in any case Here is the music video for swish swish replete with social justice messaging of course
00:36:36.000It says Bingo's Bail Bond Stadium for those who can't watch.
00:36:44.000She's sitting atop a pyramid of basketballs looking all weird and then she falls down the pyramid and the basketball hit a janitor.
00:36:55.000Okay, so... So Katy Perry's basketball team is going up against apparently a bunch of wrestlers in this video.
00:39:51.000Why are people angry with one another?
00:39:53.000Why are these singers who are multi-bajillionaires angry with one another?
00:39:56.000We have no idea, but they make music videos about it, and we're all supposed to be ensconced in culture.
00:40:01.000I think that there is a God-sized hole in a lot of people's hearts in the United States, and we're filling it with stupid culture, and the culture is getting ever stupider because we have to fill that maw somehow.
00:40:10.000And so we end up with idiotic music videos like this that don't even make any sense, aren't funny, are badly constructed, but are about some sort of minor conflict between a couple of obnoxious people who are so rich they never have to come within 3,000 miles of each other if they don't want to.
00:40:26.000Okay, I'm so annoyed by this, I can't even express how annoyed I am by this music video and by Katy Perry as a whole, by her new appearance, by all of it.
00:40:34.000Like, the new appearance, which is the SJW warrior routine, and then Nicki Minaj lecturing her from her perch atop, I guess, the...
00:40:44.000From a perch atop the pyramid of power and wonder?
00:40:47.000If this is female empowerment, gang, I can tell you this does not make women look very empowered.
00:40:51.000It just makes women look stupid and petty.