The Ben Shapiro Show - October 08, 2021


HYPOCRISY: Socialist Twitch Streamer Buys $2.7 MILLION House

Hosted by
Ben Shapiro
Mentioned
Hassan Piker Twitch Hypocrisy Marx Bernie Sanders Tucker Carlson Frank Ocean Young Turks Ilhan Omar Jeff Bezos Madude
Did McConnell Just Cave To Biden? | Ep. 1349 Yes, Happy Columbus Day | Ep. 1351

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

196.78

Word count

2,240

Sentence count

164

Harmful content

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A socialist buys a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood. The media doesn t care. They care less about hypocrisy than they do about the fact that he's a rich guy who happens to be a streamer on Twitch and has a lake house in Lake Tahoe. And they don't even care that he bought it for over $2 million. They don't care that it's in Los Angeles, California, and that he doesn't live in a modest house like the rest of us. They only care about how much he's getting paid for it, and why he should keep the proceeds of his purchase in his lake house. And why he shouldn't have to pay for it with his own money, since he's got a lot more than that. And he's not the only one who can buy a house for a lot of money, but it's a socialist who does so because he's rich. And that's a good thing, because socialism is a socialist thing. And it's good for him because he gets to be rich because it means he can do what he wants with his money, and he doesn t have to compromise his values to pay his fair share of the proceeds from his hard earned money. And he does it because it makes him a better person than most other people who don't have as much as he does, and they're not getting paid the same amount of money for the same things they have in their day-to-day lives they're getting paid by the same thing they're paying for through their wages and benefits they get through their education and their day to day, and their taxes. And that they get paid for their education, and health care and their health care, they get to keep the same stuff they're supposed to do, but they're just as much, but instead they get a house that they can't afford to buy and they get it in the same way that he does in the first place. That's not even close to the real world, right there in LA? it's not a good enough house in LA, it's $3 million in LA and he's just like everyone else in the real life, right in the middle of Los Angeles? And he thinks he's better than most people in America, right? . right? He doesn't even need to pay their fair share in order to buy a home in LA or in New York City, he's in LA and he thinks so?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 That is a truism of politics that hypocrisy is always newsworthy. 0.84
00:00:04.000 Hypocrisy is always newsworthy.
00:00:05.000 If somebody is a religious Christian and then they have an affair, this is a newsworthy event, according to the media. 0.99
00:00:11.000 If there's a politician who's right-wing, that politician turns out to be gay. 0.99
00:00:14.000 Really, really newsworthy, according to the media. 0.96
00:00:18.000 But there's one area of hypocrisy that is just not newsworthy to the media.
00:00:21.000 Like, truly not newsworthy.
00:00:23.000 And that, of course, is if you are a socialist who's extremely wealthy and gives very little charity. 0.54
00:00:27.000 If you are that person, then Hypocrisy just doesn't play a part.
00:00:33.000 Hypocrisy is never a problem because, after all, you're calling for societal change.
00:00:37.000 You yourself don't have to abide by any of those rules because some animals are more equal than other animals.
00:00:43.000 But the socialist has the benefit of the bargain because you get to be a socialist as you want to, like Bernie Sanders, and then you get to have a lake house.
00:00:51.000 You get to be a millionaire while proclaiming that, Okay, so this issue has become relevant over the course of the past couple of days because a guy named Hasan Piker, who I believe used to be a Young Turks guy, I don't really know that much about him, he apparently is a socialist Twitch streamer.
00:01:11.000 There's a big article, big glowing profile about him in New York Magazine titled, Streaming with Hasan Piker, the AOC of Twitch.
00:01:19.000 I'm a political commentator with, like, stans.
00:01:21.000 Okay, well, in the past few months, Hasan Piker, it turns out, has been revealed to be a very wealthy person, which is good for him.
00:01:29.000 He has a lot of folks who are following him over at Twitch.
00:01:31.000 That is his prerogative, and I'm glad for him that he's been able to build a following.
00:01:37.000 But a couple of times in the last month, it's been revealed that this out-and-out socialist, I mean, this is what he calls himself, that he is a very wealthy man.
00:01:48.000 Quote, Hassan Piker was in a rage.
00:01:50.000 A million tabs were pinched together like sardines at the top of his browser.
00:01:53.000 His jittery cursor bounced between them, summoning network news, Chiron's YouTube brands, viral tweets, and TikTok memes.
00:01:59.000 Today's trending topic, Piker, who is 30, had purchased a $2.7 million house in West Hollywood.
00:02:04.000 An ordinary Twitch streamer's housing wouldn't make headlines, but over the past five years, Piker has become one of the most prominent socialist pundits in America.
00:02:11.000 The controversy about the purchase had made it to Fox News and Breitbart, and Piker was prepared to take on the interlopers who logged on to see the fireworks.
00:02:18.000 Quote, The only reason my house is expensive is because of the area I live in, he growled. 1.00
00:02:22.000 Are you guys really that stupid? 1.00
00:02:24.000 Um, that doesn't, that's not even a response to the charge. 1.00
00:02:29.000 The charge is that for a socialist, you seem to be spending large, my friend.
00:02:33.000 There are a lot of places that are not in West Hollywood that don't cost $2.7 million.
00:02:38.000 They're all over the United States.
00:02:40.000 You can get yourself a tiny little shack and live yourself the Henry David Thoreau lifestyle for probably 30 grand somewhere.
00:02:47.000 2.7 million bucks, a lot of money.
00:02:49.000 I don't see you handing that out to all of the immiserated workers in the Marxist social construct. 0.98
00:02:55.000 Right, that's the charge.
00:02:57.000 And his response is, well, of course it's expensive around here.
00:02:59.000 This is West Hollywood, which of course is not a response.
00:03:03.000 Piker said three weeks later, quote, as long as you don't defang your core values, as long as you're still speaking truth to power, then F them.
00:03:09.000 Yeah, speaking truth to power is being the guy who buys the $3 million house and does interviews with New York Magazine and then jabbers about how the rich don't pay their fair share.
00:03:16.000 He says, I don't give a bleep.
00:03:19.000 I'm doing this in the least exploitative way you functionally effing can.
00:03:23.000 Really?
00:03:23.000 He says, it's my labor.
00:03:26.000 I'm the one who's streaming for 10 hours.
00:03:28.000 Welcome to capitalism, my dude.
00:03:31.000 It's my labor?
00:03:33.000 Yes, whose labor?
00:03:35.000 So, in other words, you bet on yourself, you've done really well, and you believe that you deserve to keep the proceeds of that labor.
00:03:43.000 But aren't you exploiting all the people who are engaged in commerce with you?
00:03:47.000 After all, what service of value are you providing them?
00:03:50.000 You are Twitch streaming video games.
00:03:52.000 Is that a vital social service?
00:03:54.000 What makes that service significantly more important, socially speaking, from a Marxist perspective, than the guy who picks up the garbage?
00:04:00.000 Why doesn't he own a $2.7 million home in West Hollywood?
00:04:04.000 According to New York Magazine, Piker is a Twitch streamer who spends every day in front of a camera speaking to his 1.5 million followers.
00:04:11.000 But unlike most of the platform's top users, Piker mostly talks politics.
00:04:15.000 He trawls through Twitter and roasts bad takes from career right-wing correspondents like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson.
00:04:20.000 He breaks down hawkish New York Times op-eds line by line, steadily working himself into a frothy fury.
00:04:25.000 It's free associative and open-ended. 0.86
00:04:27.000 I have an accelerated version of brain worms.
00:04:29.000 He says, I'm literally always online.
00:04:31.000 I'm consuming media nonstop.
00:04:33.000 Tune into a Piker stream, watch him condemn the civilian death toll in Afghanistan. 1.00
00:04:37.000 An hour later, he may move on to revisiting his favorite WWE feuds.
00:04:42.000 Fans don't need to have studied Marx to understand where Piker is coming from.
00:04:45.000 Well, they might have to read Marx to understand why Piker is violating core tenets of Marxism.
00:04:54.000 them.
00:04:54.000 .
00:04:56.000 He looms over his streaming rig at six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, in a silver bracelet and paint-speckled cowboy bebop shirt, gnashing a cut of nicotine gum against his molars.
00:05:03.000 On election night, from the same room, he hosted nearly 230,000 concurrent viewers, making him the sixth most-watched election livestream across the internet.
00:05:10.000 A month prior, he broadcast playing the video game Among Us with representatives AOC and Ilhan Omar.
00:05:15.000 Okay, and then later in this little SOP piece, he talks about the tax-the-rich dress that AOC wore.
00:05:25.000 And here's what he said, quote, I think the Met Gala is a disgusting gluttonous exercise.
00:05:29.000 And if given the opportunity to go, I do it in an effing heartbeat.
00:05:32.000 I'm sorry everyone would.
00:05:33.000 Why wouldn't you want to hang out with Frank Ocean?
00:05:35.000 They're not going to the effing Davos summit.
00:05:38.000 Well, but.
00:05:39.000 Yes, they are.
00:05:40.000 What do you think the Met Gala is?
00:05:42.000 It is a bunch of rich liberals who are getting together to feed themselves for their rich liberalism.
00:05:50.000 Again, the media are not interested in calling out hypocrisy.
00:05:53.000 The reason I say that is because this story was now updated, okay?
00:05:56.000 So, there was a Twitch data leak.
00:06:01.000 Here's how it was reported from the New York Times.
00:06:03.000 Twitch, the live video site popular with gamers, said on Wednesday it had endured a data breach that security researchers believe may have provided sweeping insight into the platform's computer code security vulnerabilities and payments to its content creators.
00:06:15.000 Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, confirmed it had been breached hours after a user posted what the user claimed was an enormous trove of Twitch data onto the anonymous message board website 4chan.
00:06:24.000 The user said the file contained, among other items, the history of Twitch's source code, proprietary software development kits, an unreleased competitor to Steam, an online game store, and programs, and a list of the amount of money that each of the site's streamers has earned since 2019.
00:06:38.000 Find out how much our favorite streamer is really making, the user posted.
00:06:40.000 Jeff Bezos paid 970 million bucks for this.
00:06:43.000 We're giving it away for free.
00:06:44.000 Again, we're going through this New York Times piece about Twitch.
00:06:47.000 Buried way down in this article.
00:06:50.000 Way down in this article.
00:06:53.000 Is this little revelation, quote, according to the list of earnings, which could not be independently verified, some notable personalities had made millions of dollars since 2019.
00:07:00.000 One streamer, Hassan Piker, anticipated people getting angry about the amount of money the list said he had made.
00:07:07.000 Just woke up to some fun news, he tweeted.
00:07:10.000 Can't wait for people to be mad at me about my publicly available sub count again.
00:07:13.000 And then he trended.
00:07:15.000 He said, bro, come on.
00:07:18.000 So, it never says in here what exactly Hasan Piker made.
00:07:21.000 Now, let's just put it this way.
00:07:24.000 It makes headlines every time a conservative signs a contract.
00:07:28.000 If the IRS information of conservative commentators were leaked, you think that wouldn't be front page news?
00:07:33.000 It would absolutely be front page news.
00:07:34.000 And it wouldn't be about the leak or how the leak came about.
00:07:39.000 What it would be about was the amount of money that everybody was making.
00:07:42.000 How do we know this?
00:07:43.000 Because the front page of every major newspaper this week was about what international figures made via IRS documents that were leaked.
00:07:50.000 Right?
00:07:50.000 And other sort of financial documents that were leaked.
00:07:52.000 It was the content.
00:07:53.000 It was the story.
00:07:55.000 So, what exactly did these leaked documents show?
00:07:57.000 It showed that Hassan apparently rakes in about three million bucks a year by doing his Twitch streaming.
00:08:03.000 Which is a lot of money.
00:08:05.000 It's a lot more money than your average day-to-day Marxist Lower class worker.
00:08:13.000 The social class of people who are doing the actual labor that is being exploited.
00:08:19.000 Why isn't that the headline?
00:08:20.000 The reason that isn't the headline is because socialists are never held to their own standards.
00:08:24.000 They are never held to their own standards.
00:08:26.000 See, here's the thing about socialism.
00:08:27.000 If you actually held to your standard, then you would presumably be very concerned with giving away a lot of your money to charity or ensuring that the amount of money that you made for your socially useless service, according to Marx's theory, because of course your labor should be judged by some outside metric that is not the market.
00:08:43.000 So somebody's gonna have to explain, by Marxist theory, why exactly it is more valuable for a guy to sit around and stream video games than it is for somebody to clean toilets.
00:08:53.000 I can explain it because market says that's what it's worth.
00:08:56.000 Things are worth what people say they are worth.
00:08:58.000 But I'm not sure how, from a Marxist perspective, you can make that case.
00:09:01.000 I also am not sure how you defend a $2.7 million home or a $3 million income for doing those things, and then say, it's my labor.
00:09:08.000 No, no, no, that's my perspective, dude.
00:09:10.000 If you're gonna do the it's my labor routine, Welcome to capitalism, Madude.
00:09:14.000 Seriously.
00:09:17.000 So it is amusing to watch the media play this game. 0.99
00:09:19.000 You're a hypocrite if you're a right-winger who abrogates your own principles. 0.98
00:09:23.000 If you're a left-wing socialist who earns millions of dollars for talking online, Then you are not a hypocrite in any way. 0.99
00:09:29.000 By the way, if you're a, if you're a left-wing outlet that rails against the evils of capitalism while taking millions of dollars from hedge funds and YouTube, you're not a hypocrite either.
00:09:38.000 That's the way this works.
00:09:39.000 Nobody has to hold you to account or point out that you need to, if you are, if you are Young Turks, for example, and you attempt to crush your own unionization efforts, right? 0.92
00:09:47.000 If you're, if you are the, the outlet for unionization, unionization is the only thing that matters.
00:09:52.000 And then like a couple of years ago, it turns out that people at your place are trying to unionize and you yell at them not to unionize.
00:09:58.000 Nobody seems to care very much about that.
00:10:02.000 And now here's my belief about hypocrisy.
00:10:04.000 You can make the case for Hassan or TYT or who I believe Hassan used to be at TYT.
00:10:10.000 You can make the case for all of these people that personal activity doesn't abrogate the principle.
00:10:16.000 You can make the case that the Marxist principles are correct and you are living in opposition to those Marxist principles because everybody is a sinner, right?
00:10:26.000 This is sort of the religious perspective.
00:10:27.000 There are religious principles about morals.
00:10:29.000 You don't always live up to those because everybody is a sinner.
00:10:31.000 That doesn't mean the morals are wrong.
00:10:32.000 It means you're wrong.
00:10:34.000 But you can't have it both ways.
00:10:35.000 You can't say, everything I'm doing is entirely justified and I'm a Marxist stalwart while simultaneously living high on the hog the way that a capitalist would.
00:10:44.000 Here's my capitalist view of all this.
00:10:45.000 Congratulations to Hassan on earning his business success.
00:10:49.000 I hope he enjoys his $2.7 million house and his $200,000 of earned income every month.
00:10:53.000 I hope he enjoys it to the fullest of his ability and lives a happy, fulfilling capitalist life.
00:10:59.000 Same for all of the people over at places like TYT.
00:11:02.000 But please, stop pretending that you are a good Marxist if you don't live like a Marxist and justify yourself in capitalist terms.
00:11:08.000 Because that ain't the way this works.
00:11:10.000 At least acknowledge your sins against the great gods of socialist redistribution.
00:11:15.000 I know what you're thinking.
00:11:16.000 It's time to binge some more Ben Shapiro videos.
00:11:18.000 Well, you are right.
00:11:19.000 You should.
00:11:20.000 But first, like and subscribe.
00:11:23.000 Perfect!