The Ben Shapiro Show - Is It The Media’s Job To Scare People? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 359

00:00:00.000 Is the media deliberately scaring people about North Korea?

00:00:02.000 Are Republicans really willing to cancel the 2020 election?

00:00:05.000 And we're about to have on the famous, infamous, most important guy in America today, James Damore, the Google Memo guy, in just a second.

00:00:13.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:14.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:21.000 Okay, we're all waiting with bated breath to talk to James Damore.

00:00:24.000 He's sitting right here on the Skype, so we're going to be talking to him momentarily.

00:00:27.000 We just want to jump right into it because I know that our audience has been waiting with bated breath ever since I announced this morning on Twitter that we would be having on the author of the Google Memo, the infamous Google Memo, the most important document since the Magna Carta, James Damore, is joining us right now.

00:00:41.000 He, of course, was a senior engineer at Google until he made the mistake of penning an eminently correct scientific treatise on the differences between men and women and why that may contribute in part

00:00:51.000 Yeah, thanks a lot.

00:01:03.000 Okay, so let me just jump right in here, and I want to ask you, to start, you've alleged that there's actually some illegal activity going on at Google, because that's why presumably they should be in trouble for firing you, because it's an at-will state, California's an at-will state, anybody can be fired for any reason, but according to the National Labor Relations Board, you cannot be fired if you're whistleblowing.

00:01:24.000 So what is the purported illegal activity that's going on at Google that you are attempting to expose?

00:01:28.000 So part of it is that

00:01:32.000 They treat people differently in the hiring process depending on what their race or gender is.

00:01:39.000 And some teams will preferentially choose certain groups.

00:01:45.000 Okay, so you've also said that they have these sort of super secret diversity sessions in which they discuss all of this.

00:01:51.000 Can you take us inside one of those?

00:01:53.000 What does that look like from the inside?

00:01:55.000 It's just a group of all these people talking about the benefits of diversity and how much they love diversity and all the sexism and racism that happens and how we have to try to fix that.

00:02:11.000 Okay, we know that Google has spent some 265 million dollars apparently trying to increase their diversity ratios, and this of course has been a wild fail.

00:02:18.000 Well, I've read your memo at least three times now because I just want to make sure I'm not crazy.

00:02:23.000 Because if you watch the media coverage of your memo, it is not in any way related to the actual content of the memo.

00:02:28.000 The media has made a bunch of different claims about the memo.

00:02:30.000 They've said that you were saying in the memo that women are biologically unfit for tech. 1.00

00:02:34.000 That was a chyron on CNN.

00:02:36.000 Were you making the claim, James Damore?

00:02:38.000 Google Memo Guy, were you making the claim that women are biologically unfit for the tech industry? 0.88

00:02:44.000 No, I was just trying to explain why we see a disparity in the population of people that are interested in working in tech.

00:02:53.000 And you can see that right there.

00:02:55.000 I mean, I'm quoting your memo back to you here, but it says, I'm not saying that all men differ from all women in the following ways so that these differences are just.

00:03:01.000 I'm simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women, women differ in part due to biological causes.

00:03:08.000 This has been translated by the left into you are saying that women ought not work in tech or they're unqualified for tech. 1.00

00:03:14.000 You weren't even saying when you have an entire section of your memo

00:03:17.000 Promoting the idea that there should be more women in tech, and you offered a bunch of ways that you think that the tech community could be made more welcoming to women.

00:03:23.000 So are you in favor of more women in tech? 0.99

00:03:26.000 Yeah, I mean, I like women, right? 1.00

00:03:31.000 And if we're in general just trying to get more people interested in tech, then that would be one way to do it.

00:03:36.000 So I want to talk to you a little bit about something that the YouTube CEO, a woman named Susan Wojcicki, that she wrote this morning over at Forbes.

00:03:45.000 She wrote a piece at Forbes about the horrors of your memo, and how they'd obviously emotionally crippled her young daughter, who apparently came up to her and said, Mom, is it true that there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership?

00:03:56.000 Now, it seems to me that that was not exactly the claim you were making.

00:04:00.000 Is it true there are biological reasons why there are fewer women in tech and leadership? 1.00

00:04:03.000 What's your response to the YouTube CEO?

00:04:06.000 Well, I mean, to me, at least, it felt a lot like what Piers Morgan was trying to do to you on his show by taking a little kid out and saying, oh, aren't you sorry for him?

00:04:18.000 Right?

00:04:18.000 I mean, they're just trying to guilt me.

00:04:21.000 So I do want to ask you about what the political representation is like inside Google, because there was a poll, sort of an informal poll, that came out this morning.

00:04:30.000 Uh, that said that 56% of people who were responding to this online poll who are working at Google said that they were against your firing.

00:04:38.000 Um, number one, you know, are there a lot of people inside Google who have been expressing support for you?

00:04:43.000 Yeah.

00:04:44.000 Since I've wrote it, there have been many people that privately messaged me and said, yeah, I support you.

00:04:49.000 I agree.

00:04:50.000 This is a real problem.

00:04:52.000 Do you think that Google is biasing their search results in the way they do business toward the left?

00:04:56.000 Do you think that how they're treating you is reflective of how they do business as a company?

00:05:00.000 I don't know about biasing search results, but they may definitely be biasing who they do business with.

00:05:08.000 Okay, so, and inside the company itself, do you think that there is an obvious political preference for, you know, folks on the left?

00:05:16.000 You know, if you had written a memo about how Black Lives Matter was the cause of the day, and that really mattered more than anything else.

00:05:22.000 I mean, there are all these sort of internal Google chats, apparently, that you're a part of, these Google message boards.

00:05:26.000 Have you ever seen stuff like that?

00:05:28.000 Politically oriented material toward the left, and has that ever been a problem for anyone?

00:05:33.000 Yeah, so you can openly shame white people or all men, and we do this in our company-wide meetings. 0.64

00:05:41.000 So, yeah, there's definitely a bias towards certain movements.

00:05:47.000 We had a whole TGIF that was for the Black Lives Matter movement.

00:05:52.000 And can you give me some example?

00:05:54.000 I mean, you say you have company-wide meetings where people are shamed.

00:05:56.000 What does that sound like?

00:05:57.000 Can you give me an example of some stuff that people have said?

00:06:01.000 So one example was just that someone wrote a question, and then it had something to do with gender.

00:06:11.000 She was a woman.

00:06:11.000 And out of 300 votes, 50 of them were downvoted.

00:06:17.000 And she was complaining about how she didn't feel included at Google because she got one-sixth of them downvotes.

00:06:25.000 And there were many other just random examples.

00:06:31.000 Okay, so, with all of this said, number one, I think you have a lot of broad public support, obviously, but what do you think this says about the left's views of science?

00:06:39.000 Because there's an article in Slate, for example, today saying science is bad now.

00:06:43.000 We've now found that science is bad.

00:06:45.000 Susan, watch Kiki as I say, she said at the very end of her screed, she said that these are questions that shouldn't even be asked.

00:06:53.000 This is a direct quote from her piece at Forbes today.

00:06:55.000 For example, for instance, what if we replace the word women in the memo with another group?

00:06:59.000 What if the memo said that biological differences amongst black, hispanic, or LGBTQ employees explain their underrepresentation in tech and leadership roles?

00:07:07.000 Would some people still be discussing the merit of the memo's arguments or would there be a universal call for swift action against its author?

00:07:13.000 What do you make of the left essentially saying that questions can never be asked about topics where the answer may not favor what the left wishes it to say?

00:07:24.000 They're at least just putting their ideology before truth in these cases.

00:07:29.000 And she's just trying to guilt me by association with Nazis or something.

00:07:36.000 And when one group is just trying to guilt you and call you names, and the other is actually using evidence and science, you really know which side is actually seeking truth.

00:07:48.000 And this, I think, is one of the points that is why this story has captured the imagination is because the memo itself is really moderate in tone and tenor.

00:07:55.000 Even people like Kirsten Powers, who are on the left, have said they really don't see what the big problem here is or why people are going nuts over it.

00:08:02.000 And yet you step out of line at a company like Google.

00:08:04.000 And the reason people are freaked out about this is obviously Google is a super powerful company, but this happens inside Hollywood all the time.

00:08:09.000 This happens inside journalistic institutions all the time, obviously.

00:08:12.000 So, James Damore, Google Memo guy, what comes next for you?

00:08:15.000 I've offered you off the air, I offered you a columnist gig to write about STEM issues, particularly with regard to differences between men and women and social science data and all of this, but I assume that you have job offers that are coming in from a wide variety of sources.

00:08:30.000 What comes next for you now that Google is no longer in your future?

00:08:35.000 Yeah, I'm still evaluating all my options.

00:08:37.000 It's been a really busy past few days.

00:08:41.000 And I've heard also that you were offered a position by WikiLeaks.

00:08:45.000 I would urge you not to take that.

00:08:47.000 I think that is probably a bad career move, but it's up to you.

00:08:50.000 You're a free man.

00:08:51.000 So, well, thank you for writing this memo, because I think obviously when more truth is promulgated, it's a better country.

00:08:58.000 And please keep us updated as far as your own lawsuit.

00:09:02.000 Is that actually going to happen, or is that just a possibility at this point, a lawsuit against Google?

00:09:06.000 Yeah, it's a possibility.

00:09:09.000 I'm definitely pursuing it, though.

00:09:11.000 Okay, so keep us updated on that, and obviously we are rooting for you as far as the whistleblowing aspect of this, and please keep writing true things even though there's pretty tremendous blowback.

00:09:22.000 Thanks so much for joining the show, I really appreciate it.

00:09:24.000 Alright, thanks.

00:09:25.000 Thanks.

00:09:26.000 That's James Damore.

00:09:26.000 He's the senior engineer at Google who penned that diversity memo regarding why Google should change its practices if it wants to attract more women, actually.

00:09:34.000 And he got shellacked for it by the left and fired from Google for that.

00:09:39.000 James Damore, senior engineer at Google.

00:09:41.000 Thanks so much.

00:09:42.000 In other news, I want to talk about what's going on with North Korea because obviously this continues to unfold.

00:09:49.000 Let's start with Brian Williams.

00:09:50.000 So Brian Williams, who should not be a member of the media after repeatedly lying about his own past over and over and over.

00:09:56.000 Brian Williams was on MSNBC last night where he is still respected because it's MSNBC.

00:10:01.000 And Brian Williams said that the reason that the media are covering North Korea in such insane terms

00:10:07.000 is because it is their job to scare people.

00:10:09.000 Now, before we get to Brian Williams on this, I do want to say that I think that a lot of this is overblown.

00:10:14.000 North Korea has been pursuing nuclear weapons for a long time.

00:10:16.000 They've had nuclear weapons for a long time.

00:10:18.000 Obviously, it's not good if an ICBM is capable of reaching the United States, but mutually assured destruction is still a thing, and Kim Jong-un or his successors 0.99

00:10:28.000 They would be fools, absolute fools, if they were to try and attack the United States. 1.00

00:10:32.000 We would wipe them off the face of the earth in no time flat. 1.00

00:10:34.000 I mean, legitimately. 0.99

00:10:35.000 If they fired a nuke at us, they would be toast.

00:10:38.000 Their country would be a sea of glass within moments.

00:10:41.000 I mean, this is not even talking about the USSR, right?

00:10:43.000 The fact is that even if their missile hit here, it would do, you know, awful, awful damage.

00:10:47.000 That would be terrible. 0.98

00:10:49.000 But we would survive it, and then we would nuke the living crap out of them, and that would be the end of that. 0.98

00:10:53.000 So, mutually assured destruction is still a thing. 0.98

00:10:56.000 South Korea, it's a little bit 0.91

00:10:58.000 It's a little bit more

00:11:18.000 Mutually Assured Destruction actually doesn't do the trick for you, because you always have to fear that there's going to be a conventional war under the umbrella of the Mutually Assured Destruction with the North Koreans. 0.94

00:11:25.000 But, for the United States, are we deeply worried that they're going to destroy us?

00:11:29.000 No, we're not deeply worried they're going to destroy us.

00:11:31.000 I'm not losing a lot of sleep over the possibility that LA is going to be destroyed, even though we are under the umbrella of the North Korean nuclear missile. 0.51

00:11:38.000 I'm really, like, really, I think that a lot of this is hyped to the extreme.

00:11:42.000 But Brian Williams says that the media have a duty to hype this to the extreme.

00:11:47.000 Our job tonight actually is to scare people to death on this subject so the talk isn't as free as it is about a preemptive or surgical military strike.

00:11:57.000 Okay, why is it their job to scare people to death?

00:11:59.000 And this is the problem with the media.

00:12:00.000 The media sees it as their job to push you into a certain position.

00:12:04.000 They see it as their job to evoke a certain emotional response in you.

00:12:07.000 And it's something that we ought to keep in mind when we look at media coverage of world events.

00:12:11.000 For many members of the media, it is not just about covering the events that are important to you.

00:12:15.000 It is about trying to cover the events so as to evoke an emotional response in a particular way.

00:12:20.000 Another example of this today on an unrelated topic.

00:12:22.000 So there's a poll that lefties are passing around from the Washington Post that says 52%

00:12:27.000 Of course.

00:12:44.000 Okay, so you're getting a lot of think pieces from the left.

00:12:48.000 Speaking of the media, though, pushing people to an emotional response, it's important to know how they got this particular result.

00:12:53.000 This was a push poll by the Washington Post.

00:12:55.000 First, it asked respondents if voter fraud was real.

00:12:59.000 Then it asked them...

00:13:00.000 If they thought that it occurred, and if Trump won the popular vote, and then finally it asked them, if Trump said that it occurred, would they be in favor of postponing the election?

00:13:07.000 So are these good results?

00:13:08.000 No, they're not good results.

00:13:09.000 But is it true that more than half of Republicans would be fine with postponing the 2020 election?

00:13:13.000 I highly, highly doubt it.

00:13:15.000 Also important to recognize that these sort of push polls exist from both sides.

00:13:19.000 You know, in 2016, there was a poll from WPA Research that found that two-thirds of Democrats would take an unconstitutional third Obama term

00:13:27.000 Over Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:13:28.000 A poll on November 14 from The Economist found that 39% of Democrats wish the Constitution would be changed to that purpose.

00:13:35.000 So, a couple of lessons from these things.

00:13:37.000 First lesson is, most people only like the rules if they benefit them.

00:13:41.000 They only like the elections every four years if their guy's not in power.

00:13:44.000 But, the more important thing is that the media attempt to gain a particular headline and very often

00:13:48.000 They are attempting to get to that headline via the questions they ask.

00:13:53.000 And you can see it even, look, in the interviews that I do, obviously when I ask a question, I'm expecting a particular response from people.

00:13:58.000 When I talk to James Damore, I'm questioning him in a way that I think is important, but obviously the responses that he gives are ones that I'm looking for, right?

00:14:06.000 I mean, I'm not questioning him as a feminist would, who's looking for a different response from James Damore.

00:14:11.000 You know, that's the way the media works, and so you should always take that into account

00:14:14.000 When you look at the coverage of North Korea.

00:14:16.000 So the media yesterday was going nuts over Trump's apparently provocative threats.

00:14:21.000 Fire and the fury, the fury and the fire, the power, the glory, the fury, fire, power, glory, huge emissaries, bands of evil, right?

00:14:28.000 They were going nuts over Trump's over to the top language.

00:14:31.000 But the reality is, does any of that make a huge difference in all of this?

00:14:35.000 Not really.

00:14:35.000 Okay, General James Mattis came out, Mad Dog Mattis came out yesterday, and what he said was, quote, The United States and our allies have the demonstrated capabilities and unquestionable commitment to defend ourselves from an attack.

00:14:46.000 Kim Jong-un should take heed of the UN Security Council's unified voice and statements from governments the world over who agree the DPRK, that's Democratic People's Republic of Korea, poses a threat to global security and stability. 0.92

00:14:57.000 The DPRK must choose to stop isolating itself and stand down its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

00:15:02.000 The DPRK should cease any considerations of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.

00:15:08.000 That's pretty harsh language from Mattis, but I don't see the media losing their minds over that.

00:15:12.000 Back, I think it was last year or a couple of years ago, Barack Obama threatened to destroy North Korea.

00:15:16.000 So the media obviously are attempting to evoke fear in Americans.

00:15:20.000 That Trump's precipitous nature will lead to a nuclear exchange.

00:15:23.000 That's not what's going to happen here.

00:15:25.000 It's not what's going to happen here.

00:15:26.000 And North Korea is basically, they understand that they're in a rhetorical pissing match now with Trump.

00:15:31.000 And so there's a statement released by the North Korean military in which they basically called Trump a load of nonsense. 0.91

00:15:39.000 They said that his threat was a quote-unquote load of nonsense. 0.95

00:15:42.000 And they called him a guy bereft of reason.

00:15:44.000 So you basically have Trump and the leader of North Korea in a Twitter fight, but is this going to devolve into nuclear war?

00:15:50.000 I really don't think so.

00:15:51.000 And here's the fact, okay?

00:15:53.000 The fact is that people who are living really under the threat of North Korea are happy that the United States is taking a pretty militant position on all of this. 0.69

00:15:59.000 Guam, which was a nation that was threatened by North Korea in response to Trump's threat, the governor of Guam, he likes Trump.

00:16:08.000 I mean, here he is praising Trump.

00:16:10.000 So do you think that the president's remarks are getting to the heart of the problem, no longer strategic patience, and does that play to solving this problem in the big picture?

00:16:23.000 As far as I'm concerned, as an American citizen, I want a president that says that if any nation such as North Korea attacks Guam, attacks Honolulu, attacks the West Coast, that they will be met with hell and fury.

00:16:38.000 What I'm concerned about is if a US senator says initiate an attack and causing a war and remembering that there are there in the Mariana Islands, this is American sovereign style.

00:16:49.000 This is 600 mile archipelago of islands similar to Hawaii, where there are over 200,000 American citizens.

00:16:56.000 Right.

00:16:56.000 So it's important that as we make decisions, that those folks that are in a position of leadership, that they understand to that war is the last

00:17:07.000 Right.

00:17:30.000 And I think everybody is on board with this.

00:17:32.000 I don't think Trump is precipitously into launching nuclear war, but a lot of this is the Democrats playing politics with all of this.

00:17:38.000 A lot of this is the Democrats attempting to play politics with national security and basically suggest that Trump is a madman who is going to get us into a nuclear war.

00:17:49.000 An MSCBC military analyst essentially said this. 0.99

00:17:51.000 He said if Trump ordered a nuclear launch, Mattis would defy it because obviously Trump is crazy.

00:18:00.000 This is going to be clip 4. 0.96

00:18:19.000 Okay, so this is the narrative the media is creating, is that Trump is a nutcase and he's going to order a nuclear launch for no apparent reason.

00:18:25.000 Again, I've seen no evidence of this on the international scale from President Trump, this sort of precipitous action.

00:18:30.000 Even on domestic policy, Trump will fire off a tweet, but the actions that he's taking are really not particularly precipitous.

00:18:36.000 The only precipitous action that you can say that Trump has really taken was his transgender ban in the military tweets, and even those are not being implemented by the Pentagon because there was no follow-up.

00:18:45.000 So, you know, the business of American government does not work quite as smoothly as people think.

00:18:50.000 Now there's this sort of

00:18:52.000 Old Cold War mentality that we're five seconds away from launching nuclear war I don't think that's right And I do think that the media are attempting to twist you into knots make you feel really uncomfortable make you feel like we're a second away from being obliterated You know we also don't know what nuclear we all we also know military options are on the table

00:19:07.000 I mean, we don't.

00:19:08.000 I've been saying this now for weeks, okay?

00:19:09.000 I don't know as much as the Department of Defense knows about what military options are on the table to take out the Kim regime.

00:19:15.000 But I promise you that the last thing that anyone wants, including President Trump, is a nuclear exchange.

00:19:20.000 As President Trump said during the campaign, there's nothing like nuclear.

00:19:23.000 Nothing like it.

00:19:24.000 It's just the biggest and the hugest.

00:19:27.000 Do you remember when he said that?

00:19:27.000 He actually said that during a debate, which is pretty incredible.

00:19:29.000 So, all of that said,

00:19:32.000 Don't be deeply worried.

00:19:33.000 Don't worry so much.

00:19:34.000 Everything will be okay.

00:19:35.000 You know, worry in the sense that we should come up with a solution to North Korea, but don't worry that we're five seconds away from a nuclear exchange. 0.88

00:19:41.000 We're not.

00:19:42.000 Okay, so, before I go any further, I want to talk about Trump's conflict with Mitch McConnell.

00:19:46.000 I also really want to get to some things I like, things I hate, and the big idea.

00:19:49.000 Today, I really want to get to the big idea because I think there's some important stuff here.

00:19:52.000 There is a bit of a conflict breaking out now between President Trump and Mitch McConnell, and that's not because Trump and McConnell disagree on policy as much as it is because Trump doesn't like when people insult him.

00:20:02.000 And this is my biggest problem with Trump attacking McConnell.

00:20:06.000 If you want to attack McConnell on policy, I'm totally fine with that.

00:20:08.000 McConnell has not been an effective Senate Majority Leader thus far, clearly.

00:20:12.000 If you're just attacking McConnell because you're mad at him, then that's a whole different story.

00:20:17.000 You know, it seems that he's attacking McConnell because he's mad at him, not on policy.

00:20:20.000 If you're really mad at McConnell on policy, he wouldn't be backing Luther Strange in Alabama, who's sort of a moderate Republican who backs McConnell's play, over a couple of other candidates like Roy Moore in Alabama.

00:20:30.000 So, what this really says to me is that Trump is still being driven by personal animus for particular political figures, not being driven by policy considerations, which is a problem, right?

00:20:38.000 I want to see the policy, I don't care about the personal animus.

00:20:41.000 I don't care about Trump's personal issues.

00:20:42.000 I don't care that Trump likes McConnell.

00:20:44.000 That makes no difference to me.

00:20:45.000 It makes a difference to me whether we get the policies that I would like to see.

00:20:49.000 And that's what should make a difference to you.

00:20:50.000 You shouldn't be upset if Trump is mad at McConnell or McConnell's upset at Trump.

00:20:53.000 Who cares?

00:20:53.000 It isn't a soap opera.

00:20:55.000 You should be much more upset if you're not getting the policies that were promised to you.

00:20:59.000 So Trump was ripping McConnell on Twitter.

00:21:01.000 It all started because McConnell stated at some Rotary Club meeting that Trump had excessive expectations of what the Senate could do.

00:21:09.000 The storyline is that we haven't done much is because

00:21:16.000 In part, the President and others have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point.

00:21:24.000 Now, our new President has, of course, not been in this line of work before.

00:21:30.000 And I think had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process.

00:21:40.000 And so, part of the reason I think people feel like we're underperforming is because

00:21:47.000 Okay, so McConnell is not totally wrong on this.

00:21:49.000 I mean, the fact is that President Trump doesn't understand how the vagaries of the Senate work, and so he's upset with it.

00:22:10.000 Trump, but Trump is right when he says this to McConnell.

00:22:12.000 So here he tweets back at McConnell, and he tweets that, he tweets,

00:22:22.000 Fair question.

00:22:24.000 Trump should ask himself that because he wasn't particularly active, as we pointed out at the time, in pushing this thing beyond the last couple of weeks and didn't understand the policy.

00:22:31.000 But, you know, that's not a wrong demand.

00:22:33.000 I would hope that Trump's personal animus for Mitch McConnell turns into him actually demanding policies that I like from Mitch McConnell and McConnell caving.

00:22:40.000 That's what I would like to see.

00:22:41.000 But as even Laura Ingraham is noting, you know, it's hard for Trump to be ripping McConnell at the same time he's providing McConnell with more senators who agree with McConnell.

00:22:49.000 President Trump came out and endorsed Luther Strange in that Alabama special election for Jeff Sessions' seat.

00:22:59.000 Now, Luther Strange was appointed, so he's the incumbent for the time being.

00:23:03.000 But there's all these other people running, including Mo Brooks and Judge Roy Moore is running.

00:23:10.000 And so they're probably going to have to have a runoff because no one will get a majority.

00:23:14.000 But Donald Trump came out and endorsed the incumbent, more of an establishment,

00:23:18.000 Uh, guy, Luther Strange, and that is very interesting because that's Mitch McConnell's favorite pick.

00:23:22.000 Right, and if Lord Enron is acknowledging this, this is obviously true.

00:23:25.000 So, if Trump is going to go after members of the Republican Party, let's do it on the basis of policy.

00:23:30.000 What I don't want, and what I sort of see happening, which is not particularly encouraging to me, is that President Trump is mad at leaders of the Republican Party, and you could easily see Chuck Schumer making an overture to him after the 2018 election, and Trump swiveling left in order to work with people who are praising him more fulsomely.

00:23:45.000 And gaining praise from the New York Times in the process.

00:23:47.000 That's the scary part of all of this in terms of policy.

00:23:50.000 Okay, I want to get to things I like and things I hate in The Big Idea, but before we do all that, you're gonna have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.

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00:25:02.000 Okay, so let's do some things I like and some things I hate in The Big Idea.

00:25:05.000 So Thursdays are our Big Idea Day here at the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:25:10.000 So let's first start with things I like.

00:25:12.000 So, you know, we're talking about communism and I thought that it would be worthwhile to recommend a book about North Korea in case you are interested in what North Korea is actually like today.

00:25:21.000 The book is by Andrei Lankov and it's called The Real North Korea Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia.

00:25:27.000 And it's a fascinating book because it doesn't try to paint

00:25:30.000 An excessively dark picture of North Korea while not ignoring the problems in North Korea.

00:25:35.000 Basically it says that it is a stunted rump state that is run in the most horrific dictatorial way and that manifests more in the everyday lives of North Koreans than it even does in sort of our horror imaginations of gulags and people being shot en masse. 0.73

00:25:49.000 That's less what's happening than just the gradual degradation

00:25:53.000 of a great people.

00:25:54.000 And the real North Korea, Andrei Lankov, fully worth reading.

00:25:58.000 I think a fair and honest, relatively objective look at what North Korea is like today.

00:26:03.000 It is a stain on the global, on the so-called global community that doesn't really exist.

00:26:08.000 It's a stain on the UN, certainly, that North Korea has continued to terrorize its people for more than half a century at this point, just as it's a stain on the international community that Cuba continues to be a dictatorial backwater.

00:26:20.000 It's really

00:26:21.000 It's really quite horrifying.

00:26:23.000 If there were a way to get rid of the Kim regime, I'm all for it. 0.91

00:26:25.000 Okay, other things that I like.

00:26:27.000 So, this exchange is making the rounds on the interwebs.

00:26:32.000 It is an amazing exchange.

00:26:33.000 James Franco, the actor, was talking with this Princeton professor, and the issue of abortion came up.

00:26:38.000 Now, this Princeton professor, her name is Elliot Michelson.

00:26:42.000 And she is discussing her support for early-stage abortion and why she believes nothing morally bad happens when it occurs.

00:26:49.000 And even James Franco is sitting there going, what you're saying makes no sense to me.

00:26:52.000 Okay?

00:26:53.000 And James Franco, I cannot imagine, is pro-life.

00:26:55.000 But even he is looking at her and going, this doesn't make sense what you are saying.

00:26:59.000 Namely, because what the left says with regard to abortion doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of moral sense.

00:27:03.000 Here's a bit of the exchange.

00:27:05.000 In some of my work, I defend a liberal position about early abortion.

00:27:10.000 So I defend the view that there's nothing morally bad about early abortion.

00:27:15.000 So a lot of people think, well, it's permissible to have an abortion, but something bad happens when the fetus dies.

00:27:21.000 And I think if a fetus hasn't ever been conscious, it hasn't ever had any experiences, and we abort it at that stage, that actually nothing morally bad happens.

00:27:31.000 And this view might seem unattractive, because it might seem that it dictates a cold attitude towards all early fetuses.

00:27:39.000 But what I think is that actually, among early fetuses,

00:27:43.000 There are two very different kinds of beings.

00:27:46.000 So, James, when you were an early fetus, and Elliot, when you were an early fetus, all of us, I think that we already did have moral status then.

00:27:55.000 But we had moral status in virtue of our futures, in virtue of the fact that we were the beginning stages of persons.

00:28:02.000 But some early fetuses will die 0.81

00:28:05.000 I don't know.

00:28:17.000 Okay, and James Frankel goes, uh, can't you only judge that in hindsight?

00:28:20.000 When James Frankel is wrecking you on abortion, and you're a professor at Princeton, you should lose your job.

00:28:26.000 Okay, like that is the worst argument in favor of early stage abortion I've ever heard.

00:28:31.000 The left, when they make the argument for early stage abortion, what they say is that this is not a fully formed human life.

00:28:35.000 Like, that's actually an argument, okay?

00:28:37.000 That it has not reached the stage of life at which we care.

00:28:40.000 It's not a good argument, right?

00:28:41.000 It's not an argument I agree with, because potential life is still potential life.

00:28:44.000 And the question as to what level of potential life is necessary in order for you not to be able to kill it, that's a pretty dicey question morally.

00:28:52.000 Because they're children who are born with disabilities. 0.76

00:28:54.000 You get to kill them because they don't have a lot of potential to grow into full human beings, or fully functional human beings. 0.54

00:29:01.000 This is why the abortion argument doesn't work. 0.99

00:29:02.000 But the argument she's making is so nonsensical that James Frankel absolutely wrecks her unconsciously.

00:29:07.000 Without even thinking about it, he says, if a woman decides to have an abortion with an early fetus, just that act or that intention negates the moral status of that early fetus, just because if she goes out and has an abortion, it's pretty certain it's not going to become a person.

00:29:18.000 And this professor just struggles and struggles and struggles and struggles as well as she should. 0.62

00:29:23.000 Again, this lady, this lady, was a, she's a member of the, of the, she has a philosophy, a PhD in philosophy from MIT, a bachelor's from Harvard.

00:29:33.000 Her father was a member of the Princeton Philosophy Department faculty.

00:29:36.000 She's part of the Princeton Philosophy Department faculty.

00:29:40.000 And she teaches courses called Designing Life, The Ethics of Creation and Its Control, and Morality in the Face of Moral Ignorance.

00:29:46.000 Okay, this lady should not be able to teach a course called Morality in the Face of Moral Ignorance when James Franco, again, James Franco, a guy who looks like he maybe has seven brain cells that he can rub together, is wrecking her unconsciously on abortion. 1.00

00:29:58.000 Like when even James Franco's going, uh, this doesn't make a lot of sense to me because it makes no sense.

00:30:03.000 Wow.

00:30:04.000 Wow.

00:30:04.000 So well done, Princeton.

00:30:05.000 Hiring only the best.

00:30:06.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:30:13.000 Okay, so the first thing that I hate, Skip Bayless, who has made a living saying inane things on sports channels for a long time.

00:30:20.000 He used to be on ESPN, now he's on Fox Sports 1, I believe.

00:30:23.000 And he says that Colin Kaepernick not getting a job is a full-on disgrace. 0.95

00:30:27.000 Black players should boycott games in the NFL if Colin Kaepernick, a terrible quarterback, does not get a job. 1.00

00:30:36.000 It's an easy cop-out to say it's because of the flag, and it's not because the subject that he is protesting makes you uncomfortable. 0.98

00:30:45.000 But you know what, Joe?

00:30:46.000 Guess what they used to do, Skip?

00:30:47.000 The NFL used to charge the military to have the servicemen walk out on the field.

00:30:52.000 Terrible.

00:30:52.000 It wasn't until the whistle got uncovered that they were charging that they gave the money back.

00:30:59.000 So they really love the military, but if you want to walk on our field... I'm going to say one last thing.

00:31:03.000 If the black players would unite, 0.97

00:31:06.000 And say we will not play game one this year.

00:31:09.000 I promise you it would have impact if we get something done.

00:31:13.000 Oh yeah.

00:31:13.000 Oh absolutely.

00:31:14.000 Of course it would be.

00:31:15.000 Skip one hundred percent.

00:31:17.000 Earth shattering.

00:31:17.000 Just earth shattering.

00:31:18.000 It'll be unbelievable.

00:31:19.000 It'll be huge.

00:31:20.000 It'll be incredible.

00:31:23.000 No.

00:31:24.000 Okay?

00:31:24.000 No.

00:31:24.000 That's not correct.

00:31:25.000 Okay?

00:31:26.000 The fact is all that will happen is that people will stop actually going to games because people will assume that we are now going to use the NFL as a cram down for leftist politics.

00:31:35.000 Viewership dropped relatively dramatically last year.

00:31:39.000 Thanks in large part to Colin Kaepernick and other players protesting the national anthem.

00:31:44.000 You do this for Colin Kaepernick and you reinvigorate this particular debate.

00:31:47.000 I promise you the NFL is going to lose ratings as well it should because when I watch sports I don't want to hear about how America is racist and sexist and bigoted and homophobic.

00:31:55.000 I just want to watch sports, particularly when a lot of the best players in the sport are black.

00:32:00.000 I mean, just enough is enough.

00:32:01.000 But there is a leftist pandering element that has really gone over the top.

00:32:07.000 Okay, other things that I hate.

00:32:08.000 So Bernie Sanders cut a commercial, and this just demonstrates how far left the left wing has moved.

00:32:13.000 Bernie Sanders cut a commercial about Medicare for All.

00:32:16.000 Look who he is using as a sort of moral guidepost in discussing Medicare for All.

00:32:28.000 I would make sure that employers are not responsible for the healthcare.

00:32:38.000 What that would do is free people up to have more mobility in terms of changing jobs, in terms of not worrying about illness, putting them into bankruptcy, and all those types of situations that we're in now.

00:32:54.000 And the only way to do that is through a single-payer system.

00:32:58.000 Congratulations!

00:32:59.000 Thank you.

00:32:59.000 I just want to say as an election year... Win Butler!

00:33:03.000 Singer, Arcade Fire.

00:33:05.000 We're talking about celebrity stuff, not politics.

00:33:08.000 Congratulations on your MVP!

00:33:10.000 Are we now at the point where the country does need to think about some sort of single-payer system?

00:33:15.000 With my limited knowledge... Warren Buffett.

00:33:17.000 Okay, so it's like this group of deplorables who have decided that single-payer is just grand and great.

00:33:23.000 Do any of these people actually use single-payer?

00:33:26.000 Of course not.

00:33:26.000 All of these people are extraordinarily wealthy.

00:33:28.000 All of them pay for their own insurance.

00:33:30.000 All of them have top-notch insurance.

00:33:32.000 We're good to go!

00:33:52.000 To a tremendous extent, doctors are overburdened, they're not taking a lot of Medicare patients, they won't take new Medicare patients.

00:33:58.000 Even the idea that you're going to purchase supplementary insurance, that's only going to last if there are doctors who take the supplementary insurance plus the Medicare, and a lot of doctors are saying, I'm not even going to work in the Medicare system because the reimbursement rates are too low.

00:34:09.000 So, no, none of this makes any sense, but it just demonstrates the coalition of the far left is growing, but it's still reliant on these tentpoles of insanity, people like Bernie Sanders.

00:34:19.000 So now I want to talk about the big idea.

00:34:20.000 I want to talk about this last week a little bit, and we ran out of time on it, but there's this idea that you see sometimes discussed in philosophical circles, Athens versus Jerusalem.

00:34:32.000 The idea that Western civilization is built on these twin poles, Athens and Jerusalem. 0.76

00:34:36.000 Athens being the idea of Greek reason, people like Plato and Aristotle and Socrates.

00:34:41.000 I don't

00:34:58.000 Both of the poles fall. 0.97

00:34:59.000 Okay, if reason falls, then religion can't last on its own, and if religion falls, then reason can't last on its own.

00:35:05.000 We now live in a secular society where Jerusalem has largely fallen, where people have decided that faith in a creator who cares about you, cares what you do morally, and has created a rational system capable of our interpretation because we're human beings made in his image.

00:35:20.000 As that pole has fallen in esteem in American circles, in secular circles, then science is the next thing to fall.

00:35:26.000 Because without the idea of a rational universe, and a rational creator, and a rationally articulable system, and a people who are capable of grasping huge swaths of that system,

00:35:37.000 You end up with people basically saying that science should no longer be a thing.

00:35:40.000 So Slate has an article out today talking about how science is bad, right?

00:35:44.000 Science is actively bad because it creates this idea that science is going to govern all of us and that there are objective standards of right and wrong, or more importantly, objective standards of true and false.

00:35:53.000 Science can't tell you right and wrong, but science should be able to tell you true and false in scientific terms.

00:35:57.000 The left is saying, science can't even do that anymore.

00:36:00.000 Science can't even do that, because we live in a universe where cause and effect aren't really things, they're just things that we perceive to be.

00:36:06.000 That science is all about the idea of hypotheses being verified, but those hypotheses depend on the ideas that come out of biased brains, and so there's no way to really get to a scientific truth.

00:36:17.000 And so you're seeing the left do this because the left is looking at science and they're saying science is coming up with results that we don't like, so science itself should be undermined.

00:36:24.000 Without the faith in a rational creator and a rational universe capable of our penetration, it's very difficult to make the case that science ought to be the gold standard in terms of how we live.

00:36:33.000 Beyond that,

00:36:34.000 Religion creates the notion of free will and personal responsibility.

00:36:37.000 How do you build a society along those lines, on scientific lines, if you don't believe in any of those things?

00:36:43.000 The tragedy of Western civilization is that if you look back at Aristotle, Aristotle and Plato were attempting to grasp at the infinite, right?

00:36:51.000 When they talk about Plato's cave, this idea that

00:36:53.000 That we are all sitting in a cave and we see shadows on the wall, but there's something out there that we can't fully grasp, but we can sort of grasp the shadows, but we're grasping in darkness.

00:37:00.000 You know, that idea brought to fruition by Aristotle in the idea of the forms.

00:37:07.000 There's a reason that religion, when Aristotle's work was rediscovered in the late first millennium, it was taken in by a lot of Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas and merged with religion.

00:37:19.000 In Judaism, Maimonides tried to do the same thing, looked at Aristotle and saw a religious thinker, a secular but religious thinker, a rational thinker who's attempting to reach out to the idea of the infinite.

00:37:29.000 What is it about the universe that allows us to grasp it in so much of its complexity but not grasp its purposes?

00:37:35.000 Why is that there?

00:37:36.000 Right?

00:37:36.000 This is the big question that animates all of human life and all of human reason and the striving.

00:37:40.000 And the religious community takes that question and they say, okay, here's our answer to the why, but science is going to have to tell you the what.

00:37:46.000 We're going to have to use reason to grasp God, but it's important to grasp God.

00:37:49.000 Why?

00:37:50.000 Because God is involved in your life, cares about you, wants you to succeed, wants you to make good decisions.

00:37:58.000 God is offering you a directionality to history.

00:38:01.000 Right?

00:38:02.000 The idea of a messianic future that we can all move toward.

00:38:05.000 Right, that's something that Judeo-Christian religion very strongly believes in, and free will, right?

00:38:09.000 We are not determined by the stars, which was sort of an ancient idea, that the stars determine our fate.

00:38:13.000 We are determined by our own capacity to make decisions in the world.

00:38:17.000 You combine that with the power of human reason, and you end up creating the most glorious civilization in the history of mankind.

00:38:22.000 But, over time, science ate religion, and now, a sort of bizarre spiritualism is eating science.

00:38:29.000 Because people still have the desire to grasp out at the infinite, and they're looking at science and saying, you're not getting me there.

00:38:35.000 So basically, the Enlightenment comes out of these twin poles.

00:38:38.000 The Enlightenment comes out of the idea that there's a faith-based universe out there.

00:38:43.000 That we can attempt to grasp using Aristotelian reason and using science.

00:38:49.000 And this results in the idea of natural rights, right?

00:38:51.000 Natural rights is a God-based system.

00:38:53.000 We can create a rational, reasonable, freedom-based system, but only if we believe that there is a God who made us in His image.

00:38:59.000 These were the twin poles of the Enlightenment.

00:39:01.000 And then science says, you know what?

00:39:03.000 Let's apply the standards of science to religion. 0.86

00:39:06.000 Okay, religion is unverifiable.

00:39:07.000 Therefore, we can't say anything about it.

00:39:10.000 And then science gets even more, uh, science gets even more provocative.

00:39:14.000 Science says, not only can't we prove religion, religion is false.

00:39:18.000 Right?

00:39:18.000 The Richard Dawkins School of Thought.

00:39:19.000 Science can prove religion false. 0.90

00:39:21.000 And by proving religion false, by proving that it's just a figment of your imagination, we can move into a better world. 0.95

00:39:25.000 Right?

00:39:26.000 Where man is king.

00:39:27.000 Except that the next thing that happened is that science ate the idea that man is king.

00:39:30.000 Because the more you move into the scientific world, the more you realize that human beings are just another animal with a bunch of brain functions.

00:39:36.000 And that, you know, in the E.O.

00:39:38.000 Wilson view of sociobiology, that all of our actions are not free-willed.

00:39:42.000 Right?

00:39:42.000 We can't will our own actions.

00:39:44.000 Everything is predetermined.

00:39:45.000 So why should there be punishment?

00:39:46.000 Why should there be societies?

00:39:47.000 Why are moral standards better?

00:39:48.000 Why shouldn't I do whatever is hedonistically pleasurable to me?

00:39:52.000 Why shouldn't I be the Marquis de Sade?

00:39:54.000 So science, as it progressed, ate the foundations of science itself.

00:39:58.000 And that's what we're seeing.

00:39:59.000 We're seeing the oboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

00:40:05.000 That's what's happening with science right now, because once you disconnect science from faith in a rational universe with a rational creator who cares about us, then you lose, number one, the impetus to actually seek out the universe.

00:40:15.000 Number two,

00:40:16.000 You lose the faith that there is a rational universe to be comprehended.

00:40:19.000 And number three, you lose the free will that would drive you to do all of these things.

00:40:23.000 That's why you need both Athens and Jerusalem. 0.98

00:40:25.000 And they seem mutually exclusive, and they do battle with each other for primacy and the upper hand.

00:40:29.000 But if you lose either one of those, if you lose science, then religion just becomes, you know, grasping at shadows.

00:40:35.000 Religion just becomes faith based in nothing. 0.84

00:40:38.000 And if you lose religion, then science just becomes a group of animals seeking to build huts of sticks.

00:40:46.000 With no meaning and no drive toward a better society.

00:40:50.000 And you have to answer the question as to why a more moral society is necessary when morality has no meaning, better has no meaning, and society has no meaning outside of just a bunch of animals living in a similar space.

00:41:00.000 So this is why you need both Athens and Jerusalem. 0.97

00:41:02.000 This is why reason and faith must hold hands even though they disagree all the time and slap at each other with their free hands.

00:41:09.000 Okay, so we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.

00:41:11.000 It's Thursday, right?

00:41:12.000 Yes, okay.

00:41:13.000 So we'll be back here tomorrow with the mailbag.

00:41:15.000 Remember, we are the number two podcast on iTunes.

00:41:18.000 If you help us out with subscriptions and reviews and listening to the show, then we will overtake Oprah.

00:41:23.000 We will.

00:41:23.000 I have faith.

00:41:24.000 We will overtake Oprah.

00:41:25.000 And you won't get a car.

00:41:26.000 And you won't get a car.

00:41:27.000 And no one will get a car. 1.00

00:41:28.000 Get yourself a damn car. 1.00

00:41:29.000 Okay? 1.00

00:41:29.000 I don't have to get you a car. 1.00

00:41:31.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:41:32.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 11, 2017

Is It The Media’s Job To Scare People? | The Ben Shapiro Show Ep. 359

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