The Daily Californian, the student newspaper over at UC Berkeley, ran an op-ed defending the use of violence in shutting down a speech by alt-right popularizer and professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on Tuesday. The piece was a self-immolating display of narcissistic stupidity. On today's show, Ben Shapiro explains why the students at Berkeley don't seem to understand the crucial mistake they made this week, and why they'll repeat it in the future. Plus, Ben explains why Elizabeth Warren should have been allowed to speak on the Senate floor and why she's a terrible human being. And, of course, he explains why you should not be scared of other people speaking unless they're violently threatening you. Ben Shapiro is the host of the conservative podcast "The Weekly Standard" and host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" on Fox News Radio. He's also a regular contributor on the conservative radio show "The View From The Top" and hosts the conservative think tank "The Alt-Right Project." and is a frequent guest on CNN's "The Situation Room" and other conservative media outlets. He's on the Tonight Show with John Oliver. And he's a frequent contributor on NPR's "Fresh Air" and CBS Radio's "AC/DC." and "ACORN" and "The FiveThirtyEight." Ben also writes for the New York Times and The Huffington Post. and has been featured in the Hollywood Reporter, and is an opinion piece in The Daily Beast, and has his own podcast, The Cut, The View from the Ground Zero. Ben is a regular on CNN and The Weekly Standard, and The New York Post, and many other publications. You can find him online at Ben Shapiro's new book, "Ben Shapiro's Unfiltered and edited by Ben Shapiro on The FiveThirtysomething, and Ben Shapiro s new book "The New York Review." He also is on the internet, and you can be found on social media, too! on the website of Ben Shapiro and Ben's new podcast, Ben's Dad has a new podcast on the podcast Ben's Father's Day is a great book is out! and he's also on his new podcast is out on the road on the Fourchan, and he does a podcast on Father s Day, too, and much more! Ben s got it all on all of that, and so much more on his website, and it's a fantastic gift to you!
00:00:00.000On Tuesday, in a self-immolating display of narcissistic stupidity, the Daily Californian, which is the student newspaper over at UC Berkeley, ran an op-ed defending the use of violence in shutting down a speech by alt-right popularizer and professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:00:14.000The op-ed, titled Violence as Self-Defense, was a whole series of op-eds, actually, talking about why violence was useful in shutting down political debate.
00:00:22.000Nisa Deng, an alumna of the university, she wrote, To people with platforms who decide when a protest should and should not be violent, you speak from a place
00:00:29.000Of immense privilege, as I recently wrote in a tirade against this brand of idiocy, asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act.
00:00:41.000The notion that words are violence, when the words do not explicitly call for violence, that's kind of an excuse to beat the living hell out of anyone you disagree with.
00:00:47.000It's also worthwhile noting that Yiannopoulos, for all of his myriad faults, which I have discussed at length, has never said that individuals' lives don't matter.
00:01:17.000Neil Lawrence, who's a former Daily Californian columnist, wrote that the so-called Black Bloc, the anti-fascists supposedly, was made up of people with the most to fight for and the most to lose, and did what the campus should have.
00:01:29.000Except that the vast majority of such protesters actually live in mommy's basement, by statistics, and all the students at UC Berkeley are sponsored by taxpayers to be there, majoring in uselessness.
00:01:38.000One Desmond Meagly wrote, First off, you shouldn't be scared of other people speaking unless they're violently threatening you.
00:01:51.000No one worried about protesters putting their own safety on the line.
00:01:53.000It was beating the hell out of other people we were mostly worried about.
00:01:56.000Finally, Josh Hardman wrote, quote, If leftists were really, really worried about normalizing Milo, burning things and breaking windows did more to make him a mainstream victim than anything he's ever said or done.
00:02:14.000It gave Yiannopoulos the ability to don that college Republican outfit on Tucker Carlson and dump all the alt-right talk and pretend to be a normal conservative for ten minutes.
00:02:23.000The students at UC Berkeley don't seem to understand the crucial mistake they made this week.
00:02:37.000Oh, so there's so much to talk about today, as always.
00:02:40.000But really, more particularly today, there's a lot to talk about.
00:02:43.000Apparently, Elizabeth Warren has been shut down, and if you ask how, she also asks how.
00:02:48.000But Elizabeth Warren has been shut down by the Republicans in the Senate.
00:02:52.000I'll explain why, I think that's actually really, really dumb, in just a second.
00:02:55.000But first, we have to say thank you to our advertisers over at Legacy Box.
00:02:58.000So, I'm a big fan of the idea that you preserve your memories from the past, you preserve your parents' memories, because after you're gone, while you're here, preserving those memories is crucial.
00:03:07.000And if you're gonna pass those on to the next generation, you gotta make sure that they're in some sort of form that's not being eaten away by maggots in the garage.
00:03:14.000You take all of your old tapes, and all of your old film reels, and all of your old VHSs, and you throw them in a box, and you throw them to Legacy Box, and Legacy Box then uploads all of them, and cleans them up, and then puts them back on a thumb drive or a DVD for you so you can access them at any time.
00:03:29.000It means that if there's a fire in your house, you don't have to worry about those ten boxes of photos you're gonna lose.
00:04:07.000Okay, so, Elizabeth Warren, she sent some smoke signals yesterday on the Senate floor about how much she hated Jeff Sessions.
00:04:16.000She, you know, participated in the sort of usual stupidity we've become used to from Elizabeth Warren, and Mitch McConnell then got up and reprimanded Warren and told her she had to stop, and when she didn't, then the Senate voted 49-43 to gag her.
00:04:32.000That's not as much fun as it sounds like.
00:04:33.000They didn't actually take her and put a gag in her mouth or anything.
00:04:36.000They actually just told her to shut up and then according to the Senate rules she has to shut up for the remainder of the Jeff Sessions debate.
00:04:41.000The big problem here, the reason they could do that, is because there's a rule, it's Rule 19, where it's supposed to stop you from being uncivil to Senate colleagues.
00:04:49.000If you're uncivil to Senate colleagues, if you accuse them of things on the floor of the Senate, then the Senate has the right to shut you up.
00:04:55.000What she was doing is she was reading a letter from Coretta Scott King
00:04:59.000Jeff Sessions was anti-civil rights and so forth and so on.
00:05:02.000We've talked about the fact that this is a lie before, that there's no evidence that Jeff Sessions has shut down civil rights or voting rights or that he has cracked down against black people.
00:05:22.000A person who has exhibited so much hostility to the enforcement of those laws.
00:05:29.000The Senator is reminded that it is a violation of Rule 19 of the Standing Rules of the Senate to impute to another Senator or Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or becoming a Senator.
00:05:44.000Okay, and then he proceeded to say that she would not stop doing that, and so one of the phrases that has gone viral now because of this is that Mitch McConnell said she persisted in doing this, therefore she is ruled out of order, and the sanctions, the boom come the sanctions.
00:05:59.000So, very exciting stuff on the Senate floor.
00:06:12.000First, it didn't actually silence Elizabeth Warren.
00:06:14.000After she was thrown out of the Senate debate, she then proceeded on her own personal trail of tears where she
00:06:20.000Explained everything that she could about why Jeff Sessions was the worst person in the world.
00:06:23.000She went on Twitter and she said, Makes it sound like he clocked her with a brick or something.
00:06:42.000I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory and racist comments that have no place in our justice system.
00:06:48.000I will not be silent while the Republicans rubber stamp an AG who will never stand up to the president when he breaks the law.
00:06:54.000First of all, it's kind of ironic since Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder never stood up to Obama when he broke the law repeatedly.
00:06:59.000She concluded tonight, Senate Majority Leader silenced Mrs. King's voice on the Senate floor and millions who are afraid and appalled by what's happening in our country.
00:07:07.000Now, unless you actually want to make Elizabeth Warren the nominee in 2020, which is possible.
00:07:11.000Maybe you actually want to make Elizabeth Warren the nominee in 2020.
00:07:14.000You want Focahontas to be the nominee in 2020.
00:07:16.000The reason we call her that, by the way, is because she claimed for years that she was of Native American ancestry, and there is no evidence whatsoever that she is.
00:07:31.000I mean, honest to God, she's significantly whiter than this piece of paper right here.
00:07:35.000I mean, she is the whitest person in human history, but she said all this.
00:07:40.000In any case, they silence her, and this is the problem.
00:07:44.000Number one, they gave her what she wanted.
00:07:46.000So, I let off today's broadcast by talking about if you want to give Milo what he wants, just keep telling him to shut up.
00:07:52.000If you want Milo to get what he wants, all you have to do is keep burning things over at Berkeley.
00:07:55.000If you want to give Elizabeth Warren what she wants, more publicity, all you have to do is tell her to shut up and then invoke the Senate rules.
00:08:31.000The idea that the Senate is this place of great decorum and civility.
00:08:35.000Because the Senate passed a lot of crappy laws.
00:08:36.000I prefer it when they yell at each other.
00:08:38.000I prefer when they scream at each other.
00:08:39.000I like when there's conflict, because what that means is that nothing gets done.
00:08:43.000And as you know, my perspective on government is that we are best off when the government is not really able to do anything.
00:08:48.000So, when Republicans do this, but it is hypocritical.
00:08:51.000When every time Donald Trump tweet farts, and everybody on the Republican side immediately responds with, well, he has a unique way of communicating.
00:08:59.000When Donald Trump is insulting people routinely, and people go, well, that's just Trump, and then Elizabeth Warren says that the potential Attorney General is a bad guy, and everybody goes, no!
00:09:17.000Playing by the we-don't-need-no-stinking-civility rules,
00:09:21.000And then turning around and saying, but civility for you?
00:09:23.000It's a game the left likes to play a lot.
00:09:25.000I don't like it when the left plays it.
00:09:26.000I don't like it when the right plays it.
00:09:28.000If we're not going to have civility, which I'm fine with, then let's stop with all the protestations about how it's so awful that Elizabeth Warren said stuff about Sessions.
00:09:36.000You can't be in favor of censorship when it's your opponent, and against it when it's you.
00:09:41.000So, the best way to stop Elizabeth Warren is to let her just continue babbling like a nonsensical moron, because she does that really well.
00:09:47.000She talks and she talks and she talks, and the more she talks, the stupider she sounds.
00:09:51.000If you actually want her to lose, then what you have to do is just let her talk.
00:09:55.000And then you say, none of that's true, and you're crazy.
00:09:59.000That's a much better way of doing this than by voting to shut her down.
00:10:01.000Look, is it emotionally satisfying for a lot of Republicans to shut Elizabeth Warren down and make her be quiet?
00:10:07.000Yeah, of course it's emotionally satisfying to put her back in her teepee.
00:10:56.000There are people that say I'm against school choice, and I don't understand that.
00:11:02.000I cannot ever stand up and stand against a parent having options, because I benefited from my parents having options.
00:11:13.000And when people tell me they're against school choice, whether it's the Opportunity Scholarship Act or charter schools, I look at them and say, as soon as you're telling me you're willing to send your kid
00:11:24.000To a failing school in my city, or in Camden or Trenton, then I'll be with you.
00:11:30.000But as far as I know, all the people representing my city right now, I'm not exaggerating, I've looked, maybe I'm wrong, but all the people representing my city, in elected office, that have children in schools, let's start at the top.
00:11:47.000I'm going to be out there fighting for my president, but he does not send his kids to Washington D.C.
00:12:12.000The more they talk, the better republicanism sounds, the better conservatism sounds.
00:12:16.000No better case of this than last night, Senator Ted Cruz debates Bernie Sanders on CNN about health care and health insurance.
00:12:23.000And Bernie Sanders' argument, as always, it's always the same argument.
00:12:26.000It always comes down to, the world is full of unfair things, and those unfair things must be made fair by government.
00:12:31.000That makes things more unfair, but they will be made fair by that same government, because only the government can make everyone poor, and then everyone is fair.
00:12:42.000I live in the lap of luxury, in the richest country in the history of mankind.
00:12:46.000But that has nothing to do with all the policies that have been purveyed until now.
00:12:50.000The only thing that matters is that we impute socialism and put it into, we import it, and we put it into policy here in the United States.
00:13:06.000Really sort of destroyed him because Bernie had no stats, he had no facts.
00:13:10.000His entire argument last night was that.
00:13:12.000It was, life is unfair, poor me, yay government.
00:13:16.000And so he just kept saying over and over and over that we spend lots of money on healthcare and that other countries have it better.
00:13:20.000And then Cruz would come back and he would say, no, and I'll explain why that's not true.
00:13:24.000And then Sanders would wander dazedly around the auditorium.
00:13:27.000But it's fun to show some clips of this because it does demonstrate the lack of factual knowledge among Democrats who stump for nationalized healthcare.
00:13:35.000Here is, I want to start with clip 19 actually.
00:13:37.000This is Ted Cruz destroying Bernie Sanders' tax plan.
00:13:40.000Because Bernie says we should have nationalized healthcare and the way he's going to pay for it is by taxing rich people.
00:13:49.000The National Health Service in Britain is a nationalized healthcare system which rations and they have all sorts of severe problems.
00:13:56.000It's basically bankrupt at this point.
00:13:58.000They have to charge everybody who makes more than $50,000 a year in American dollars 40% income tax.
00:14:03.000That's aside from all of the other fees and taxes they have to pay.
00:14:06.000And by way of contrast, in the United States, the income tax rate for people who make like 50 grand in the United States is, what, like 20%?
00:14:14.000So, you know, to pretend that you can pay for all of this stuff just by taxing rich people is nonsense, and that's what Cruz says, and he destroys Sanders over and over.
00:14:22.000It's kind of fun to watch Sanders' face as this happens.
00:14:25.000But let me make a broader point on taxes, which as many times in this debate,
00:14:30.000Bernie has talked about providing health care for free from the government.
00:14:56.000All of the federal income taxes we pay today are about 1.5 trillion a year.
00:15:02.0002.5 trillion means every one of us paying income taxes would have to about triple what you pay in income taxes to get an additional 2.5 trillion.
00:15:12.000Now Bernie, no doubt, is going to come back and say, no, no, no, no.
00:15:19.000Well, how about if we took every person that makes over a million dollars a year and confiscated a hundred percent of their income, took every penny that they make?
00:15:28.000That would raise only enough money to fund Bernie's plan for five months.
00:15:54.000In addition to the wait list, in addition to the rationing, in addition to fewer MRIs and mammograms to worse care, then you don't want to see Bernie's Medicaid for all.
00:16:04.000You want to see cheap, affordable healthcare that you can choose to put you in control.
00:16:10.000Yeah, great stuff from Senator Cruz right there.
00:16:14.000Perhaps the most shocking incident was, there's a woman named LaRonda who gets up, and she's from Texas, and she asks Bernie Sanders, she says, I have 49 employees at this hairdressing employeum that I own, and I don't want to pay for everybody's health insurance because I will go out of business.
00:16:28.000And Bernie Sanders' answer is, and this is the cruelty of socialism, Bernie Sanders' answer is, maybe you should go out of business.
00:16:35.000If you cannot pay the health care, perhaps you should go out of business.
00:16:39.000Ignoring the fact that then everybody at La Ronda's is not going to have a job and be on the government dole, but that's actually what he wants, right?
00:16:45.000Socialism is all about driving people out of private industry and into the arms of the public sector.
00:16:49.000Bernie Sanders said many times last night, he said a bunch of times, that the Medicare is deeply, deeply popular, Medicaid is deeply- Right.
00:16:56.000Because when you make people dependent on something, it turns out that that thing is super popular with the people who are dependent on it.
00:17:02.000But here was this exchange, it was pretty amazing, this clip 8.
00:17:04.000This is this woman, LaRonda, questioning Bernie Sanders, and Bernie Sanders basically saying, You go out in the cold, and you should die out there!
00:17:18.000Under Obamacare, I am restricted because it requires me to furnish health insurance if I employ more than 50 people.
00:17:29.000Unfortunately, the profit margin in my industry is very thin, and I'm not a wealthy person, so it's impossible for me to grow my business.
00:17:41.000My question to you, Senator Sanders, is how do I grow my business?
00:17:46.000How do I employ more Americans without either raising the prices to my customers or lowering wages to my employees?
00:17:56.000Let me give you an answer you will not be happy with.
00:18:00.000And that I think that for businesses that employ 50 people or more, given the nature of our dysfunctional health care system right now, where most people do get their health insurance through the places that they work.
00:18:30.000And you should fire all of your employees, you should go out of business, and then you should get in a boat off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico, drill a hole in it, and drown.
00:18:56.000Actually, I have to admit, I lose my keys and wallet a lot.
00:18:58.000And we have Tracker at home, and that allows me to find it.
00:19:01.000So Tracker is this thing, it's like the size of a coin, and you attach it to the object that you're afraid you're gonna lose, and then you can call it, and then it tells you exactly where it is.
00:19:10.000It rings, it beeps, and that allows you to know exactly where it is.
00:20:02.000And since I'm a really annoying person, as you can tell, that really helps me a lot in my marriage.
00:20:06.000It means that my wife loves me more and wants to murder me less.
00:20:09.000Okay, so back to this Cruz-Bernie Sanders debate.
00:20:13.000Speaking of annoying, there was one aspect where I thought that Republicans are constantly making a mistake.
00:20:19.000And that aspect is they grant the lefty premise that profit is bad.
00:20:24.000Instead of just saying that free markets, you know, make things better, what they really should be saying is, look, the only reason free markets work is because there's a profit incentive.
00:20:32.000The reason free markets work, the reason people want to become doctors, the reason drug companies produce new drugs, the reason that the hospital takes care of you, is not out of the charity and goodness of their heart.
00:21:07.000And you may not like your insurance company.
00:21:08.000The reason you probably don't like your insurance company is because there's not open competition, so the product is worse.
00:21:13.000The government heavily regulates the insurance companies.
00:21:15.000The government now crams down bad deals on insurance companies from the state, and that's why your health insurance costs are so high.
00:21:20.000It's why they've risen under Obamacare.
00:21:22.000You need to restore an honest and open free market with profit incentive so that everyone can make money, right?
00:21:27.000The idea here is that insurance companies make money, and they should make money, and doctors make money, and they should make money, and you should be able to make more money by paying your insurance company less.
00:22:01.000I don't think the federal government ought to be passing a law that doubles insurance company profits.
00:22:06.000And while those profits were doubling, what happened to the average American family?
00:22:10.000The average American family, your premiums have gone up $5,462.
00:22:16.000Okay, so what he's saying here is true, and he's also undermining Bernie's argument that Obamacare makes the insurance companies, you know, less profitable.
00:22:23.000But it's also not true in the long term, because the fact is that it's bankrupting insurance companies, which is why there's so many states.
00:22:29.000And there was one point where Cruz did this.
00:22:30.000He took out a map showing how many states only have one insurance company now that Obamacare has been implemented.
00:22:35.000Insurance companies are dropping out specifically because it isn't that profitable.
00:22:38.000In the short term it's really profitable because everybody is now forced to buy health insurance.
00:22:41.000In the long term it really isn't because now health insurance is forced to cover pre-existing conditions, which means that you can wait till you get cancer and then pay your $500 premium and then all of a sudden you have health insurance for cancer after never having paid into the system your entire life.
00:22:56.000This is not the best way to defend the private market.
00:22:59.000It's basically undermining the private market even as you're trying to defend it.
00:23:02.000So I want to talk a little bit more about this.
00:23:04.000When we continue over on dailywire.com.
00:23:06.000But you have to subscribe for that, plus I want to get to the continuation of the Trump media battle.
00:23:10.000Trump is tweeting, and some of it is good, and some of it is not so good, as per our usual arrangements.