The Ben Shapiro Show - The College Scam | Ep. 736

00:00:00.000 A college scam ensnares two famous actresses, corruption at the Obama Department of Justice rears its ugly head, and AOC battles for the commanding heights of the economy.

00:00:08.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:00:09.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:15.000 I know what you're asking.

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00:00:21.000 I'll tell you how.

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00:00:29.000 We'll get to the actual news in just one second.

00:00:31.000 But before we get to that, let me remind you, in 2008, the U.S.

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00:01:43.000 We begin today with one of the greatest scams in modern American history.

00:01:47.000 I'm talking, of course, about the university system.

00:01:49.000 Now, personally, I am a beneficiary of America's university system.

00:01:53.000 I went to the University of California at Los Angeles, which is the superior school in Los Angeles.

00:01:57.000 I went to UCLA.

00:01:58.000 And then for law school, I went to Harvard Law School.

00:02:02.000 So I know a fair bit about higher education since I've spent an awful lot of time there.

00:02:06.000 Well, I will explain to you why it is that so much of college education is a scam.

00:02:11.000 What college education is actually designed to do, why what colleges are designed to do, does not mesh with the proposals of the left for paying for tuition for everyone.

00:02:20.000 And we can do all of this through the prism of what is a shocking and somewhat amusing story.

00:02:25.000 This is a story about a bunch of rich people who apparently bribed their kids' way into top and also mid-tier colleges, according to the New York Times.

00:02:35.000 A teenage girl who did not play soccer magically became a soccer star recruit at Yale.

00:02:40.000 Cost to her parents, $1.2 million.

00:02:43.000 A high school boy eager to enroll at the University of Southern California was falsely deemed to have a learning disability so he could take his standardized test with a complicit proctor who would make sure he got the right score.

00:02:53.000 Cost to his parents, at least $50,000.

00:02:56.000 A student with no experience rowing won a spot on the USC crew team after a photograph of another person in a boat was submitted as evidence of her prowess.

00:03:04.000 Her parents wired $200,000 into a special account.

00:03:07.000 Now, okay, let's be straight about this for a second.

00:03:09.000 I hear the $1.2 million for Yale.

00:03:11.000 Yale's pretty exclusive.

00:03:12.000 I do not hear the $200,000 for admission to USC.

00:03:16.000 I mean, that is really, really overpaying for that Happy Meal right there.

00:03:19.000 In a major college admissions scandal that laid bare the elaborate lengths some wealthy parents will go to get their children into competitive American universities, federal prosecutors charged 50 people on Tuesday in a brazen scheme to buy spots in the freshman classes at Yale, Stanford, and other big-name schools.

00:03:36.000 33 well-heeled parents were charged in the case, including Hollywood celebrities and prominent business leaders.

00:03:40.000 Prosecutors said there could be additional indictments to come.

00:03:43.000 Also implicated, top college athletic coaches, who were accused of accepting millions of dollars to help admit undeserving students to a wide variety of colleges, from the University of Texas at Austin to Wake Forest and Georgetown, by suggesting that they were top athletes.

00:03:58.000 By the way, we should get rid of college athletics.

00:03:59.000 I know, unpopular viewpoint.

00:04:00.000 A lot of folks love to watch their college athletics.

00:04:03.000 Yeah, well, I like to watch Broadway theater.

00:04:05.000 I don't think that schools should give scholarships based on your ability to do a play that the school raises money off of.

00:04:14.000 If you want to go to school to learn about theater, that is one thing.

00:04:17.000 But you don't go to school to learn about sports.

00:04:19.000 You go to school, and you join an athletic team so that the school can make money off of you, which is why they should pay their student-athletes, or they should have associated teams that don't actually get college scholarships.

00:04:28.000 But that's a side point.

00:04:29.000 The parents included the television star Lori Loughlin and her husband, the fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, the actress Felicity Huffman, and William E. McGlasson Jr., a partner at a private equity firm TPG, according to officials.

00:04:41.000 The scheme unveiled Tuesday was stunning in its breadth and audacity.

00:04:44.000 It was the Justice Department's largest-ever college admissions prosecution.

00:04:48.000 A sprawling investigation that involved 200 agents nationwide and resulted in charges against 50 people in six states.

00:04:56.000 The charges also underscored how college admissions have become so cutthroat and competitive that some have sought to break the rules.

00:05:02.000 The authorities say the parents of some of the nation's wealthiest and most privileged students sought to buy spots for their children at top universities, not only cheating the system, but potentially cheating other hardworking students out of a chance at a college education.

00:05:14.000 The parents are the prime movers in this fraud, said Andrew Lelling, the U.S.

00:05:16.000 Attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

00:05:18.000 He said those parents used their wealth to create a separate unfair admissions process for their children.

00:05:22.000 Okay, quick note.

00:05:24.000 That separate unfair admissions process for kids has existed in a couple of different ways in the United States for quite a while.

00:05:29.000 Way number one is through legacy admissions.

00:05:31.000 The idea, my dad went to a school, therefore I should get into the school.

00:05:35.000 Or my parents gave a building to the school, therefore I should get into the school.

00:05:39.000 In fact, this even comes up in the show The Sopranos.

00:05:42.000 Where a meadow soprano gets into Columbia, and then her parents are hit up for a donation to the building.

00:05:47.000 So this sort of stuff has been going on in American public life for a very long time.

00:05:51.000 And then there's a second corrupt way that people get into schools, and that is the soft bigotry of low expectation way that we get people into schools through writing stories in their essays about how tough they have it in life, and then we allow people with lower scores and lower GPA to take the spots of people with higher scores and higher GPAs, predominantly Asian in the cases of places like Harvard. 0.59

00:06:11.000 The real victims in this case, says Andrew Lelling, the U.S.

00:06:13.000 attorney, were the hard-working students displaced in the admission process by far less qualified students and their families who simply bought their way in.

00:06:21.000 At the center of the sweeping financial and fraud case was William Singer.

00:06:24.000 He's the founder of a college prep business called the Edge College and Career Network, also known as The Key.

00:06:29.000 Apparently, Mr. Singer used The Key and its nonprofit arm, Key Worldwide Foundation, based in Newport, California, to help students cheat on their standardized tests and to pay bribes to coaches who could get them into college with fake athletic credentials.

00:06:40.000 Parents paid Mr. Singer about $25 million from 2011 until February 2019 to bribe coaches and university administrators to designate their kids as recruited athletes, which effectively ensured their admission, according to the indictment.

00:06:54.000 Singer went to court on Thursday afternoon and described how he arranged for students S.A.T.

00:06:59.000 and A.C.T.

00:07:00.000 results to be falsified by sending them to take the exams in Houston or L.A.

00:07:03.000 where he'd bribed the test administrators.

00:07:05.000 He described the students as believing they were taking the test legitimately, but he said the test proctor would correct their answers afterward.

00:07:10.000 He said he would tell the proctor the exact score he wanted the student to get, and then that proctor was great at this and would achieve the score exactly.

00:07:18.000 So there are a bunch of celebrities who have been caught up in the middle of this, obviously, and that is why it's drawing so much fire and so much media scrutiny at this point.

00:07:29.000 Some of the celebrities who have been caught up in the middle of this, of course, Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives fame and Lori Loughlin of Full House.

00:07:36.000 Loughlin and her husband have allegedly spent $500,000 in bribes to get their two daughters designated recruits for the USC crew team.

00:07:44.000 The two daughters were then admitted on that basis.

00:07:46.000 As I say, that's a lot of money to just get into USC.

00:07:49.000 Huffman paid $15,000 as a faux charitable donation to the Key Worldwide Foundation so her daughter could be admitted to a top college. 0.99

00:07:56.000 The money actually went toward paying a third party to correct her daughter's SAT scores, boosting it to a 1420 from the mid-1000s where she had been scoring on her practice SAT a year earlier.

00:08:07.000 So we do have a rather hilarious bit of audio from Lori Loughlin's daughter.

00:08:14.000 So her daughter is an Instagram model, Olivia Jade.

00:08:17.000 She's an Instagram model.

00:08:18.000 She has something like 1.5 million Instagram followers.

00:08:21.000 She has another 2 million YouTube followers, which does raise the question as to why she cares about going to college in the first place.

00:08:26.000 She's making more money off of all of that than she will ever make By majoring in some random marketing class at USC. 0.99

00:08:34.000 In any case, here is Lori Loughlin's daughter talking about what she expected out of college.

00:08:39.000 And then the whole college thing.

00:08:40.000 Yep, I'm going.

00:08:41.000 I'm living in a dorm with a roommate who's so sweet.

00:08:44.000 With work, it's going to be hard.

00:08:45.000 Like my first week of school, I'm leaving to go to Fiji for work.

00:08:49.000 And then I'll be in New York a bunch this year for work.

00:08:53.000 And traveling to a different country because I'm creating something with this country and that's her work.

00:08:58.000 So I don't know how much of school I'm gonna attend but I'm gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I can try and balance it all.

00:09:06.000 But I do want the experience of like game days, partying.

00:09:10.000 I don't really care about school.

00:09:12.000 Okay, so everybody is laughing at this.

00:09:13.000 She doesn't really care about school.

00:09:15.000 So why do her parents care so much about getting her into school?

00:09:17.000 The answer is that Olivia Jade is right and y'all are wrong.

00:09:20.000 Okay, Olivia Jade is correct and you all are wrong.

00:09:23.000 What do I mean by that?

00:09:24.000 What I mean by that is that what people think college is for, what people think university is for, is not what college and universities are for.

00:09:30.000 Whenever I speak at colleges and universities, and I speak at these universities regularly, I mean, I was at University of Michigan yesterday, I always say, There is a vast difference between people who are going to colleges and universities to learn a skill set and people who are going there to not learn a skill set.

00:09:46.000 So in other words, the people who are generally in the humanities and the people who are generally in the sciences, if you want to put a label on it.

00:09:51.000 At UCLA, that was the North Campus majors versus the South Campus majors.

00:09:55.000 South Campus majors, that was all the pre-med folks.

00:09:58.000 South Campus majors, We're all the engineering students, all the mathematics students, all the geology students, you know, people who are going to learn a skill set they were then going to apply in a job.

00:10:06.000 All the North Campus majors were the political science majors, and the history majors, and the English majors, the people who are prepping for a career, maybe in academia or teaching.

00:10:16.000 And possibly in going to law school, or business school, or in marketing, or something.

00:10:21.000 All those North Campus majors were not there to learn a skill set.

00:10:24.000 Because the reality is, the skill sets that you learn being a lawyer are not the same as the skill sets that you learn in a poli-sci class.

00:10:30.000 You don't learn a skill set in a poli-sci class.

00:10:32.000 If you don't know how to write by the time you get to college, very low chance you're actually going to learn to write once you do get to college.

00:10:38.000 So then what exactly are colleges and universities about?

00:10:42.000 And this answers a couple of other questions.

00:10:44.000 The question I'm asking right now is about to answer a couple of other questions.

00:10:47.000 So, to answer the question, what are colleges and universities about?

00:10:51.000 We have to answer two other questions specific to this scandal.

00:10:53.000 One, why are rich, famous parents shelling out legitimately millions of dollars to get their kids into these prestigious schools?

00:11:01.000 They don't need to.

00:11:02.000 They're rich and famous.

00:11:03.000 They could just give their kid a million bucks and say, go start a business.

00:11:06.000 Or they could put it in a trust fund.

00:11:07.000 Their kid wouldn't have to worry.

00:11:09.000 So why are they so intense on getting their kids into these top-notch schools?

00:11:13.000 That's question number one we have to answer.

00:11:14.000 And question number two.

00:11:16.000 Let's say all these kids get in.

00:11:17.000 Let's say that Lori Loughlin's kid gets in.

00:11:21.000 And she gets in on the basis of crappy SAT scores and bad grades and all the rest. 1.00

00:11:26.000 Wouldn't she fail out?

00:11:28.000 And if not, why not?

00:11:30.000 If I got admitted to the MIT mathematics program on the basis of bad scores, I would fail out.

00:11:36.000 But if I got into MIT on the basis of crew, being an MIT crew, and then I majored in history, there's a good shot that I would not fail out.

00:11:45.000 Which says something about the quality of these universities and what they are intending to do.

00:11:49.000 What these universities, particularly in the humanities, are designed to do.

00:11:52.000 Because they are not career building exercises.

00:11:54.000 They are not skill set building exercises.

00:11:56.000 I'll explain in a second what people are getting wrong about college and why this scandal Could rip the lid off of what basically is a university scheme in just one second.

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00:13:19.000 Okay, so as I say, There are these two questions that need to be answered.

00:13:22.000 Why are rich parents paying for their kids to get into these schools? 0.98

00:13:25.000 And two, even if they did get these kids into the schools, why aren't the kids failing out?

00:13:28.000 Why aren't the kids failing out?

00:13:30.000 Because, presumably, they're unqualified.

00:13:32.000 And what we have seen from many affirmative action programs all over the country is that when people who are not generally qualified to get into a university get into that university, dropout rates tend to be much higher than the general population.

00:13:44.000 But here's the thing.

00:13:46.000 Those dropout rates are not universal.

00:13:47.000 Those dropout rates are still relatively low.

00:13:51.000 So why aren't these kids getting kicked out for not being up to snuff?

00:13:55.000 And two, why are parents who are already uber-wealthy, already uber-privileged, why are they spending $500,000 to get their kid into USC?

00:14:03.000 And the answer is that colleges are not about training kids for the real world.

00:14:07.000 Colleges are not about teaching them significant modes of thinking or examining timeless truths.

00:14:11.000 This is not what universities are about anymore.

00:14:13.000 They're not what they were about 150 years ago or 100 years ago or even 50 years ago.

00:14:17.000 Universities are not about skill sets, at least not in the humanities.

00:14:21.000 They're about two things and two things only.

00:14:23.000 Credentialism and social connections.

00:14:25.000 That is it.

00:14:26.000 That is what universities are.

00:14:27.000 They are a big social club.

00:14:30.000 Now, credential.

00:14:31.000 So let's discuss each of these in turn, because this really does have a pretty vast impact on American society and on the bifurcation of American society into these sort of Intellectual contingent, the white collar contingent and those dummies who didn't go to college.

00:14:45.000 You know, that's the attitude of the intelligentsia.

00:14:49.000 And it's a wrong attitude.

00:14:50.000 It's not correct. 0.99

00:14:51.000 It's a foolish attitude. 0.95

00:14:52.000 But it's an attitude reinforced by the colleges themselves. 0.95

00:14:55.000 So in our society, let's talk about credentialism first.

00:14:57.000 In our society, there's an easy way to be perceived as intellectually meritorious.

00:15:02.000 There's a way of being perceived as smart.

00:15:04.000 You point to your degree.

00:15:05.000 People don't take out their IQ scores or their SAT scores and hit each other with that, but they will take out their degree and do it all the time.

00:15:12.000 In fact, when I was at Harvard Law, this was literally, we had a name for this, it was called dropping the H-bomb.

00:15:19.000 In the middle of a conversation, you would say, you would drop the H-bomb. 0.78

00:15:21.000 You'd say, oh yeah, I went to Harvard.

00:15:23.000 Even today, when people ask where he went to law school, there's like a puff of pride and go, oh, I went to Harvard Law School.

00:15:27.000 It's like, oh wow, he must be very smart.

00:15:28.000 He went to Harvard Law School.

00:15:30.000 That's the way everybody thinks of college these days.

00:15:33.000 My business partner, Jeremy Boren, went to a music school.

00:15:36.000 He dropped out after a couple of years.

00:15:38.000 Jeremy now makes a lot of money.

00:15:39.000 He's a very successful guy.

00:15:40.000 He runs a business that has a hundred employees.

00:15:43.000 Well, just a few years ago, he was in a conversation with a very well-known right-wing figure who is not a good human being.

00:15:51.000 And this well-known right-wing figure had never met Jeremy before, and they were in a bit of a conflict over an option for a film.

00:15:57.000 And this right-wing figure called up Jeremy and started asking him about his background. 0.95

00:16:03.000 And when Jeremy said he didn't go to college, this person, who is a jerk, who I know, this person said to Jeremy, You mean you didn't even go to effing college? 0.98

00:16:11.000 You didn't even go to college? 0.99

00:16:13.000 Why should I respect you?

00:16:14.000 You didn't even go to college?

00:16:15.000 That's the attitude among a lot of people who go to college.

00:16:18.000 Why?

00:16:18.000 Because they feel like colleges are basically filtration systems.

00:16:22.000 That all they are, are a way of filtering out smart people and then stamping the imprimatur of a university upon them.

00:16:29.000 Credentialism is the most important thing.

00:16:31.000 And we all do this, right?

00:16:32.000 We all do this on the basis of where people went to school.

00:16:34.000 So if you meet two people, one went to Yale, the other went to junior college, you're immediately going to assume the person who went to Yale is smarter than the person who went to junior college, which in many cases is true because Yale does have high admission standards and junior college does not.

00:16:48.000 It is not universally true, nor does it translate over into life success.

00:16:52.000 Just as IQ is, in fact, an effective measurement of innate levels of intelligence in certain areas, but it does not necessarily translate over into a level of life success.

00:17:02.000 I know this because I went to a highly gifted magnet school when I was in junior high, and you had to have the quote-unquote genius level IQ to get in.

00:17:09.000 I got in, but not by a huge amount.

00:17:11.000 There were people there who had IQs 20 points higher than I did.

00:17:14.000 Many of them are teaching gym.

00:17:15.000 Some are in jail.

00:17:17.000 In other words, innate ability does not always translate over into life success or skill set.

00:17:21.000 That's one of the beautiful things about capitalism.

00:17:23.000 Your innate intelligence does not mean that you have provided a good or service to somebody else.

00:17:28.000 It just means that you have the capacity to do certain things.

00:17:30.000 So, in any case, colleges are designed for, thing number one, credentialism, so you can brag about where you went to school.

00:17:36.000 And then thing number two they're designed for is social connections.

00:17:40.000 Social institutions in the United States have been fading over time.

00:17:43.000 It used to be that most of us had our social connections with other people through a couple of different institutions.

00:17:49.000 Church and work.

00:17:53.000 Most of the people at my office who hang out with each other in their spare time, their social connections, their social fabric is created by the fact that they work with others.

00:18:01.000 But before that, predating that, going back to when they were a teenager, most people's social connections came from school or came from their church.

00:18:10.000 Well, as churches declined and as schools became less and less of a binding commitment, particularly public schools, As parents became less and less involved, as the federal government became more and more involved, social fabric tended to disappear.

00:18:24.000 And so, in essence, what has happened is that colleges have become a rebuilt social fabric.

00:18:30.000 So, Tim Carney has a very good book called Alienated America that is out in the last couple of weeks, in which he specifically talks about how it is that there is strong social fabric in left-wing, white-collar, upper-class communities on the coasts, and that social institutional fabric is created in large part by colleges, people who went to college with each other, and they still go out for drinks, and they still get jobs from one another.

00:18:54.000 He says that in many cases, College social fabric has become a substitute for church social fabric.

00:18:59.000 In the rest of the country, we still connect with people we go to church with.

00:19:01.000 The beautiful thing about going to church with people, or synagogue with people, is that there's no IQ requirement to get in, there's no testing requirement to get in, there's a values requirement to get in.

00:19:10.000 And those connections seem to be far more durable and far more meaningful than simply, we have the same IQ level so we went to the same college.

00:19:17.000 But, for a group of white-collar people, Who are not ensconced in other social institutions, your connections are created by the college that you went to.

00:19:27.000 J.D.

00:19:27.000 Vance, who went to Yale Law School, wrote a huge bestseller called Hillbilly Elegy about growing up in, in essence, sort of a broken Appalachian community in Kentucky.

00:19:37.000 And he says that admission to Yale Law School granted him social capital.

00:19:40.000 He said, quote, the networks of people and institutions around us have real economic value.

00:19:45.000 They also have social value, obviously.

00:19:46.000 We get jobs from friends or from friends of friends.

00:19:48.000 The social circles in which we travel matter.

00:19:51.000 That is true for people who are born rich as well as those born poor.

00:19:54.000 In fact, if you look at the areas of the country suffering most, those tend to be the areas of the country where there are no effective social institutions, where the churches have fallen apart, where there are no PTA meetings, and where people are not going to the same college.

00:20:05.000 Here is the problem.

00:20:07.000 Neither of these two things, credentialism Or social institutions.

00:20:11.000 Neither of these two things, credentialism and social fabric, actually demands that universities teach anything.

00:20:17.000 None of that has to do with actual education.

00:20:19.000 The credentialism occurs the minute that you get in.

00:20:22.000 And the social fabric is created simply by virtue of your presence at these universities.

00:20:26.000 And that's why parents are willing to pay through the nose to get their kids in. 0.98

00:20:29.000 Because Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin want to be able to say about their kids that they went to a prominent university and they want their kids to be able to call on the resources of the people they went to school with so that they can have friends later in life and social connections.

00:20:44.000 That's what this is all about.

00:20:45.000 They want to be able to point at their daughter's school and say, look, she's smart.

00:20:48.000 She's at USC.

00:20:50.000 She's smart.

00:20:50.000 She's at Yale.

00:20:51.000 Right.

00:20:51.000 That is the goal here.

00:20:52.000 And the kids want to do the same.

00:20:54.000 They never want to be questioned about their intelligence.

00:20:56.000 They wanted to listen.

00:20:57.000 This applies across the aisle.

00:20:59.000 When President Trump points to his Wharton degree, that is what he is doing.

00:21:03.000 You never hear President Trump talk about what he learned at Wharton.

00:21:05.000 He says everything that he learned, he learned actually running a real estate business.

00:21:09.000 But he points at Wharton so that he can say, this is why I am smart, right?

00:21:12.000 Don't question my intellect.

00:21:14.000 I went to Wharton.

00:21:15.000 This sort of credentialism is very important in American life.

00:21:19.000 It is, however, not the role of a university.

00:21:22.000 It's why universities are a giant, giant scam.

00:21:26.000 In a second, I'm going to tell you a story about my first day at Harvard Law School that sort of underscores a lot of these points, and then we'll talk about what universities ought to be and what we ought to do to fight all of this, because this is indicative of a broader problem in the university system.

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00:22:53.000 Okay, so...

00:22:55.000 As I say, colleges and universities no longer about teaching a skill set.

00:22:58.000 They're about credentialism and about social fabric.

00:23:00.000 The first day I went to Harvard Law School, I attended orientation.

00:23:04.000 And listen, I loved my experience at Harvard Law School.

00:23:06.000 I really did feel that the first year taught me a certain way of thinking about the world, a certain skill set in looking at the world through a legal lens.

00:23:12.000 That's great.

00:23:13.000 Harvard Law School is three years long.

00:23:15.000 years are effectively a waste of time and a way to drive up a way to drive up the amount of student debt you are in so that you have to work for a big law firm in any case our very first day at harvard law school we were gathered in memorial hall in historic sanders theater so sanders theater is this beautiful hall all mahogany fits about a thousand people and each class at harvard is pretty big for law school about 500 person strong class

00:23:41.000 So we were gathered in historic Sanders Theater, and Dean Elena Kagan, who is now Supreme Court Justice, she strides onto stage, and she tells us that the competition is over.

00:23:51.000 There is no more competition.

00:23:52.000 It's over.

00:23:52.000 We were in.

00:23:53.000 I remember this vividly.

00:23:55.000 She said, listen, you think this is going to be like the paper chase, very famous movie about Harvard Law School from the 1970s, where one Professor Kingsfield really harasses his students using the Socratic method and makes them feel terrible about themselves.

00:24:06.000 And there's competition and people drop out and all the rest.

00:24:09.000 She said, that's not real.

00:24:11.000 Harvard Law, the game is over.

00:24:13.000 You won.

00:24:14.000 You're here.

00:24:15.000 She said that basically we were destined to leave with a degree, with a job, and not only that, we were destined to rule the universe.

00:24:24.000 She told us how many alumni of Harvard Law School were in the Senate, how many were in Congress, how many were on the Supreme Court.

00:24:30.000 Basically, your life's battle was over upon acceptance to Harvard Law.

00:24:34.000 What happened next did not matter at all.

00:24:36.000 What is that?

00:24:36.000 That's credentialism and social fabric.

00:24:38.000 That's it.

00:24:38.000 That's the only two things she was promising.

00:24:40.000 Right there.

00:24:41.000 Now, this has significant social ramifications.

00:24:43.000 It means that our meritocracy does not actually begin in college.

00:24:47.000 The meritocracy begins long before college.

00:24:50.000 In fact, meritocracy very often ends upon admission to college.

00:24:53.000 That is why, by the way, you can be admitted to one of these schools and never be kicked out, even if you're not meritorious.

00:24:58.000 Once you get through the gates, the meritocracy is done.

00:25:02.000 You're in.

00:25:02.000 This is heaven.

00:25:04.000 It is also one of the reasons why the failures of the lower education system ought to loom larger than inability to get into a good school.

00:25:12.000 Because if you failed in high school, the chances that you're going to get into this privileged estate are very, very low.

00:25:18.000 This also has significant political ramifications for campus.

00:25:21.000 It means that these places are cush places where students expect to be treated with kid gloves.

00:25:26.000 Because after all, you're there, as Olivia Jade said, to party and have game night.

00:25:31.000 You're not actually, you're there to build social fabric.

00:25:33.000 You're not there to learn things.

00:25:35.000 Professor Harvey Mansfield at Harvard University He famously graded people as he thought they ought to be graded.

00:25:41.000 So a lot of his students got C's, some of them got D's.

00:25:45.000 And then he was chided by the administration and the students because he was told, you're ruining these kids' college experiences and you're driving kids from your classes by giving them legitimate grades.

00:25:53.000 Instead, you should be participating in grade inflation so you don't harm these kids' future careers.

00:25:59.000 And pressured by the administration, by the students, Mansfield started giving out two grades.

00:26:04.000 One for merit, he would actually give kids their real grade, and then the one that he would send to the registrar, which was their fake grade, their ironic grade, is one of the things he called it.

00:26:12.000 It also means politically, students expect not to be challenged.

00:26:15.000 They expect to go to college campuses and be ensconced in a safe space, in a bubble, where they are never microaggressed and where everyone treats them well.

00:26:22.000 Because after all, when you go to church, you don't expect to be microaggressed. 1.00

00:26:25.000 When you go to a PTA meeting, you don't expect to be challenged with new ideas.

00:26:29.000 You expect that it's all going to be very friendly and very nice.

00:26:31.000 This is a social fabric building institution.

00:26:34.000 What this means is that if somebody like me is brought to a campus like Berkeley, all hell may break loose because I have now threatened the social fabric.

00:26:41.000 Discomfort, which used to be the hallmark of educational institutions.

00:26:45.000 Discomfort because you didn't know things and you had to learn things.

00:26:48.000 That discomfort has been outed.

00:26:50.000 No more discomfort.

00:26:51.000 It must be thrown away.

00:26:53.000 Discomfort used to be a feature of higher education.

00:26:55.000 Now it is a bug.

00:26:57.000 So what does this mean for the Bernie Sanders College for All routine?

00:27:02.000 Well, it means that it's completely misguided.

00:27:04.000 If college were really a place where you learned a skill set, then College for All would sound a lot better.

00:27:09.000 If we're talking about stipends, frankly, for people who are going to a trade school, that would sound better than what Bernie Sanders is talking about.

00:27:17.000 But if the idea is that we have to pay for everybody to get into They're local universities.

00:27:22.000 They can major in women's studies and build a social fabric. 1.00

00:27:25.000 That actually isn't going to work.

00:27:26.000 Why?

00:27:27.000 Well, once you start admitting everyone's universities, then both of the things, both of the things that colleges actually do right now are undercut.

00:27:35.000 Credentialism is undercut as soon as you have a broad admissions policy.

00:27:38.000 Credentialism only works so long as there's exclusivity.

00:27:42.000 If it's hard to get into a school, the credential still holds.

00:27:44.000 If it's very easy to get into a school, if it's just your local community college, no one brags about going to JUCO.

00:27:50.000 Okay, so credentialism doesn't work if everybody gets in.

00:27:53.000 And when it comes to building the social fabric, the same thing holds true.

00:27:57.000 If you, if everybody gets in, all that happens is that now you have new social cliques that are formed inside this broader pool.

00:28:05.000 Basically, you turn college into high school.

00:28:06.000 People don't build social fabric in high school.

00:28:08.000 They do build social fabric in college because they are sort of lined up like with like, is the idea.

00:28:13.000 So the College for All plan kind of withers under the scrutiny of why this sort of scandal would happen in the first place.

00:28:19.000 But it does speak to what universities ought to be and how we ought to see them.

00:28:24.000 How ought we to see universities?

00:28:26.000 We should have... Credentialism I don't think has to go away.

00:28:29.000 I think credentialism is a somewhat useful phenomenon in the sense that is an intellectual shortcut for us to decide whether somebody has innate ability or not.

00:28:37.000 Although it should not be used as the only indicator.

00:28:40.000 But when it comes to building social fabric, our social fabric has to be built outside of colleges, and colleges should be places where we learn skill sets, and are educated, and are challenged, not places where we go for game nights and partying.

00:28:52.000 The inconvenient thing about what Olivia Jade said there is that every word of it is true.

00:28:56.000 People largely go to college, at least for North Campus majors, as I say, they largely go to college in order to party it up, build social fabric, and not learn anything.

00:29:05.000 And in that way, colleges are succeeding at their task.

00:29:08.000 They're doing what they need to do.

00:29:10.000 So, you shouldn't be surprised when you see rich people doing this sort of thing.

00:29:16.000 Even rich people doing this sort of thing to sort of buy their kids into the institutional social fabric and credentialism they feel their kids will need. 0.95

00:29:24.000 Okay, in just a second, I'm gonna get to Tucker Carlson being beat over the head by Media Matters and why I now have proof positive that the people who are largely leading this drive against Tucker Carlson are massive hypocrites. 0.80

00:29:36.000 We'll get to that in just one second.

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00:30:46.000 Okay, we are going to get to Tucker Carlson.

00:30:49.000 We're going to get to AOC just destroying herself. 1.00

00:30:52.000 She played herself.

00:30:54.000 We'll get to that in just a second.

00:30:55.000 First, you're going to have to go subscribe over at dailywire.com.

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00:32:30.000 All right.

00:32:36.000 So let's talk for a second about the proof positive that this bad faith effort to get Tucker Carlson is just that, a bad faith effort to get Tucker Carlson.

00:32:45.000 So, yesterday, there was an attempt to put together a protest over at the Fox News headquarters by Media Matters.

00:32:51.000 Media Matters put out a notice.

00:32:53.000 They wanted people to show up at Fox News and protest outside the headquarters because Fox News is meeting with its advertisers in preparation for the ad buying for the next year.

00:33:02.000 And they want to show with a crowd how much people hate Fox News.

00:33:04.000 So a bunch of non-Fox News watchers will go tell advertisers how much they do not like to watch Fox News.

00:33:11.000 And it's Media Matters putting this together.

00:33:12.000 First of all, let's not pretend that Media Matters gives two craps about stuff that Tucker Carlson said 13 years ago.

00:33:18.000 They do not care in the slightest.

00:33:21.000 And yet the pretended offense is so egregious, it's so over the top, that it's actually kind of shocking.

00:33:28.000 So let's take, for example, and the mainstream media are complicit in this because they don't care either.

00:33:33.000 I mean, let's be absolutely frank about this.

00:33:35.000 Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon do not care at all about anything Tucker Carlson said.

00:33:39.000 They're not offended by it.

00:33:40.000 They're not shocked by it.

00:33:42.000 They don't like Tucker Carlson.

00:33:43.000 And so they see this as a convenient club to beat Tucker Carlson with.

00:33:46.000 I am more offended by what Tucker Carlson said than they are.

00:33:49.000 Because I've never been in favor of this stuff.

00:33:51.000 I hate shock jock radio and I think it's yuck.

00:33:53.000 So I'm more offended by it than Don Lemon and Tucker and Chris Cuomo.

00:33:59.000 Nonetheless, you're seeing these mainstream news anchors saying that these old comments resurfaced by Media Matters specifically to destroy Tucker Carlson from 13 years ago.

00:34:07.000 It's the end of the world.

00:34:08.000 I thought the most humorous clip about this last night came courtesy of Anderson Cooper.

00:34:13.000 Anderson Cooper, who, like, goes on every New Year's Eve on CNN and made, like, oral sex jokes with Kathy Griffin, was very deeply offended by Tucker Carlson being on a shock jock radio show, and he brought in Sam Donaldson, presumably from the crypt, To come and talk with him about how offended Sam Donaldson is about all of this.

00:34:33.000 Can you think of Matt Lauer or any of the other people, Charlie Rose, saying, well, wait a moment.

00:34:40.000 It was just in jest.

00:34:41.000 It was in fun.

00:34:42.000 I mean, this is something that wasn't that important, was it?

00:34:45.000 Yes, it was important.

00:34:46.000 It happened long ago, but yes, it's still important.

00:34:49.000 Your character's important.

00:34:50.000 And what's happening today is a revolution when it comes to the way men treat women.

00:34:55.000 Well, you say, but this is not that.

00:34:57.000 No, this is vulgarity.

00:34:59.000 This is hate speech.

00:35:00.000 This is homophobic speech.

00:35:02.000 This is the kind of speech that, if left unchecked, will change this country forever.

00:35:08.000 It's just as bad, and it should be punished in the way that the men were punished for what they did.

00:35:13.000 So, he's saying that Tucker Carlson should be punished like Matt Lauer, who literally locked women in his office and then sexually abused them.

00:35:20.000 And then he says that if speech like this is left unchecked, it's going to ruin the country.

00:35:24.000 Dude, it was left unchecked for 13 years.

00:35:27.000 And you know what happened?

00:35:28.000 Nothing.

00:35:29.000 Because no one cared. 1.00

00:35:31.000 It was stupid crap on a shock jock radio show. 1.00

00:35:33.000 It was vulgar. 1.00

00:35:34.000 That's true.

00:35:35.000 It was gross.

00:35:36.000 That's true.

00:35:37.000 Did it massively change the country?

00:35:38.000 Of course not. 0.89

00:35:39.000 This is all cynical nonsense. 0.97

00:35:41.000 Badly motivated cynical nonsense from a lot of these people. 0.84

00:35:44.000 I do have a great Sam Donaldson story, by the way.

00:35:46.000 At the 2012 RNC, Sam Donaldson showed up.

00:35:48.000 It was in Tampa.

00:35:49.000 Beautiful Tampa.

00:35:50.000 Great idea, Mitt Romney.

00:35:51.000 And we go to the RNC, and on Radio Row, there's Sam Donaldson.

00:35:57.000 And so I walk over to Sam Donaldson, and he is hosting, at the time, an opinion radio show.

00:36:01.000 And it's a left opinion radio show.

00:36:02.000 And so I walked up to him and I said, you know, Mr. Donaldson, nice to meet you.

00:36:05.000 I'm wondering why it is that you host an opinion radio show right now and you're very much on the left.

00:36:11.000 And he said, yes.

00:36:12.000 And I said, well, did you hold the same opinions back when you were a reporter?

00:36:15.000 And he said, yes.

00:36:16.000 And I said, well, doesn't that make you a liar?

00:36:18.000 Since you essentially portrayed yourself as an objective news journalist back then, but you held the same opinions.

00:36:23.000 And it was pretty obvious you held the same opinions.

00:36:25.000 And he said, what, you think you're better than I am?

00:36:26.000 I said, well, frankly, yes, I do, actually, because I'm pretty open about my biases and I state them front and center.

00:36:32.000 He got very angry at me.

00:36:33.000 Those eyebrows basically came at me.

00:36:35.000 It was it was it was a moment.

00:36:36.000 It was a moment.

00:36:37.000 In any case. 1.00

00:36:39.000 How do we know that these people are pathetic hypocrites? 1.00

00:36:42.000 Well, first, let me show you this. 1.00

00:36:43.000 Pod Save America.

00:36:45.000 The pod bros.

00:36:46.000 The Obama bros.

00:36:47.000 They're going after Tucker, and they were saying that they were helping out Media Matters, because this is all, again, a hit job.

00:36:51.000 It is all an attempt to drive people they don't like off the air.

00:36:54.000 Here are the guys from Pod Save America trying to drive advertisers out of the Tucker Carlson business.

00:37:00.000 Honestly, this is badly motivated nonsense.

00:37:03.000 I have said for a long time that left, right, and center advertisers should be allowed to advertise on every program.

00:37:08.000 I would never call for a boycott against Pod Save America.

00:37:12.000 I would never call for a boycott against Pod Save America's advertisers.

00:37:16.000 Advertisers should take note, by the way, that the folks at Pod Save America are willing to use them as tools.

00:37:21.000 They're willing to use them as tools to achieve their political agenda.

00:37:25.000 And maybe they should think about whether they want to be associated with that.

00:37:28.000 But I'm not calling for advertisers to disassociate from Pod Save America.

00:37:31.000 They should feel free to advertise on a wide variety of programs.

00:37:33.000 It makes the country a better place.

00:37:35.000 Pod Save America, though, has activated in defense of media matters, trying to knock Tucker Carlson off the air for stuff that does not offend the Pod Save America bros in the slightest.

00:37:43.000 They're having a protest outside of Fox News headquarters on Wednesday at 11 a.m.

00:37:47.000 in New York, because Fox is having an emergency meeting with their advertisers.

00:37:51.000 So if you want to send a message, and you want people to actually care there, let the advertisers know, because that's the only reason the Bill O'Reilly's and the Lor- like, the people actually- And the Glenn Beck's, too.

00:38:00.000 Like, yours is the only thing that's worked.

00:38:02.000 Tucker Carlson is their most popular host and their most popular time slot.

00:38:06.000 Okay, so the Pod Save America bros, very happy with going after advertisers and secondary boycotts.

00:38:10.000 Well, let me just say this.

00:38:12.000 Every show is susceptible to this.

00:38:15.000 Every show is susceptible to this.

00:38:16.000 As I've said before, this can be weaponized, and it's in bad faith.

00:38:19.000 Everybody knows it's in bad faith.

00:38:20.000 Here is evidence it's in bad faith.

00:38:22.000 Leading the charge on this is Media Matters ex-Gribble president Angelo Carasone.

00:38:26.000 Angela Carusone has a long track record of saying nasty, terrible things on social media for years. 1.00

00:38:32.000 For example, in November 2005, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, he posted a lengthy diatribe on his website about a Bangladeshi man who was robbed by a gang of transvestites.

00:38:42.000 That is a quote from Carusone.

00:38:43.000 Carusone was so offended that the gang was described as attractive in an article.

00:38:49.000 Quote, did you notice the word attractive?

00:38:50.000 What the eff is that doing in there? 0.97

00:38:52.000 Is the writer a tranny lover too? 0.95

00:38:54.000 Is the leader of Media Matters? 0.96

00:38:55.000 Or perhaps he's trying to justify how those trannies kicked this Bangladeshi in the first place. 1.00

00:38:59.000 Look man, we don't need to know whether or not they were attractive. 0.96

00:39:02.000 The effing guy was Bangladeshi. 1.00

00:39:03.000 And while we're out, what the hell was he doing with 7,300 bucks worth of stuff? 0.61

00:39:07.000 The guy's Bangladeshi.

00:39:09.000 And that is the head of Media Matters.

00:39:11.000 Also, he chided the police for not advising the public to stay away from tranny bars. 1.00

00:39:16.000 Don't effing kiss a transvestite. 1.00

00:39:18.000 Don't bring a group of transvestites back to your room, etc. 1.00

00:39:21.000 The title of the post, Tranny Paradise. 0.88

00:39:25.000 Also, there's another post in which he uses an ethnic slur for Japanese people and another post in which he suggested that his boyfriend, who is Jewish, he said, quote, despite his jewelry, you know, he's adorable.

00:39:38.000 And he said that he would accept as a consequence.

00:39:40.000 He said that he's come to accept the different politics of his boyfriend as a as a fact of life, as a consequence of his possession of several bags of Jewish gold.

00:39:52.000 So, when does Angelo Carusone call for a boycott against Angelo Carusone?

00:39:56.000 The answer is never, because this is all cynical nonsense. 1.00

00:39:59.000 It's all garbage. 1.00

00:40:00.000 It's always been garbage. 1.00

00:40:01.000 And everybody knows that it's garbage. 1.00

00:40:03.000 But we're all supposed to pretend that it's sincere. 0.99

00:40:05.000 It is not sincere.

00:40:05.000 I'm not going to pretend good faith where bad faith is obvious.

00:40:08.000 And bad faith is perfectly obvious here.

00:40:10.000 Okay, meanwhile...

00:40:11.000 AOC, making the rounds, man.

00:40:14.000 One of the beautiful things about AOC is that when Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York and fresh face of the Democratic Party, incredibly fresh, endlessly face, when she has her hearings on Capitol Hill, With full sincerity, she plays a lawyer half well on TV.

00:40:31.000 She doesn't really know what she's talking about, and so she gets caught in these weird situations where she will ask a question, the person doesn't give an answer that she likes, and then she doesn't know what to say next.

00:40:41.000 That happened in a long exchange with the CEO of Wells Fargo.

00:40:45.000 She had called this guy on the carpet, presumably to grill him about all of these companies to which Wells Fargo has lent money in the past.

00:40:53.000 The Wells Fargo CEO is named Timothy Sloan.

00:40:56.000 There's a House Financial Services Committee hearing, and the hearing was titled, Holding Megabanks Accountable, An Examination of Wells Fargo's Pattern of Consumer Abuses.

00:41:06.000 Sloan was the first Megabank chief executive Waters summoned to appear.

00:41:09.000 By the way, it is insane, insane, that Maxine Waters presides over the House Financial Services Committee.

00:41:14.000 She's one of the most corrupt members in the history of modern Congress. 1.00

00:41:18.000 There's fairly solid evidence that she was, as a member of the House Financial Services Committee, that she was helping to direct money to a bank associated with her husband for years.

00:41:26.000 The one United Bank.

00:41:28.000 In any case, AOC used her time to go after the Wells Fargo CEO for lending money to ICE.

00:41:36.000 And it got real awkward for her because she doesn't know what she's talking about.

00:41:39.000 Mr. Sloan, why was the bank involved in the caging of children and financing the caging of children to begin with?

00:41:48.000 I don't know how to answer that question because we weren't.

00:41:52.000 So in finance, you were financing and involved in debt financing of CoreCivic and GeoGroup, correct?

00:41:59.000 For a period of time, we were involved in financing one of the firms.

00:42:03.000 We're not anymore in the other.

00:42:04.000 I'm not familiar with the specific assertion that you're making, but we weren't directly involved in that.

00:42:10.000 Okay, so these companies run private detention facilities run by ICE.

00:42:16.000 Okay, so the case that she is making is that if a bank lends to a customer, and then that customer goes and does something bad with the money, the bank is now responsible for that.

00:42:30.000 So in other words, if the bank gives you a car loan, and you go out and you buy a car, which has happened to Millions of people in the United States.

00:42:38.000 You get some sort of loan from a bank, you go out and buy a car.

00:42:41.000 Then you take that car, and you drive drunk and you crash it.

00:42:44.000 That is the bank's fault, according to AOC. 1.00

00:42:47.000 So, I guess that the people who manufactured the microphone into which AOC is speaking are responsible for her stupidity. 1.00

00:42:53.000 I guess that's the way this works now. 0.98

00:42:55.000 Anybody who is involved in the chain of events leading to a bad thing happening is now responsible for that bad thing happening because we all have magical godlike powers.

00:43:03.000 She tried the same routine with regard to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

00:43:07.000 She tried to ask the CEO of Wells Fargo if he is responsible for an oil spill by a pipeline.

00:43:14.000 Wells Fargo was also an investor, a major investor in the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Keystone XL Pipelines.

00:43:21.000 Should Wells Fargo be held responsible for the damages incurred by climate change due to the financing of fossil fuels and these projects?

00:43:29.000 I don't know how you'd calculate that, Congresswoman.

00:43:31.000 Say, from spills, or when we have to reinvest in infrastructure, building seawalls, from the erosion of infrastructure, or cleanups, wildfires, etc.?

00:43:44.000 Why shouldn't Wells Fargo pay for the cleanup of it, since it paid for the construction of the pipeline itself?

00:43:49.000 Because we don't operate the pipeline.

00:43:50.000 Why did Wells Fargo finance this pipeline when it was widely seen to be environmentally unstable?

00:43:58.000 Because our team reviewed the environmental impact and we concluded that it was a risk that we were willing to take.

00:44:06.000 I mean, what I love about her case right here is that she is saying that Wells Fargo is responsible for every downstream effect of a business that it funds, including effects on climate change.

00:44:16.000 Yet this is a lady who just said the other day that she is living in the world, so she is not responsible for using Uber and blowing carbon emissions into the atmosphere at an exorbitant rate. 1.00

00:44:25.000 She's not responsible for that, which she does directly. 0.80

00:44:28.000 But somehow Wells Fargo is responsible for doing something lesser.

00:44:32.000 Amazing stuff.

00:44:33.000 And again, demonstrative of the fact that this is a bad faith attempt to go after big business.

00:44:37.000 This is a bad faith attempt to go after people who fund business in the United States.

00:44:42.000 I would love to see a world where AOC's logic prevailed legally.

00:44:47.000 Where people are responsible for every action downstream taken with any product that they manufacture.

00:44:52.000 All business in the United States would be immediately bankrupt.

00:44:54.000 Which might be the point.

00:44:56.000 Because the only folks who never have to be responsible for anything are the folks in the federal government.

00:44:59.000 The folks in the federal government never have to be responsible for anything.

00:45:02.000 They can promote programs that destroy the social fabric of the country.

00:45:05.000 They can promote programs that make people poorer, that destroy businesses.

00:45:08.000 They can do all of those things and they will never be held to account because the government never goes bankrupt and because no individual is individually responsible for those evils.

00:45:18.000 Pretty amazing stuff.

00:45:19.000 Meanwhile, quick update.

00:45:21.000 Quick update on the Bernie Sanders campaign.

00:45:23.000 Remember that time that the entire Democratic Party decided to wink and nod at anti-Semitism?

00:45:28.000 Well, it turns out that goes a little bit more than skin deep.

00:45:30.000 Over at the Bernie Sanders campaign, an aide was forced to apologize today for questioning American Jews' dual allegiance to Israel.

00:45:37.000 A spokeswoman for Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign apologized on Tuesday after questioning whether the American Jewish community has a dual allegiance to the state of Israel.

00:45:47.000 In a conversation on Facebook, I used some language that I now see was insensitive.

00:45:50.000 Issues of allegiance and loyalty to one's country come with painful histories, said Belen Sisa, Sanders' deputy national press secretary.

00:45:58.000 At a time when so many communities in our country feel under attack by the president and his allies, I absolutely recognize we need to address these issues.

00:46:05.000 Oh, oh, we don't feel under attack by you.

00:46:08.000 Or by Ilhan Omar.

00:46:09.000 Or by Bernie Sanders.

00:46:11.000 Or by the Democratic candidate who defended Ilhan Omar.

00:46:13.000 We feel under attack by Trump, and that's why you're apologizing for being a blatant anti-Semite.

00:46:18.000 Oh, got it.

00:46:20.000 Cisa's comments were flagged at 2 Politico.

00:46:22.000 Jewish political leaders criticized her remarks before Cisa deleted them.

00:46:27.000 I would totally disagree with that. 0.85

00:46:28.000 It's ridiculous and she's wrong, said Representative Lois Frankel, a Jewish Democrat from Florida. 0.96

00:46:33.000 Doesn't matter. 0.93

00:46:34.000 Is this person going to lose their job?

00:46:36.000 No, of course not.

00:46:37.000 No, because the truth is that a lot of members of the Democratic Party are fine with this sort of stuff.

00:46:41.000 They're absolutely fine with a lot of this sort of nonsense.

00:46:45.000 Solid stuff from the Bernie Sanders campaign.

00:46:47.000 Okay, time for some things I like and then we'll get to some things that I hate.

00:46:50.000 So, things that I like.

00:46:52.000 I was on a plane that meant it was time to watch a movie.

00:46:54.000 The movie that I chose was Bad Times at the El Royale.

00:46:57.000 Now, this thing had mixed reviews going in.

00:47:00.000 It is not a great movie.

00:47:01.000 It is a very well-made movie.

00:47:03.000 It's fun to look at.

00:47:05.000 It's incredibly stylish and sort of an old-school 1960s charade style.

00:47:12.000 The acting is quite good across the board.

00:47:15.000 It couldn't really decide whether it wants to be sort of an Agatha Christie murder mystery or whether it wanted to be a meditation on the nature of life and redemption.

00:47:24.000 It's got moments.

00:47:25.000 That's what I'll say about it.

00:47:26.000 It's got moments.

00:47:27.000 Here's a little bit of the preview.

00:47:28.000 First time in the El Royale.

00:47:37.000 You have the option to stay in either California or Nevada.

00:47:40.000 I always wanted to stay in Honeymoon Suite, even though I'm not currently on my honeymoon.

00:47:47.000 What are you doing out here?

00:47:48.000 I got a job singing in Reno tomorrow.

00:47:50.000 Don't pay nothing, but I'm singing the singing.

00:47:54.000 This is not a place for a priest, father.

00:47:56.000 You shouldn't be here.

00:48:01.000 It's a little too quiet in here.

00:48:02.000 It gives me the willies.

00:48:06.000 Okay, so all the performances are quite good.

00:48:09.000 The performance that really stands out, just because I'd never seen her in anything before, I think it's her first major part, is Cynthia Erivo, who plays the black lady who is a singer.

00:48:17.000 And she's a terrific singer.

00:48:18.000 She sings throughout the film.

00:48:19.000 She really can sing.

00:48:20.000 The movie doesn't quite hold together.

00:48:24.000 But again, it's a movie of moments.

00:48:25.000 Jeff Bridges is terrific in it.

00:48:27.000 And Jon Hamm is quite good.

00:48:28.000 And it's got a really big cast.

00:48:29.000 Chris Hemsworth is terrific in it.

00:48:31.000 So it's worth checking.

00:48:32.000 It's worth the watch.

00:48:33.000 It's worth the rent.

00:48:33.000 I wouldn't have seen it in the theater, and I didn't.

00:48:35.000 But it's worth the rent.

00:48:36.000 Okay, time for a couple of things that I hate.

00:48:38.000 Okay, so thing that I hate, number one.

00:48:43.000 There's a piece that I saw linked over at the Washington Post from a publication called The Lily.

00:48:48.000 And it says, I'm weary of dating in the church.

00:48:50.000 A devout Christian lets us into her dating life.

00:48:53.000 It's by Joy Beth Smith.

00:48:55.000 And it's an interview with this committed Christian, and the entire article is about how bad it is to date as a Christian.

00:49:01.000 And it just says to me how corrupt our society is that we think that it is very bad to date as a religious person.

00:49:05.000 I dated as a religious person, as I have said for my entire adult life.

00:49:10.000 I think dating for marriage is the only type of dating that is worthwhile.

00:49:13.000 I think dating for fun is a waste of time.

00:49:14.000 I think it is counterproductive.

00:49:16.000 I think it prevents you from finding someone you want to spend the rest of your life with.

00:49:19.000 I'm a goal-oriented person.

00:49:20.000 I think people should be goal-oriented in relationships.

00:49:23.000 What's hilarious about this article is that it unintentionally exposes how great it is to date as a religious person.

00:49:29.000 So here's what the article says.

00:49:30.000 This is an interview.

00:49:31.000 So this woman is asked, you're a committed Christian.

00:49:33.000 What's your experience been like dating in a devout religious setting?

00:49:36.000 Exhausting.

00:49:37.000 I'm weary of dating in the church.

00:49:39.000 Growing up as a conservative Southern Baptist, I was conditioned to believe that the purpose of dating is for marriage.

00:49:43.000 You only date when you are ready and able to be married, and you only date people whom you would consider marrying.

00:49:48.000 This, of course, presents all kinds of problems.

00:49:51.000 How do you know when you're ready for marriage?

00:49:52.000 And is anyone really ready for marriage?

00:49:54.000 Okay, the answer is that yes, there comes a point in your life when you are ready to make a commitment and settle down.

00:49:59.000 And if you're not ready to do that, then you shouldn't be leading anybody else on.

00:50:03.000 We all know when this point is.

00:50:04.000 And to pretend that you don't really know when you're ready for marriage, it's like saying, do you know when you're ready to get a job?

00:50:09.000 You're ready to get a job when it's time to get a job.

00:50:11.000 You're ready to get married when it's time to get married.

00:50:13.000 Are you ready at the end of college after your brain fully develops or maybe once you're financially stable and your fertility is starting to decrease at an alarming rate?

00:50:20.000 No, it is when you are personally capable of having a fulfilling lifelong commitment.

00:50:25.000 By default, this mentality also teaches you to assess every guy as a prospective spouse before seeing him as a person.

00:50:30.000 I don't even know what that means.

00:50:32.000 I legitimately don't know what that means.

00:50:34.000 If I see somebody as a prospective spouse, do I no longer see them as a human being?

00:50:38.000 In fact, I see them as the ultimate human being, a person with whom I might want to spend the rest of my life.

00:50:43.000 How's it demeaning anyone to evaluate whether you want to spend the rest of your life with them?

00:50:47.000 That seems like maybe the best way to determine whether that person is a person worth your time.

00:50:53.000 But this lady says, this creates a culture of commodification and dehumanization that only compounds dating's inherent frustrations. 0.96

00:51:00.000 Okay, let me ask you this.

00:51:01.000 Which do you think creates more dehumanization and commodification? 0.79

00:51:04.000 Dating for sex or dating for marriage?

00:51:06.000 Which do you think is more dehumanizing? 0.97

00:51:08.000 Hey, there's a hot person. 1.00

00:51:09.000 I'd like to screw them. 0.99

00:51:10.000 Or, hey, there's a human being. 1.00

00:51:13.000 I might like to settle down and marry that person.

00:51:14.000 They seem attractive on the surface.

00:51:16.000 Maybe we should sit down and talk about their values, their aspirations, goals, and dreams.

00:51:19.000 Which one is more dehumanizing and commodifying?

00:51:22.000 This lady says, it begins to seem like you're only as valuable as you are marriageable.

00:51:27.000 Well, in the context of relationships, yes, that's exactly what it means.

00:51:31.000 It means that maybe if you're not marriageable, you should start thinking about how to make yourself more marriageable.

00:51:36.000 Because in order to be marriageable, that means that you have to be found worthwhile by another person voluntarily.

00:51:41.000 Stop railing against reality and start thinking about how you improve your life.

00:51:45.000 Anything that detracts from your marriage potential, like a quirky personality, thick thighs, or a too loud laugh, decreases your value as a person.

00:51:52.000 No, it doesn't decrease your value as a person.

00:51:54.000 It decreases your value as a marriage partner, but only to people who value those things.

00:51:58.000 Because again, it's a voluntary, lifelong commitment.

00:52:02.000 In the orbit of a church culture that highly prizes the nuclear family unit, I'm unable to fully participate or create that family structure for myself, despite my best efforts.

00:52:10.000 Listen, I know it's hard to be single. 0.79

00:52:11.000 It sucks to be single.

00:52:13.000 It's no fun to be single. 0.97

00:52:14.000 But to substitute an ersatz relationship for something real and true, to stop seeking the good in favor of the mediocre to bad, is not only a waste of your time, it is a waste of your soul.

00:52:28.000 This lady says, Again, that is true.

00:52:29.000 It is difficult to date. 1.00

00:52:29.000 Dating sucks. 1.00

00:52:30.000 It was my least favorite time of life. 0.99

00:52:31.000 I hated dating.

00:52:31.000 I thought it was terrible.

00:52:32.000 any issues, but I don't know how to be what the single men seem to be looking for.

00:52:35.000 And it's painful to continually put yourself on a market where there are no takers.

00:52:38.000 Again, that is true.

00:52:39.000 It is difficult to date. 1.00

00:52:40.000 Dating sucks. 0.98

00:52:41.000 It was my least favorite time of life. 0.99

00:52:42.000 I hated dating.

00:52:43.000 I thought it was terrible.

00:52:44.000 It's why after I found my wife and we started dating within three and a half months, we were engaged.

00:52:48.000 I remember when we got engaged.

00:52:50.000 I turned to my wife and I said, basically, I remember the dates.

00:52:53.000 It was November 15th of 2000 and, let's see, we were married in 2008.

00:52:56.000 So it would have been November 15th of 2007.

00:52:59.000 And finally, I turned to my wife and I said, I love you.

00:53:03.000 And then for a month, she did not say I love you back.

00:53:05.000 For a full month, she did not say I love you back.

00:53:08.000 And this was very troubling.

00:53:10.000 It was very difficult.

00:53:11.000 Every time I would finish a phone call, I'd say, I love you.

00:53:13.000 And she would say, okay, bye.

00:53:15.000 It was great.

00:53:16.000 Then, December 15th, she finally realized that, in fact, she did love me.

00:53:20.000 And she said, I love you, too.

00:53:22.000 And the reason she hadn't said I love you is because she knew that the minute that she said I love you, this is what was going to happen next, because it did.

00:53:28.000 I said, OK, let's get married.

00:53:30.000 You love me.

00:53:30.000 I love you.

00:53:31.000 We share the same values.

00:53:32.000 We're ready to get married.

00:53:33.000 What's the problem?

00:53:33.000 Let's do this thing.

00:53:34.000 And my wife, I remember saying, you know, why don't we just take our time and enjoy the dating? 0.89

00:53:39.000 And I said to her, because I'm not enjoying the dating.

00:53:42.000 I'm enjoying being with you.

00:53:43.000 But dating always holds over its head the possibility that we break up.

00:53:47.000 And I don't like that.

00:53:48.000 It's uncomfortable to me.

00:53:49.000 I don't want to break up with you.

00:53:50.000 I want to spend the rest of my life with you.

00:53:52.000 So why don't we just get this thing formalized and let's get this done?

00:53:55.000 And it took my wife about a week to come around and then we were engaged on December 22nd of 2017.

00:53:59.000 That's how, by the way, our first date was September 5th.

00:54:01.000 So that is the entire timeline of our dating experience.

00:54:06.000 And it was great.

00:54:07.000 Why?

00:54:07.000 Because it was always done with an attitude toward commitment, directed toward commitment.

00:54:12.000 Don't waste your time.

00:54:13.000 Don't waste your life.

00:54:14.000 And that doesn't mean that this is going to be easy.

00:54:17.000 It doesn't mean that the timeline is going to be quick.

00:54:21.000 Listen, I know a lot of single people.

00:54:23.000 A lot of them.

00:54:24.000 And it's painful.

00:54:25.000 I remember being single.

00:54:27.000 I was 24 when I was married.

00:54:29.000 It's no fun at all.

00:54:31.000 It's no fun at all.

00:54:32.000 But that does not mean that you should lower your sights or settle for, well you know it'd be better if I just randomly had sex with people or I would just have a relationship where I know it's not going anywhere but better to be together than be alone.

00:54:43.000 You're emptying your soul and depriving yourself of the possibility of something better.

00:54:48.000 Okay, you know, we'll be back here a little bit later with two more hours of Ben Shapiro Show.

00:54:52.000 You're going to want to be here.

00:54:53.000 Plus, we have Daily Wire backstage.

00:54:54.000 Also, I will remind you, my new book, The Right Side of History, comes out next week, soaring up the bestseller charts as we speak.

00:55:00.000 The audiobook is now available, or it's available next week.

00:55:04.000 I do the audio read on it, so if you love this voice, get six and a half more hours of it simply by going over and buying the audiobook.

00:55:11.000 Otherwise, we'll see you here later this afternoon or tomorrow.

00:55:14.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:55:14.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:20.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:55:22.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

00:55:23.000 Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.

00:55:25.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover.

00:55:27.000 And our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:55:29.000 Edited by Adam Sajovic.

00:55:30.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.

00:55:32.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

00:55:34.000 Production assistant, Nick Sheehan.

00:55:35.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - March 13, 2019

The College Scam | Ep. 736

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