Ben Shapiro takes a moment to vent about all the things going on in the world, including the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a children's book being attacked for no reason, and the question of whether or not technology is going to kill us all. Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, Like, and Share to get notified when we deconstruct the latest news in politics, culture, entertainment, and society. You can also join our FB group, and join the conversation by using the hashtag on the social network, and find us on Insta if you search for the topic . Thanks to our sponsor, PolicyGenius, for making life insurance affordable and accessible for millions of Americans. Go to policygenius.co/TheBenShapiroShow and use the promo code "ELISTS" to receive 20% off your first month with discount code "THEPODCAST" when you sign up for a FREE trial of $20 or more! You won't want to miss it! You'll get access to all the latest and greatest shows and shows on the airwaves, plus access to special merch, including T-shirts, T-Shirts, hoodies and hoodies, and much more. FREE PROMO codes, including limited-edition hoodies! Learn more about all kinds of merch and gift sets, including hoodies from all major boutiques, including our sponsorships, including "The Ben Shapiro's Real Goodies. and "The Besties." to help pay for your ad-free version of his new book "The Real Life is Not What It's Said to be the Real Life Version of The Real Life Bestseller of the show "Ben Shapiro's New Thing." - The Real Thing's Real Thing is the Real Thing? The Real Goodie: The Real Deal's Real Deal, the Ben Shapiro Podcast, the Real Deal Is The Best Thing You'll Never Get a Deal of the Week! by Ben Shapiro, the podcast you'll Never Hear It All About It All! and much, Real Life Is Not What You'll Hear About It's Real Life's Best Thing Happier than You'll Get a Real Thing Is Real, Not-Upsets and More Real Life Story, the Podcasts That Will Help You Find It All, Not Really, So Much Better than That's Real-Life Story, Real Deal?
00:00:01.000We have many things to discuss today, among them Facebook under fire, Democrats attacking a children's book for no reason at all, and will technology kill us all?
00:00:36.000I get in there, they're in the middle of a tornado warning, and then I have to stop at a hotel that, let's just say, was not five star.
00:00:43.000It's the kind of hotel where you wake up at two o'clock in the morning and you really haven't gone to sleep and you're just feeling like garbage and you need some water because there's no water in the room because the last time anybody cleaned the room was three years ago and so you saunter on over to that that special vending machine just down the hall you know
00:00:58.000You know, right past those three doors that people have been slamming the entire night.
00:01:01.000And you know that the guy next door has been listening to a Jim—watching a Jim Carrey movie because you can hear through the paper-thin walls.
00:01:06.000Anyway, you saunter on over to that vending machine and you say, you know what, I'll get myself some water and really chill out.
00:01:12.000And then you get to the vending machine and you realize the only options are Coca-Cola, Sprite, and Mellow Yellow.
00:01:18.000And you think to yourself, did I somehow stumble into a portal?
00:01:23.000And then, of course, we have the technological problems of today's shows.
00:01:28.000Actual real news, not just me banging and moaning about the situation.
00:01:32.000Let's just say that the high life is not always what it's cracked up to be.
00:01:36.000But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at PolicyGenius.
00:01:40.000If you are like me and you are afraid of death at this point in your life, then you might want to be looking over at our friends at Policy Genius.
00:01:46.000Because Policy Genius has made comparing and buying life insurance easy.
00:01:48.0004 in 10 Americans do not have life insurance.
00:01:51.000That's because they are not thinking ahead.
00:02:43.000The folks on the ropes over the past 24 hours have not just been world travelers, you know, crossing the country.
00:02:48.000It's also been the folks over at Facebook.
00:02:50.000So right now, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the use of personal data from 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica violated a consent decree that the tech company signed with the agency in 2011, according to Bloomberg.
00:03:01.000So, if you recall, all the way back to yesterday's show, there was a report in the UK Guardian suggesting that the folks at Cambridge Analytica, which was the data analysis firm, the data gathering firm for the Trump campaign, that they had illicitly gathered 50 million Facebook users.
00:03:14.000Now, there's nothing illegal about what they did, apparently.
00:03:17.000What they did is they gathered a bunch of data from Facebook users who had taken a personality quiz, and then they'd use those personality quiz, they'd obtain that data, they'd cross-reference that personality quiz data.
00:03:28.000with supposed politics, and this was a work of heart-rending genius, right?
00:04:04.000There's nothing terrible that happened so far as I can see yet.
00:04:07.000Maybe there will be new evidence of something quite terrible.
00:04:09.000But the left is going crazy because, again, they're trying to set up a particular narrative here.
00:04:13.000So a spokesman for the FTC is saying, quote, we are aware of the issues that have been raised but cannot comment on whether we are investigating.
00:04:19.000We take any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously, as we did in 2012 in a privacy case involving Google.
00:04:25.000Facebook said Tuesday it had received a letter from the FTC with questions, but had not been informed of a formal probe.
00:04:30.000If these were all found to be violations, if it turns out that Facebook had been willfully violating its own consent decree, it would cost them $40,000 per violation.
00:04:37.000If you were talking about tens of millions of violations, then you're talking about presumably billions and billions of dollars in violations.
00:04:43.000It would basically bankrupt the company if this ended up being a serious issue.
00:04:48.000These weekend reports allege that Facebook users allegedly, willingly provided their data to a psychology quiz app, and then the people who made that quiz app passed the data along to Cambridge Analytica without the user's knowledge, constituting a potential violation.
00:05:19.000Shares of Facebook fell 5% Tuesday after skidding as much as 8% on Monday.
00:05:24.000And now, apparently, Mark Zuckerberg's having a meeting, but he's not going.
00:05:28.000So Facebook's bureau, their staff, is having a meeting.
00:05:30.000The chief executive of Facebook, according to The Guardian, Mark Zuckerberg, has remained silent over the more than 48 hours since the Observer revealed the harvesting of 50 million users' personal data
00:05:39.000Even as his company is buffeted by mounting calls for investigation and regulation, falling stock prices, and a social media campaign to delete Facebook, Facebook shares slid 7% on Monday following the news, knocking $36 billion off the company's valuation as investors worried about the consequences of the revelations, according to the U.K.
00:06:02.000The embattled social media company announced on Monday it would engage in a digital forensics firm to conduct an audit of Cambridge Analytica to determine whether the firm or not still has copies of the data in question.
00:06:13.000Does this sound like anything awful happened?
00:06:34.000And then, and Barack Obama's data team, by the way, was praised as these wonderful, world-breaking geniuses.
00:06:41.000In fact, flashback to 2012, Maxine Waters, another world-breaking genius, she was talking back in 2012 about how Barack Obama had done it, and she said he gathered data on everyone via Facebook.
00:07:34.000In fact, one of the publications that looked the other way, not only looked the other way, but praised the Obama campaign was, you guessed it, the UK Guardian.
00:07:59.000But no, it was about the Guardian talking about the world-breaking genius of the Obama team.
00:08:04.000Again, building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never before achieved.
00:08:16.000According to the Guardian, Obama's new database would be gathered by individual volunteers who'd log on to Obama's re-election site using their Facebook credentials, consciously or otherwise.
00:08:24.000Again, the entire claim here is that the Trump campaign gathered data on people who weren't consciously aware that their data was being gathered.
00:08:30.000Here's the Guardian in 2012, quote, consciously or otherwise, the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page, home location, date of birth, interests, and crucially, network of friends, directly into the central Obama database.
00:08:44.000Facebook had no problem with any of this.
00:08:48.000The former Obama Director of Integration and Media Analytics said, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to, quote, suck out the whole social graph.
00:08:56.000Facebook, quote, was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn't stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
00:09:03.000And then this woman added, quote, they came to the office in the days following the election recruiting and were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn't have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
00:09:14.000Of course, as soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.
00:09:19.000None of this is surprising, because it's all part of a larger and greater agenda.
00:09:24.000That larger and greater agenda, as I suggested yesterday, is that Democrats think that Trump should not have won.
00:09:30.000In order to prevent future Trumps from winning, they're going to prevent conservatives from getting out their message.
00:09:35.000They're going to prevent data mining by Republicans, but they will allow it for Democrats.
00:09:38.000They're going to prevent conservative websites like The Daily Wire from distributing our material.
00:09:42.000They'll build algorithms to prevent that distribution.
00:09:45.000They will at the same time benefit a bunch of left-wing organizations that are doing exactly the same kind of journalism that we are, just on the other side.
00:09:52.000Democrats have been using the Trump election as a way to browbeat social media companies that were supposed to be open sources into censoring conservatives.
00:10:03.000The agenda here, and it's been clear for months, the agenda here is the Democrats who have been claiming with no evidence whatsoever that it was social media manipulation that won Trump the election and therefore Facebook, YouTube, Google, Twitter, these all have to be regulated, these all have to be brought to heel.
00:10:39.000So, a year and a half ago, there was a lot of talk about Facebook algorithms preventing conservative topics from trending.
00:10:45.000And Zuckerberg met with a bunch of conservatives, including my friend Glenn Beck, and he met with, I believe, Tucker Carlson, a bunch of people, to talk about shifting his algorithm.
00:10:54.000And, according to Wired, that was all an attempt to sort of buy off the press, prevent conservatives from whining about it too much.
00:10:59.000Well, now, they don't care whether conservatives whine about it.
00:11:01.000They've just decided they're going to cater to Democrats by essentially shutting down all these mechanisms for conservatives.
00:11:07.000Senate Democrats have trotted out a bunch of pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook viewed by a handful of human beings, right, as an excuse for Hillary Clinton's loss.
00:11:15.000They've suggested that this is why Hillary Clinton lost.
00:11:18.000Those things—we showed them on the show.
00:11:33.000But the Democrats are claiming it's a something burger because, of course, they want to use that as an excuse to club all of these social media companies into submission.
00:11:41.000They also claimed without evidence that fake news had swamped Facebook.
00:12:02.000Nobody likes the stuff that's outright false.
00:12:04.000But instead of just banning the stuff that's outright false, Mark Zuckerberg has gone further.
00:12:08.000Mark Zuckerberg has decided that he is going to cleanse his network of all stuff that would remotely be construed as conservative.
00:12:15.000In February, Wired Magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook's role in the election of 2016 and their subsequent attempts to fix the problem.
00:12:23.000After the election, Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, met with Barack Obama after the election, when Obama was no longer the president.
00:12:32.000I'll tell you in one second what exactly he said to Barack Obama, because it's stunning, and it shows that what I am saying about this quasi-conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory.
00:12:41.000First, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at ZipRecruiter.
00:12:44.000So, if you're having a rough day at the office, and let's say that your employees haven't been doing a particularly good job and you need to replace all of them, well,
00:14:18.000In February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to rejigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems trustworthy, informative, and local.
00:15:02.000This isn't really in any serious way about anything except for forcing social media platforms to move to the left and social media wanting to demonstrate just how wonderful they are by moving to the left in order to head off Democrats and make themselves feel better about the fact that Trump was elected president.
00:15:20.000There's a reason that Twitter has suspended alt-right racists but continues to promote Louis Farrakhan.
00:15:23.000There's a reason that YouTube is being sued by Prager University for demonetizing all of its videos.
00:15:27.000There's a reason that Google used automatic fact-checking on right-wing sites like this one we discussed on the show, but did no such thing for left-wing sites.
00:15:34.000This is a radical reshifting in social media.
00:15:36.000The reason I used Facebook, the reason I used Google, the reason I used YouTube, the reason I used Twitter, is because these are open sources.
00:15:42.000Because the whole goal here is that these were neutral arbiters.
00:15:45.000These were not people who were going to interpose themselves between you and the news you wanted to see.
00:15:49.000I'm getting emails every single day from users over at Facebook who are saying that we used to show up in their newsfeed and now we no longer do, and they want to know how to fix it.
00:15:56.000We have a video, by the way, over at YouTube and Facebook, where you can see how to fix your newsfeed so that you're actually getting our headlines again.
00:16:21.000On all of these major social media outlets.
00:16:23.000And here's going to be the final solution on all of this.
00:16:26.000The end solution here is going to be either regulation of these companies or beginning new companies.
00:16:30.000I think beginning new companies is probably going to happen in relatively short order.
00:16:33.000I've heard rumors to that effect from some pretty major folks that there will be rivals to YouTube, there will be rivals to Facebook, that these companies, in their attempt to shut down free and open exchange of ideas, in their attempt to prevent views that they don't like from being disseminated, they're driving away a huge percentage of their audience.
00:16:50.000And this is really important stuff, because so many people get their news from Facebook.
00:16:53.000Right now, it's like well over 50% of the people in the United States get their news from Facebook.
00:16:58.000While Facebook is censoring us, but not censoring the New York Times, you're only getting one element of the news.
00:17:02.000You're only getting one element of the news.
00:18:10.000So John Oliver, who has apparently decided to make a living out of being an insufferable douchebag, he came out on HBO and not only ripped Pence, he then launched a rival children's book against Charlotte Pence's children's book about a bunny.
00:18:23.000Because this is how nasty so many of the folks on the left have become.
00:18:26.000Now, while in many ways, Pence is like any other Trump employee, ethically compromised, creeped the... out by Jared, and subjected to all sorts of unwanted physical contact, Pence is, constitutionally, the only official in the White House that Trump can't fire.
00:18:41.000The first tell-all book to come out of the current White House is hopping into bookstores, Marlon Bundo, the pet rabbit of Vice President Mike Pence there.
00:18:49.000We also wrote a book about Mike Pence's rabbit that has also been published.
00:19:01.000Okay, and the book that they created was A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, and this book is a book about a gay bunny who's being victimized by a creature called Stinkbug who's supposed to be drawn like Mike Pence, because of course Mike Pence hates gay people.
00:19:14.000Again, I'm waiting for the evidence that Mike Pence hates gay people, but people on the left just keep suggesting it over and over, so I suppose it must be true.
00:19:20.000Now what's even worse is that John Oliver then sicked all of his friends onto Charlotte Pence's Amazon page.
00:19:27.000So her Amazon page got spammed with nasty reviews.
00:19:30.000So, not from people who had actually bought her book, but from all of the people who were buying John Oliver's books.
00:19:38.000They all went over there, they spammed her site with a bunch of one-star reviews on a nice, friendly, apolitical children's book.
00:21:11.000Because you're afraid of the NRA, right?
00:21:13.000What if we all voted and said this is not okay?
00:21:16.000It was an incredibly exciting election night.
00:21:19.000In a district, there never should have been a question that the Republicans should have won.
00:21:23.000They're sending a Democrat from the heart of Trump country.
00:21:26.000Okay, so now David Hogg is openly stumping for Democrats, and the way he's doing that is by claiming that everybody who disagrees with them is a bitch of the NRA.
00:21:35.000This sort of talk is not good for the country.
00:21:37.000It doesn't allow us to have conversations with one another.
00:21:39.000There's an open letter written by a student at Susquehanna to me.
00:21:55.000And in just a second, I'm going to read you what Nolan Nightingale has to say about me arriving at Susquehanna, because obviously I'm a bad guy because we disagree.
00:22:02.000And I will show you that this is how he feels.
00:22:04.000And again, this is terrible for the country first.
00:22:06.000I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at MVMT watches.
00:22:22.000Okay, so I've gotten a bunch of pairs of sunglasses before, and every time I buy an expensive pair of sunglasses, I feel like I got ripped off.
00:22:28.000Well, the folks over at MVMT thought exactly the same way.
00:23:33.000Dear Mr. Shapiro, I am a student at Susquehanna University, and a proud one at that.
00:23:37.000If that name sounds familiar to you, it's because you are scheduled to speak here on March 20th of this year.
00:23:41.000You are invited by the Young Republicans Club, a young group of people who are by all means reasonable and relatively nice.
00:23:46.000I have grown up around Republicans all my life.
00:23:49.000My parents, whom I love very much, are Republicans.
00:23:51.000There's nothing wrong with level-headed Republicans.
00:23:53.000A large amount of the people coming to see you speak are not level-headed Republicans.
00:23:56.000The people I'm about to describe should be the kind of scum that gets you riled up when you hear that they dare to claim to belong to the same group as you.
00:24:03.000Of course, you do not denounce these people, at least publicly, because they are your bread and butter.
00:24:07.000Okay, so already he's indicting me for denouncing a group of people he hasn't described yet.
00:24:11.000Who are these nefarious folks who are showing up to my speeches, supposedly?
00:24:14.000These evil, cruel people I refuse to denounce?
00:24:27.000Because if so, they should stop being awful people.
00:24:30.000Don't send death threats to faculty because you can't see one of my shows.
00:24:32.000But I don't have any evidence of this, and I have a fairly solid belief that this kid doesn't have a lot of evidence of this either.
00:24:38.000Like, has he actually tracked down the people who wrote these nasty notes?
00:24:40.000Does he even have access to those notes?
00:24:42.000Your fan base are the people that are making my friends lock themselves in their rooms on the day that you're here for fear of their lives.
00:24:49.000Because I'm fairly certain that the death threats have been all issued against me, which is why I have to travel with a large security team and why they are now going to spend a bunch of money to bring police officers out there.
00:25:00.000That's the folks over in Antifa or at Susquehanna Rising, which is one of these groups that has claimed that they want to try to shut down the event.
00:25:06.000By the way, my full expectation is that these are fair weather protesters.
00:25:44.000Again, the whole goal of this article is to make it seem like I am a nefarious fellow because he can't actually find anything nefarious that I've done.
00:25:50.000Instead, what he likes to do is claim that I am responsible for a bunch of people who I've openly denounced for years.
00:26:41.000There are lots of jerks on all sides of the aisle.
00:26:42.000Okay, I would promise you the people who are rioting across the country in places like Ferguson and Baltimore are fans of Barack Obama's policies.
00:26:49.000Does that mean that Obama's policies are necessarily wrong?
00:26:53.000In fact, when a Bernie Sanders supporter shot up a congressional baseball game, I was the first one out there saying, this is not Bernie Sanders' fault.
00:27:00.000Why is it Bernie Sanders' fault that there's a nutjob who follows his ideas?
00:27:04.000If the implementation of your ideas causes death, if the implementation of your ideas causes tyranny, then we can talk about whether your ideas are wrong.
00:27:11.000But just because some people who agree with you happen to be bad human beings doesn't mean that you are responsible for their evil or that you're a bad human being.
00:27:18.000This is just a nasty form of guilt by association that the left is associated with.
00:27:30.000Because she happens to be related to the Vice President of the United States.
00:27:33.000David Hogg suggesting that anyone who's a member of the NRA is in favor of child death.
00:27:37.000Like, even when I was on CNN on Sunday with Brian Stelter, there was one point where Stelter said to me, you know, is it really a—I was saying you're biased, right?
00:27:47.000And he said, is it really a sin that we want to stop gun violence?
00:27:49.000The implication being that if you're in favor of gun rights, you don't want to stop gun violence.
00:27:52.000And I said, like, what are you talking about?
00:27:55.000What in the world are you talking about?
00:27:57.000But again, this is just another demonstration of the radicalism that has overtaken so much of the Democratic Party.
00:28:02.000Character attacks are first on the list of things to do, rather than last on the list of tactics to use.
00:28:08.000Democratic radicalism has really gotten extreme.
00:28:11.000Again, these are the same people who are endorsing Keith Ellison, who's endorsing Louis Farrakhan.
00:28:15.000And the same people claiming that my fans are the problem are out there pretending that the heads of the Women's March can hang out with Louis Farrakhan, no problem, and that Keith Ellison, who has nearly made the head of the DNC, is not a problem either.
00:28:26.000Speaking of Keith Ellison, by the way, he is a career-long anti-Semite with longtime associations with the Nation of Islam's anti-Semite extraordinaire Louis Farrakhan, while on Monday, he penned an article at Medium complaining about the media's coverage of connections between top Democrats and Farrakhan.
00:28:41.000Ellison's article didn't take responsibility for association with and defense of Farrakhan.
00:28:45.000Instead, he suggested that people like me were attempting to drive a rift between the Jewish and black communities, which is just — like, you endorsed an open anti-Semite because you said that he's for black rights, and then you accuse me of driving a rift between black people and Jewish people?
00:28:58.000But this is the game, and this is the game that the left is consistently playing.
00:29:03.000All right, Ellison says stuff like this.
00:29:05.000He says, over the last few weeks, some political opponents have been pushing the narrative that I am somehow connected to a man named Louis Farrakhan.
00:29:13.000Here's CNN on Keith Ellison's associations.
00:29:16.000A CNN K-file review of Ellison's past writings and public statements during the late 1980s through the 1990s reveal his decade-long involvement in the Nation of Islam and his repeated defense of Farrakhan and other radical black leaders against accusations of antisemitism in columns and statements to the press.
00:29:32.000Keith Ellison defended Kwame Ture, that would be Stokely Carmichael, in 1990, after Carmichael made a speech stating, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That same year, Ellison wrote, quote, That
00:30:02.000Farrakhan said on his own show that he met Ellison in Farrakhan's hotel room in December 2016, along with Representative Andre Carson.
00:30:12.000It really is an astonishing thing, and this shows the radicalism of Democrats.
00:30:16.000And it also demonstrates why they have to make character attacks, because if they're forced to defend their character on this kind of stuff, they're going to fail every single time.
00:32:26.000We are the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast in the nation.
00:32:35.000OK, so in other news, the CDC is issuing a stunning report about youth suicide, and it does say something about where we stand as a country.
00:32:42.000According to the Centers for Disease Control, youth suicide is in the middle of a precipitous, really frightening, skyrocketing rate.
00:33:07.000The Blaze points out that CNN reported last year the suicide rate among girls between the ages of 15 and 19 rose to a 40-year high in 2015.
00:33:29.000So there are a bunch of theories about why the suicide rate has been skyrocketing.
00:33:32.000Theory number one is that the suicide rate has been rising because the economy was bad in 2007-2008.
00:33:39.000The evidence for that is really not there, because what you would have expected is that the suicide rate would mirror the economic decline in 2007-2008.
00:33:53.000The suicide rate has continued to rise.
00:33:55.000Then there are people who blame the rise of suicide on drugs, particularly opioids.
00:34:00.000But according to a study from the National Institute of Drug Abuse, drinking, smoking, and drug use may be at the lowest level seen in decades among teenagers.
00:34:11.000I think that the solution is not something that a lot of folks on the left are going to like, but I think that it's pretty obvious.
00:34:16.000If you look at polls on human happiness, if you look at polls on people finding meaning in their lives, I mean like cosmic meaning in their lives, it is highly correlative with religious practice.
00:34:26.000So according to the Atlantic, right, not a right-wing source, they cited a study in psychological science.
00:34:32.000The researchers found that this factor of religiosity mediated the relationship between a country's wealth and the perceived meaning in its citizens' lives, meaning that it was the presence of religion that largely accounted for the gap between money and meaning.
00:34:44.000People in the West largely find meaning in materialism.
00:34:47.000This is true for people on the left and the right.
00:34:49.000Marxists say that all human meaning can be found in rectifying income inequality.
00:34:53.000A lot of folks on these sort of libertarian rights suggest that material wealth and prevalence of human freedoms provide people meaning.
00:35:00.000That has not held true throughout human history.
00:35:02.000So, this study analyzed a bunch of other factors.
00:35:04.000Education, fertility rates, individualism, social support, to see if they could explain the findings.
00:35:22.000This isn't a problem that can be cured by redistributing Xboxes.
00:35:25.000There's a problem with the human soul.
00:35:26.000Now this doesn't mean you have to head on over to the church and then you have to become a deeply religious member of an organized religious sect.
00:35:32.000It does mean you have to put aside spiritual but not religious.
00:35:34.000Spiritual doesn't come with action points.
00:35:38.000And people are notoriously bad at defining their own meaning.
00:35:41.000I know there's been this moral relativistic streak that is characterized post-enlightenment thought in the West.
00:35:46.000That there's good and there's bad, but it's really up to you.
00:35:49.000And this is the line from City Slickers.
00:35:51.000In City Slickers, Billy Crystal's going through a midlife crisis, and he goes out with his friends Daniel Stern and Bruno Kirby all the way out to the desert.
00:35:58.000And when he gets out to the desert, he meets up with Curly, and Curly is played by Jack Palance, and Jack Palance gives him the meaning of life.
00:36:04.000He says the meaning of life is one thing, and then he dies before he can say what the one thing is.
00:36:09.000And Palance basically says, well, that's for you to find out.
00:36:12.000Well, except that human beings are really bad at this.
00:36:13.000Human beings are not good at finding out what their meaning is.
00:36:16.000Human beings need to be told that they have a special meaning in the universe, a special place before God, that they are made in God's image, they have intense value, and that even the mundane things they do in life have a deeper, lasting impact beyond themselves.
00:36:30.000And it's really weird to me that so many people on the left deny this.
00:36:33.000I understand they think that religion has been an obstacle to human growth, which I don't see the evidence for.
00:36:39.000I know that they believe that religion has been an obstacle to scientific development, which, again, has not been true, historically speaking.
00:36:46.000There are times when religion has been an obstacle, but overall religion has actually been a spur for most of human history, at least in the West.
00:36:53.000That said, I explain all of this in my upcoming book, actually.
00:36:57.000That said, there's a lack of meaning that has grown in American society, and I think it's coming to a head right now.
00:37:03.000Now, speaking of lack of meaning and devastating events, today there was another school shooting, this time at Maryland High School.
00:37:10.000And this one was actually rather instructive, because a resource officer fired at the high school shooter who was fatally shot.
00:37:16.000So three individuals, including the shooter, were shot.
00:37:19.000According to a local reporter, Peggy Fox, Sheriff Tim Cameron confirmed that a shooting occurred this morning in a hallway by a Great Mills student who was eventually engaged by an armed resource officer.
00:37:28.000The shooter reportedly fired at a female student and another student was hit.
00:37:31.000An armed school resource officer then engaged the shooter with a firearm.
00:37:34.000So this is what should have happened at Parkland.
00:37:36.000Instead, it happened in Maryland and prevented further death.
00:37:39.000This does give the lie to the idea that a good guy with a gun cannot stop a bad guy with a gun.
00:37:43.000So, good for the school resource officer for doing the right thing.
00:37:46.000Again, disproving the argument that guns are inherently bad.
00:37:49.000Now, speaking of technologies that have been blamed as inherently bad, while they're not inherently bad, there's a lot of hubbub in the last couple of days.
00:38:24.000According to the Daily Mail, the female driver who was in control of a self-driving Uber when it hit and killed a homeless woman in Arizona is a convicted felon who claims the victim stepped out in front of his car suddenly, giving her no time to try to avoid her.
00:38:53.000And take control of the vehicle if anything went wrong.
00:38:56.000She told police that Herzberg, who'd spent time in prison for drug offenses, stepped out in front of her with a bicycle carrying multiple shopping bags, and she had no time to brake before it hit her.
00:39:03.000She was traveling at 40 miles per hour at the time, well within the 45 mile per hour speed limit.
00:39:09.000She insisted she was alert, but nothing could have been done to stop the crash.
00:39:32.000Virtually all of them were due to human error.
00:39:34.000Machines are better at this stuff than human beings are now.
00:39:37.000I know there's been a lot of talk about truck drivers going to go out of business, and so many people won't be able to drive anymore, and what are we going to do?
00:39:44.000But all this really is, in essence, is Ludditism.
00:39:47.000What happened to this lady is terrible, but it sounds like it would have happened whether it was a human driver or an automated driver.
00:39:52.000Again, machines are very good at these types of things, and the roads will be a lot safer when there are more machines on them rather than more human beings, because people are notoriously bad at driving.
00:40:03.000Plus, we're texting anyway, so better that we should be texting while not driving than that we should be texting and driving at the same time.
00:40:10.000And now it's time for me to do some things I like and some things that I hate.
00:40:15.000So, this movie I had a chance to watch a couple of days ago.
00:40:19.000There's no doubt after watching this movie that Margot Robbie should have won Best Actress over Frances McDormand, who I thought was overrated in three billboards.
00:40:33.000It's always sort of a shock when a woman who I believe started off as a model ends up being a very good actress, but she's actually a terrific actress.
00:41:24.000They tried to turn it into a critique of American life and how viewers treat ice skating.
00:41:29.000They want all these women not to have real lives and all the rest of this sort of stuff.
00:41:33.000The real story is Tanya Harding had a horrible mother and also had a horrible ex-husband.
00:41:39.000And her ex-husband, according to the movie, at least planned the hit on Nancy Kerrigan, basically himself, along with an idiot friend of his.
00:41:46.000It's hard to watch, but it is entertaining.
00:43:01.000I'm sure that Jim Carrey himself is a wonderful Christian and a great tribute to people of religion everywhere.
00:43:08.000You know, the nastiness that's inherent in this is pretty obvious.
00:43:12.000This kind of art is fairly typical, but again, it's all about the people you disagree with politically must be bad human beings.
00:43:18.000If he wants to say that she's bad because she lies for the president,
00:43:22.000I guess that's his prerogative, and he could then make a case for why that is the case.
00:43:27.000I don't think it's good to lie for the president, either.
00:43:28.000But I get the feeling that whether or not Sarah Huckabee Sanders were telling untruths on behalf of the president, he would have said the same thing about Dana Perino, because this is just what the left has become.
00:43:36.000It's all about character attacks and maligning other people's character, as opposed to actually standing up for an agenda.