The Ben Shapiro Show - The Media’s Big Boo Boo | Ep. 532

00:00:00.000 NBC screws up on a major claim about Michael Cohen. 0.81

00:00:03.000 The Huffington Post is pushing fish sex. 0.73

00:00:05.000 I am not joking. 0.53

00:00:06.000 And we get into the mailbag.

00:00:07.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:13.000 Yep, things are real weird.

00:00:14.000 We'll get to all of the news in just one second.

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00:01:47.000 Alrighty, so.

00:01:49.000 Yesterday, the big news was that NBC reported that the FBI had actually been wiretapping Michael Cohen.

00:01:54.000 Michael Cohen is, of course, President Trump's personal lawyer.

00:01:57.000 And the idea here was that when they raided Michael Cohen's office, that it had come after weeks of them tapping Michael Cohen's phone.

00:02:03.000 This would have been huge news, considering that Michael Cohen, as Trump's personal lawyer, presumably was talking with President Trump.

00:02:08.000 There was also a rumor that they had, well, NBC News reported it, just as fact.

00:02:13.000 Well, then that sort of fell apart.

00:02:14.000 So NBC News has retract all of that.

00:02:27.000 They had to issue a correction.

00:02:29.000 They said earlier today, NBC News reported there was a wiretap on the phone of Michael Cohen, President Trump's longtime personal attorney, citing two separate sources with knowledge of the legal proceedings involving Cohen.

00:02:38.000 But three senior U.S.

00:02:39.000 officials now dispute that, saying the monitoring of Cohen's phones was limited to a log of phone calls known as a pen register, not a wiretap where investigators can actually listen to calls.

00:02:47.000 Okay, well, that's not the same thing at all, okay?

00:02:50.000 I worked in a prosecutor's office for a summer out here in Los Angeles, and we were able to obtain call records for virtually anybody by subpoenaing the phone company.

00:02:58.000 So, all that is, is just a list of phone numbers.

00:03:00.000 And then you cross-check the phone numbers against the person who has the phone number.

00:03:03.000 That is not the same thing as listening to the contents of the phone call.

00:03:06.000 It's a pretty massive retraction.

00:03:07.000 And again, this is just the latest crazy retraction from the media in a long line of them over the past few weeks.

00:03:14.000 The media have been going so insane over Trump.

00:03:18.000 They've been trying their best to take down Trump.

00:03:20.000 Every story is going to be the tick tick tick boom that takes down Trump.

00:03:24.000 Benjamin Wittes, who is a legal reporter, he's constantly using that sort of framework on Twitter.

00:03:29.000 He's constantly saying, tick tock, tick tock, as though it's just a matter of time until the bomb goes off and Trump's presidency is destroyed.

00:03:35.000 And you can see this is how the media cover these issues.

00:03:38.000 I mean, yesterday there was another story that was just like this.

00:03:40.000 There was a story that was passed around the media, a huge story, that Bob Mueller had requested 70 blank subpoenas in the case against Paul Manafort.

00:03:49.000 The supposed idea here is that he was going to subpoena President Trump, that these blank subpoenas show that he was going hard after Paul Manafort.

00:03:55.000 Not really.

00:03:56.000 A blank subpoena is just something that you get drawn up.

00:03:58.000 It's the same thing as ordering blue pens.

00:04:00.000 Okay, it's literally a form.

00:04:02.000 So ordering blank subpoenas in a major case is not a shock at all.

00:04:06.000 But the media treated this as though this were a major development.

00:04:09.000 Wow, he ordered a blank subpoena.

00:04:11.000 Under Title IV, Rule 17 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the clerk must issue a blank subpoena signed and sealed to the party requesting it, and that party must fill in the blanks before the subpoena is served.

00:04:20.000 So that, of course, does not actually say anything about who's going to be served or the relevance of what is going to be served.

00:04:27.000 But the media went nuts over it anyway.

00:04:29.000 You remember a few weeks ago, McClatchy reported that Michael Cohen, the president's personal lawyer, had in fact visited Prague.

00:04:34.000 The reason that that would make a difference is because there were accusations, as you recall, in the BuzzFeed dossier, in the crazy dossier filled with allegations about Trump shtipping Russian prostitutes and such, there are allegations in there that Michael Cohen had visited Prague to coordinate with Russian agents during the election cycle.

00:04:52.000 McClatchy had written an entire story about how, after Michael Cohen had denied this and shown his passport, that it was not true that Michael Cohen, in fact, was in Prague.

00:05:00.000 Well, they reported that Michael Cohen was in Prague and that he was lying.

00:05:04.000 And then they provided no substantiating evidence.

00:05:06.000 There's not been a second report that confirms that.

00:05:08.000 So there's no more evidence of that than there was when McClatchy claimed it.

00:05:11.000 And yet that story is just sort of sitting out there.

00:05:13.000 This sort of error has become supremely common in the media.

00:05:16.000 ABC News, if you recall, a few months back had to correct a bombshell story in which they suggested that Michael Flynn had been instructed by Donald Trump to coordinate with the Russians during the campaign.

00:05:26.000 During World News Tonight, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross had said the source had provided the initial information for his story and that that initial story prompted the Dow to fall 350 points because there was a suggestion that suddenly the Trump administration was in serious trouble because

00:05:42.000 Of the report that said that Flynn was prepared to testify that Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians, which would have been the Trump-Russia collusion case proven to a T. It turns out that Trump instructed Flynn, if anything, to talk to the Russians after Trump had already been elected in December of 2016.

00:05:55.000 Right?

00:05:56.000 ABC News had to retract that report.

00:05:59.000 And you'll recall that CNN had to retract a similar report.

00:06:02.000 CNN had to correct a report about Donald Jr.

00:06:08.000 connecting with WikiLeaks.

00:06:09.000 The New York Times reported this back in December of 2017.

00:06:22.000 In fact, the email to Mr. Trump was sent a day after the documents stolen from the DNC were made available to the general public.

00:06:28.000 The point that I'm making here is that you can tell the agenda of the media by the errors that the media makes.

00:06:33.000 The media never make errors in the other direction.

00:06:36.000 The media never make errors about Obama to this extent.

00:06:39.000 They never did well.

00:06:40.000 He was president.

00:06:41.000 They never make errors about Nancy Pelosi to this extent.

00:06:43.000 They certainly never make errors about Debbie Wasserman Schultz to this extent.

00:06:47.000 And it's a really incredible thing

00:06:50.000 That the media continue to trot out stories without fully vetting them.

00:06:54.000 Now look, everybody makes mistakes, right?

00:06:56.000 I've made mistakes in my reporting.

00:06:57.000 We've apologized for mistakes at Daily Wire.

00:07:00.000 Way back when, when I wrote for Breitbart News, I ran a report that specifically said that we were reporting a rumor, and the rumor could be not true.

00:07:06.000 It had been sourced highly by a member of the Senate, in which it accused Chuck Hagel of having, who's then the nominee for Secretary of Defense under President Obama, of having coordinated with a group called Friends of Hamas.

00:07:17.000 The group turned out not to exist.

00:07:19.000 It was a bad story.

00:07:21.000 We shouldn't have run it.

00:07:22.000 It was a mistake, right?

00:07:23.000 People make mistakes.

00:07:24.000 I get that people make mistakes.

00:07:26.000 That particular story we had said at the beginning was a rumor anyway, so it wasn't like we were hiding the ball there, but it was still a mistake.

00:07:30.000 We shouldn't have run it in the first place.

00:07:31.000 Okay, that said, the question of which direction to make mistakes reveals your bias.

00:07:36.000 Now, I was biased against Chuck Hagel, so I was probably more likely to believe a bad story about Chuck Hagel.

00:07:40.000 The media proclaim that they are objective.

00:07:43.000 The media proclaim that they are fully just trying to report the news, right?

00:07:47.000 It's not biased.

00:07:47.000 There's no favor for any candidate or any president.

00:07:52.000 That obviously is untrue.

00:07:53.000 When every single error is in one specific direction, you have to acknowledge that something is happening there.

00:07:59.000 And every error with regard to Trump has been against Trump.

00:08:02.000 Every error with regard to President Obama seemed to be in favor of President Obama.

00:08:05.000 The erroneous reporting by the media about President Trump is astonishing and stunning.

00:08:11.000 It does make a certain amount of sense, considering the quickness of the news cycle, but all of these big screw-ups are directly playing into President Trump's campaign to suggest that everything is fake news.

00:08:21.000 I'll tell you something I don't like.

00:08:22.000 What I've seen from the right is MSNBC is fake news.

00:08:24.000 CNN is fake news.

00:08:25.000 New York Times is fake news.

00:08:27.000 No.

00:08:27.000 A news story is fake news.

00:08:29.000 If the news story is wrong, then it is fake news.

00:08:32.000 To suggest that the entire outlet is fake news throws out the baby with the bathwater.

00:08:36.000 Now, you can say that some publications are more trustworthy than others.

00:08:41.000 I've been ripping on InfoWars.

00:08:42.000 I don't think InfoWars is a trustworthy source of information, by and large.

00:08:45.000 OK, and you can you can take that down the line.

00:08:48.000 You know, I think that CNN is less trustworthy than The Wall Street Journal.

00:08:51.000 I think that, you know, I would not put InfoWars and CNN in the same category when it comes to reporting standards.

00:08:56.000 But obviously you can have gradations of how much you trust a particular outlet.

00:09:00.000 But to suggest an entire outlet is fake news and everything they do is fake news, I think is a large scale mistake.

00:09:06.000 But.

00:09:07.000 All you're doing, media, you're playing into President Trump's hands.

00:09:10.000 You're playing directly into President Trump's hands when you jumped the gun and you report things that have not been verified.

00:09:16.000 It's a huge mistake, and I'm shocked that the media continues to make these sorts of mistakes.

00:09:20.000 Meanwhile, President Trump continues...

00:09:22.000 It's a struggle for a legal strategy on Michael Cohen.

00:09:25.000 So Rudy Giuliani is still out there trying to play sort of offense for President Trump in the Michael Cohen investigation.

00:09:32.000 He came out and he said that Jeff Sessions should end the Mueller investigation.

00:09:34.000 He should end the — he should presumably also end the Michael Cohen investigation.

00:09:38.000 He says that all of this has gone too far.

00:09:41.000 Giuliani is, of course, Trump's new lawyer.

00:09:43.000 And here's what he had to say about the Mueller investigation, which he feels is a witch hunt.

00:09:46.000 Kim Jong-un impressed enough to be releasing three prisoners today, and I've got to go there and Jay Sekulow and the Rassners, we have to go there and prepare them for this silly deposition about a case in which he supposedly colluded with the Russians, but there's no evidence of that? 0.53

00:10:03.000 I mean, everybody forgets the basis of the case is dead.

00:10:07.000 Sessions should step in and close it. 0.79

00:10:10.000 OK, now, here's the real problem.

00:10:12.000 If Sessions, of course, steps in and closes the investigation, he's already recused himself from all the Trump-Russia stuff, so he'd have to end that recusal, step back in, and finish the investigation.

00:10:20.000 Or Fire Rod Rosenstein, or he should go, presumably, and Rosenstein and Mueller.

00:10:25.000 All of this is not going to benefit President Trump.

00:10:28.000 The only thing that can hurt President Trump about the Mueller investigation in any serious way is if Trump were to step in and fire Robert Mueller.

00:10:33.000 Now, there are people who are proclaiming that Rudy Giuliani is just promoting a rip-off-the-Band-Aid strategy, that this thing can drag on for another year and a half, all the way through the 2020 election.

00:10:42.000 So, let's just rip off the Band-Aid, fire Mueller, there will be a blowback for two months, and then everybody will be over it.

00:10:47.000 Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.

00:10:48.000 I happen to think it's probably not true, because the James Comey thing is still haunting President Trump, and it's a year and a half after he fired James Comey.

00:10:55.000 Well, it's about a year after he fired James Comey.

00:10:57.000 So, I just don't think that's going to go the way that Giuliani thinks that it's going to go.

00:11:01.000 And Giuliani, it seems, has been speaking a little bit out of turn.

00:11:04.000 So, one of the big questions about Giuliani on Hannity the other night, so you recall Rudy Giuliani suggested on the Sean Hannity show that Trump knew about the $130,000 payoff to Stormy Daniels.

00:11:14.000 And he suggested that Trump had done so in the run-up to the election, and Cohen had done so in the run-up to the election, which could create legal peril for President Trump.

00:11:21.000 Well, President Trump has now responded to Rudy Giuliani's comments.

00:11:24.000 In a second, I'm going to show you what President Trump had to say about those comments, because it's pretty funny.

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00:12:58.000 OK, so President Trump has now responded to Rudy Giuliani's odd statement.

00:13:03.000 And he says that Rudy is just sort of saying things.

00:13:06.000 Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago.

00:13:09.000 So Rudy knows it's a witch hunt.

00:13:12.000 He started yesterday.

00:13:14.000 He'll get his facts straight.

00:13:17.000 He's a great guy.

00:13:19.000 But what he does is he feels it's a very bad thing for our country, and he happens to be right.

00:13:23.000 Okay, so Trump is throwing a little bit more chum in the water there by saying, Rudy may not know what he's talking about, he may know what he's talking about, but the question is, why Trump likes what Rudy is doing?

00:13:32.000 And the answer might be that what Trump really likes from Rudy is he likes a guy on TV who's saying witch hunt over and over and over again.

00:13:39.000 It is my belief that this may, in fact, end up being a witch hunt.

00:13:42.000 That this may, in fact, end up being nothing.

00:13:43.000 There's new information out today that the prosecution of Paul Manafort may actually be falling apart.

00:13:49.000 Which is amazing.

00:13:49.000 Like, if you can't prosecute Manafort for collusion, then I'm not sure how exactly you're going to prosecute anybody else.

00:13:55.000 I mean, it's really amazing.

00:13:57.000 So, according to the Washington Post, a federal judge in Virginia on Friday grilled lawyers from the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the motivations for bringing a bank and tax fraud case against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

00:14:07.000 You don't really care about Mr. Manafort's bank fraud, Judge T.S.

00:14:10.000 Ellis said during a morning hearing.

00:14:12.000 You really care about getting information Mr. Manafort can give you that will reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment.

00:14:18.000 I mean, boom!

00:14:19.000 Ouch.

00:14:20.000 Manafort was seeking to have the bank and tax fraud charges against him dismissed in federal court in Alexandria, with his lawyers alleging that the crimes have nothing to do with the election or with President Trump.

00:14:29.000 Ellis agreed.

00:14:30.000 He made no immediate decision on the defense motion.

00:14:32.000 He said even without such a connection, the special counsel may well have the authority to bring the charges.

00:14:36.000 He's saying, I'm not saying it's illegitimate, but Manafort has also filed similar motions in the D.C.

00:14:41.000 federal court

00:14:42.000 He's pleading not guilty to all of these counts, stemming from his work for a pro-Russian political boss in Ukraine.

00:14:56.000 The longtime lobbyist has argued that Rod Rosenstein overstepped, giving the special counsel's office a blank check to go after Manafort in the first place.

00:15:03.000 And it appears that the federal judge feels the same way.

00:15:05.000 Again, we have seen very little evidence coming out from Robert Mueller about what exactly he has here, and the indictments that have come down do not lead me to believe that he's got a lot on President Trump, which is one of the reasons he wants to get President Trump in front of him to testify.

00:15:18.000 Now, that is a separate question from whether Trump should fire Mueller.

00:15:21.000 Listen, I know that the popular talk radio position is that Trump should fire Mueller and we should just, you know,

00:15:26.000 Throw four sheets to the wind, everything will be fine.

00:15:28.000 Fire Mueller, it'll all be fine.

00:15:30.000 I don't think that's right.

00:15:31.000 I think that the president should let this play out.

00:15:34.000 I think the president would be making a very large mistake if he were not to let this play out.

00:15:37.000 Because again, what the left wants is for President Trump to step on his own toes.

00:15:41.000 They want President Trump to make a big boo-boo here by firing Mueller so that they can turn around and say the reason he fired Mueller is not because the investigation was going nowhere, it's because it was going somewhere.

00:15:50.000 Instead, why doesn't Trump just let the investigation go nowhere?

00:15:53.000 It's not damaging him.

00:15:54.000 The polls right now have Trump at about 50%, according to Rasmussen.

00:15:57.000 That's as high as he has ever been, and the economy continues to do well.

00:16:00.000 I do not think all this stuff is really a threat to the Trump administration or to his viability as a 2020 candidate.

00:16:07.000 Okay, so, meanwhile, President Trump continues to be in hot water.

00:16:11.000 Over the Michael Cohen Stormy Daniels payment, right?

00:16:13.000 That's a separate case from the case regarding Robert Mueller.

00:16:18.000 That case, again, I don't think it's going to do Trump a lot of damage, but it continues to kind of nibble at his credibility.

00:16:25.000 Trump didn't have a lot of credibility to begin with when it came to matters sexual, but the media have been all over it.

00:16:30.000 One of the things I find so amusing is the media are so confused why people on the right continue to support Trump's agenda when Trump obviously was lying about Stormy Daniels and paying her off.

00:16:39.000 And the answer is, because we knew all of that, are we supposed to pretend that we are surprised in any serious way here?

00:16:45.000 Are we really supposed to pretend that we are shocked and appalled by Trump's behavior?

00:16:48.000 We've known about Trump the whole time, okay?

00:16:50.000 You knew about Trump, too.

00:16:51.000 The media knew about Trump when they were making him the apprentice guy on NBC.

00:16:55.000 But they've decided this is their time to really undermine the credibility of President Trump, as though he had tons of credibility to begin with.

00:17:01.000 So, for example, a bunch of reporters went after Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday, asking, how can you expect anyone to believe President Trump?

00:17:08.000 But can I ask you, when the President so often says things that turn out not to be true, when the President and the White House show what appears to be a blatant disregard for the truth, how are the American people to trust or believe what is said here or what is said by the President?

00:17:27.000 We give the very best information that we have at the time.

00:17:31.000 I do that every single day, and we'll continue to do that every day I'm in this position.

00:17:35.000 I don't know what that question's even supposed to mean.

00:17:37.000 I mean, honestly, like, what is she supposed to say to that?

00:17:40.000 Of course she was not informed the proper truth about Stormy Daniels, because Trump was fibbing to her, too.

00:17:44.000 And that's not a shock.

00:17:46.000 No one believes her when she was saying that Trump didn't know about Stormy Daniels.

00:17:49.000 But the media think they've really got Sarah Huckabee Sanders now. 0.93

00:17:52.000 Ooh, we've caught Sarah Huckabee Sanders in a lie, again. 1.00

00:17:55.000 No.

00:17:56.000 No one cares.

00:17:56.000 Here's Jim Acosta posturing on this issue as well.

00:17:59.000 You said on March 7th there was no knowledge of any payments from the president and he's denied all of these allegations.

00:18:07.000 Were you lying to us at the time, or were you in the dark?

00:18:10.000 The President has denied and continues to deny the underlying claim.

00:18:15.000 And again, I've given the best information I had at the time.

00:18:18.000 Why can't you just answer yes or no whether you were in the dark?

00:18:20.000 I think it's a fairly simple question whether you just didn't have the information at the time.

00:18:23.000 I think it's a fairly simple answer that I've given you actually several times now.

00:18:26.000 I gave you the best information that I had, and I'm going to continue to do my best to do that every single day.

00:18:30.000 Okay, again, they're just going to keep asking her the same question over and over and over, and then, when she kicks back, then they're going to suggest that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a thug. 1.00

00:18:36.000 Again, her job is to go out and dissemble on behalf of the president. 0.90

00:18:40.000 Okay, that was also Jake Harney's job.

00:18:42.000 That was the job of Robert Gibbs.

00:18:44.000 Guess what being a press secretary is?

00:18:45.000 Very often, it is you going out there and lying on behalf of the president.

00:18:49.000 Okay, let's not be naive, okay, about how politics works.

00:18:53.000 Let's not be naive about how all of this operates.

00:18:56.000 Okay, there are just

00:18:57.000 Everyone knows when the president tells a fib, his press secretary is going to go out there and defend the fib.

00:19:01.000 That is literally what they are paid to do.

00:19:04.000 But again, the media have decided that they are hands clean in all of this.

00:19:08.000 They can print as much nonsense and fake news as they want, and nobody is allowed to call their general credibility into question.

00:19:13.000 But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, we're supposed to believe that she is totally undermining the credibility of a president who had very little to begin with. 0.95

00:19:19.000 Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders going after April Ryan. 1.00

00:19:22.000 So April Ryan suggests that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blindsided. 0.89

00:19:26.000 Sanders kicks back and then Ryan goes crazy.

00:19:29.000 Why didn't you talk to the White House press office about his impacting stellar statements about what was happening?

00:19:37.000 The White House press office wouldn't coordinate with the president's outside legal team on legal strategy.

00:19:41.000 You said yourself you were blindsided.

00:19:43.000 I actually didn't use that term.

00:19:44.000 Well, I said it, but you were blindsided from what you said.

00:19:48.000 Well, with all due respect, you actually don't know much about me in terms of what I feel and what I don't.

00:19:58.000 Okay, so, you know, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is not being rude, but April Ryan thought she was being rude because, again, the only thing anyone in the media care about is how they look on camera. 0.99

00:20:06.000 They should stop televising the press briefings.

00:20:08.000 They really should.

00:20:09.000 Because all it turns into is a bunch of grandstanding political theater on behalf of these reporters.

00:20:14.000 And April Ryan was happy to do that, right?

00:20:16.000 She went on TV later and she talked about Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

00:20:18.000 She said, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was very street with me.

00:20:20.000 I don't even know what that means.

00:20:22.000 So she was blindsided.

00:20:23.000 This was not a personal attack on her.

00:20:25.000 And for her to say something like, you don't know me,

00:20:28.000 That was very, um, street.

00:20:30.000 I know there's street politics here, but that was very street.

00:20:34.000 To say you don't know me is very street.

00:20:36.000 Well, you don't know Sarah Huckabee Sanders all that well.

00:20:38.000 Like, what?

00:20:39.000 But, again, it just demonstrates that what the media love best of all about President Trump is the constant controversy.

00:20:45.000 While they proclaim that they don't like any of this and they just want to cover the news straight, they really don't.

00:20:49.000 They want to report what they want to report about the Trump administration, and when Trump makes a boo-boo, they want to jump all over it, and then they want to make themselves the story.

00:20:55.000 Because now the story is April Ryan and Jim Acosta.

00:20:57.000 The story is not really the president lying to the American people, and the American people not really caring, because we knew all of that.

00:21:03.000 Okay.

00:21:04.000 So, before I go any further, and I have a lot to say about some weird sex stuff in just a second.

00:21:10.000 Now, if that's not a pitch, I don't know what is.

00:21:12.000 But, before I get to any of that, first,

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00:23:09.000 We're good to go.

00:23:32.000 There's a

00:23:48.000 Incels are involuntary celibates. 0.98

00:23:50.000 The reason that they have become a thing is because last week, a couple of weeks ago, there was a 25-year-old Canadian killer who rammed his van into a crowd of people, killing 10 and injuring 15.

00:23:59.000 And the killer had written a Facebook post stating that the incel rebellion has already begun and all the Chads and Stacys, which I guess is some sort of slang for attractive people, would pay the price.

00:24:08.000 So there have been a bunch of think pieces about how to solve the problem of involuntary celibacy.

00:24:14.000 Point number one, I don't understand why involuntary celibacy is a problem.

00:24:17.000 If you haven't earned somebody's love and affection enough for them to have sex with you, I don't understand why this is society's problem.

00:24:23.000 But it just demonstrates that the victimhood mentality has taken over everyone in our society. 0.99

00:24:28.000 You're a loser and you can't find somebody to marry you? 0.99

00:24:30.000 Maybe it's because you ought to get your act together. 1.00

00:24:33.000 Maybe the reason you're involuntarily celibate is because you have not made enough of yourself to earn somebody else's love and affection.

00:24:39.000 But when you live in a society where sex is believed to be owed, when you live in a society that's constantly promising that sex is right around the corner, casual sex is easy to get, it's not a problem, no one's ever going to require anything of you,

00:24:51.000 When you watch TV and everybody is jumping in and out of the sack with everybody else, it does lead to a mentality that suggests, I am owed this thing.

00:24:58.000 I am owed sex. 0.59

00:24:59.000 Everyone's getting it except for me.

00:25:01.000 Involuntary celibacy is obviously a societal problem. 0.97

00:25:05.000 This is a very perverse view of sexuality.

00:25:07.000 Ross Douthat at the New York Times has pointed out that for purposes of discussion, there are two types of incels. 0.82

00:25:12.000 Men who can't get sex as a general rule. 0.75

00:25:14.000 It's usually men who are worried about involuntary celibacy.

00:25:17.000 And people perceived by the left wing to be victimized by a society that has unfair standards of sexiness.

00:25:21.000 So, this would be people who are trans, who say that they can't have sex with the kind of people that they want to have sex with, because as trans people, society has set up rigid standards of sexuality, and people are falling prey to all of that. 0.64

00:25:33.000 Well, Douthat suggests that the solution posed by those who see involuntary celibacy as a problem to be solved will be the redistribution of sex. 0.84

00:25:40.000 That in the end, what we will end up doing is sponsoring people so they can hire prostitutes, or we can develop new technology like sex robots so we can have equality of sex.

00:25:48.000 In the Bernie Sanders model, the top 1% of the 1% are having 99% of the sex, and we must redistribute the sex as well as the pudding.

00:25:56.000 This is the sort of move that Doubt Hat sees coming with regard to involuntary celibacy. 1.00

00:26:00.000 Now, we all rightly rebel at this idea because this idea is gross and stupid. 0.99

00:26:04.000 It's not your responsibility to make sure that anybody else has sex, obviously, nor is it your responsibility to have sex with somebody just because they would like to have sex with you. 1.00

00:26:11.000 It's idiotic. 1.00

00:26:13.000 But the reason this has even become an issue, the reason there are now all these think pieces, a lot of think pieces in the last week, about involuntary celibates and how we solve their problems, is because of this stupid victimization mentality with regard to sex. 1.00

00:26:24.000 So I was what you would call a voluntary celibate until I was married. 0.98

00:26:28.000 I was somebody who did not have sex until I was married.

00:26:31.000 My wife had the same standard. 1.00

00:26:32.000 The reason for that is because I felt that sex was an adjunct to commitment.

00:26:36.000 Sex was something that you earned as an element of commitment.

00:26:40.000 I earned the love of my wife.

00:26:41.000 I earned the commitment of my wife.

00:26:42.000 She earned my commitment. 0.74

00:26:43.000 And then we are willing and happy to have lots of fantastic sex, right?

00:26:47.000 That is the way that society used to work, is that celibacy was not considered some sort of terrible thing to be experiencing.

00:26:54.000 It was something that was supposed to encourage you to better yourself and make yourself worthy of marriage.

00:27:01.000 Right?

00:27:01.000 Conservatives have had the solution for a long time.

00:27:03.000 A sexual morality that takes into account commitment.

00:27:06.000 If we measure happiness by commitment, rather than by amount and variety of sex, then the onus placed on us is to get someone else to commit to us.

00:27:13.000 And we have a society right now that values sex above commitment.

00:27:16.000 That says that the happiest possible life is the one where you're having the sex with the most people, in the most positions, and that's what's going to make you the happiest.

00:27:22.000 That's a lie, number one.

00:27:23.000 Social science demonstrates that this is a lie.

00:27:25.000 Promiscuity does not lead to happiness, it turns out.

00:27:27.000 Sexual variety does not lead to happiness. 0.76

00:27:29.000 Commitment tends to lead to happiness.

00:27:31.000 But we're a commitment-phobic society and a sex-centric society, and that leads to an unhealthy focus on sex, and it leads to us seeing people who are not receiving this free and plentiful sex as victims of the society, as opposed to people who need to better themselves and therefore to earn commitment.

00:27:47.000 Again, virginity should not be seen as something to be condemned.

00:27:50.000 It's seen as a norm, not as a shortcoming, until you have earned somebody else's commitment.

00:27:55.000 But that's not the way our society has viewed it.

00:27:56.000 If sex is the goal of life, then we're going to fall directly into this trap about redistribution of sex and voluntary celibates being victims.

00:28:03.000 Again, the reality is nobody owes you sex.

00:28:06.000 Nobody owes you anything.

00:28:07.000 You need to earn.

00:28:09.000 And when I say you need to earn, I don't mean you gotta be a guy who plays the game.

00:28:13.000 You gotta be a stud.

00:28:14.000 That's not what I mean.

00:28:15.000 What I mean is that if you actually want to have a happy life, what you need to do is make yourself worthy of the person with whom you would like to have sex, and that person needs to make themselves worthy of you as well.

00:28:24.000 It means bettering yourself.

00:28:26.000 Every way.

00:28:27.000 Physically, emotionally, spiritually.

00:28:30.000 Become a better person.

00:28:32.000 It's really interesting.

00:28:33.000 You rarely see... The guys who are complaining right now about involuntary celibacy, they're never complaining about involuntary lack of commitment.

00:28:41.000 You never see... The same guys who are talking about how they're not getting enough sex, just random sex, you never see them talking about, you know, I've really been trying to get married for a really long time, and I've been unable to find women who are willing to marry me.

00:28:51.000 That number is much, much smaller than the number of guys who are out there complaining about not getting the supposedly free and plentiful sex offered by society. 0.99

00:29:00.000 Well, we're making a generation of pathetic men. 0.99

00:29:03.000 That's all that's happening here. 0.99

00:29:03.000 We're creating a generation of pathetic humans, men in particular, who think that they are owed things instead of having to actually be gentlemen, be strong defenders of family, be prepared to sustain a household in order to participate in lovemaking activity. 0.99

00:29:19.000 Meanwhile, speaking of people who are being made pathetic, it's not just exclusive to men. 0.99

00:29:23.000 It's also happening to women. 1.00

00:29:24.000 The lead at the Huffington Post right now, literally the lead, okay, the top of their enormous website is Wet Dreams, the age of fish sex.

00:29:32.000 I am not kidding you.

00:29:33.000 And then there's a picture of a woman's feet and a fish.

00:29:37.000 Okay, and here is the story, okay?

00:29:39.000 Time for the easiest game.

00:29:40.000 This is by Claire Fallon, who I have no clue who she is. 0.83

00:29:43.000 All I know is she has the lead at Huffington Post and she's crazy. 1.00

00:29:45.000 So here is what she writes. 0.57

00:29:47.000 She writes,

00:29:48.000 Time for the easiest game of if you love this movie, read this book ever.

00:29:51.000 If you love The Shape of Water, a movie about fish sex, you should definitely read The Pisces by Melissa Broder, a book about fish sex.

00:29:57.000 The cover literally shows a woman in an amorous clench with a fish.

00:30:00.000 The novel actually tells the story of a woman who has a torrid love affair with a merman. 0.99

00:30:04.000 And then she says, both the Pisces and Guillermo del Toro's Oscar-winning Shape of Water seem to have arrived at an inflection point for heterosexual relations, as some straight women have thrown up their hands in despair at the prospect of dealing with straight men.

00:30:16.000 These men who grope us and talk down to us and consistently fail to clean the bathroom.

00:30:21.000 We're supposed to make lives with them?

00:30:23.000 Let them touch us?

00:30:24.000 No, you're not.

00:30:26.000 You're supposed to find a good man and settle down with him.

00:30:29.000 That was the idea. 0.95

00:30:30.000 You shouldn't be having sex with fish, ladies. 1.00

00:30:32.000 Okay, it turns out that going after the bass, right, nailing the salmon, that's not actually a good solution to you lacking the ability to find a man who is willing to commit.

00:30:43.000 Again, how about women focus on bettering themselves and men focus on bettering themselves and both of these things lead toward commitment.

00:30:57.000 Okay, just because your husband voted for Donald Trump doesn't mean that he's a bad human being. 0.90

00:31:01.000 This is so insane.

00:31:02.000 So basically, you're going to opt to go after the whitefish instead of sleeping with your husband because he voted for Trump? 0.92

00:31:11.000 Even before we heard the claims about Harvey Weinstein's history of sexual harassment and assault, and the ensuing avalanche of horrifying MeToo allegations, we heard about our president grabbing women by the bleep, Bill Cosby feeding women roofies, and R. Kelly allegedly sexually exploiting young girls.

00:31:23.000 So many straight men we have been forced to accept are bad to us and for us. 1.00

00:31:27.000 Why would we take the enormous risk of loving one of them?

00:31:30.000 And yet straight women do have desires. 1.00

00:31:32.000 Cutting men out of our lives isn't a simple proposition.

00:31:35.000 And as satisfying as the concept of going lissastratus until men get their house in order might be, that strategy also requires straight women to deny their sexual urges. 1.00

00:31:42.000 The handsome prince of our imagination has been exposed as a dangerous fraud, but we still need some form of romantic hope and sexual release.

00:31:48.000 One seductive yet impossible fantasy might be the romantic attention of a man who lacks the exhausting baggage of male entitlement.

00:31:54.000 To find such fantastical being women, at least in fiction, have turned to the sea." 0.99

00:31:57.000 Okay, maybe the emasculation of men is leading men to become pathetic, and maybe men's expectation of sex without relation to commitment is making men pathetic, and it's making women pathetic, and it's making everybody pathetic. 0.93

00:32:10.000 Maybe instead of turning men into something they are not, which both men and women are doing, we should acknowledge that masculine behavior is a useful and necessary component of life. 0.98

00:32:21.000 Instead of emasculating men, you should expect men to be better, and men should expect themselves to be better.

00:32:26.000 Women set the standard for men, and men set the standard for women. 0.99

00:32:29.000 Okay?

00:32:29.000 This is just the reality in human relations.

00:32:31.000 Maybe that's not the way it should be.

00:32:32.000 That's the way it is.

00:32:33.000 When it comes to sexual relations, if you want to have sex with somebody of the opposite sex, you are setting your standards. 0.99

00:32:37.000 That's just the way that it works.

00:32:38.000 What that means is that women should expect men to be better. 0.97

00:32:42.000 They should expect men to be better, but they should not expect men not to be men. 0.98

00:32:45.000 Men are creatures who are going to want sex. 0.99

00:32:48.000 But you can also dictate to a man, ladies, what kind of man you would like to have sex with. 1.00

00:32:53.000 It's up to you to determine what type of person you think is going to make a good husband. 0.52

00:32:58.000 And suggesting that all men are R. Kelly or Donald Trump, or that if they voted for Donald Trump, they are Donald Trump, or that if they disagree with you about feminization of boys, that somehow they're going to be bad husbands,

00:33:11.000 We're leading generations of men and women to be unhappy.

00:33:14.000 That's all that's happening here.

00:33:15.000 You have unhappy men who believe that the expectation of life is that they're going to have as much sex as they want, and unhappy women who are living in the expectation that men are going to be under their boot heel and not act like men at any point in real life. 1.00

00:33:26.000 And it's just stupid. 1.00

00:33:27.000 It's just stupid. 1.00

00:33:28.000 And that's how you end up with fish sacks on the front page of the Huffington Post and incels killing people in Canada. 1.00

00:33:33.000 Just ridiculous.

00:33:34.000 OK, we're going to get to the mailbag in just one second, but for that you have to go over to dailywire.com.

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00:34:52.000 Alrighty, it's mailbag time, so let's do this thing.

00:34:55.000 So, let's just jump right in.

00:34:56.000 Hugh, which specific Senate and House seats should the Republicans try to flip in the midterms?

00:35:00.000 Well, there is a list today of Senate seats, particularly, that are up for re-election.

00:35:08.000 Democrats could lose, seriously, up to nine seats.

00:35:11.000 Okay, they could lose up to nine seats in the next Senate election.

00:35:15.000 So I will give you the answers here.

00:35:17.000 So, okay, Joe Manchin right now is trailing by 14 points to any generic Republican in West Virginia.

00:35:22.000 North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp is trailing by eight.

00:35:25.000 She's a Democrat.

00:35:26.000 Incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly in Indiana is trailing by five.

00:35:29.000 Claire McCaskill trails by five in Missouri.

00:35:31.000 Montana, Jon Tester trails by five.

00:35:33.000 Florida, Bill Nelson is locked into a deadlock with Rick Scott.

00:35:36.000 He probably will lose that seat.

00:35:38.000 Pennsylvania and Ohio.

00:35:39.000 Democrats Bill Casey and Sherrod Brown are leading by less than two points each.

00:35:42.000 Virginia Tim Kaine is within three.

00:35:44.000 So there are a bunch of Democratic seats that are up in the Senate.

00:35:46.000 In the House, it's very difficult to name Republicans who are capable of flipping a blue seat.

00:35:52.000 It looks a lot more like Democrats are going to flip some red seats.

00:35:54.000 So I'd put most of, if I were investing money right now, I'd invest most of my money in Senate races.

00:35:59.000 I would not invest, by the way,

00:36:00.000 In one particular candidate, I'd be remiss if I did not play this just because it's so amazing.

00:36:04.000 There's a guy who is running for the nomination in Virginia, I believe.

00:36:08.000 Is it West Virginia?

00:36:09.000 Don Blankenship.

00:36:10.000 Okay, Don, it's West Virginia?

00:36:12.000 Don Blankenship in West Virginia trying to run against Joe Manchin. 0.98

00:36:16.000 And he's an insane person, okay?

00:36:19.000 Here's the ad that he's currently running in the primaries in this West Virginia primary. 0.88

00:36:22.000 Again, if you blow this seat,

00:36:24.000 Again, Joe Manchin has a 14 point deficit against generic Republican.

00:36:28.000 Unfortunately, Don Blankenship is certainly not generic Republican.

00:36:31.000 Here is the ad that he released legitimately this week.

00:36:35.000 Oh no.

00:36:37.000 Swamp Captain Mitch McConnell has created millions of jobs for China people. 1.00

00:36:41.000 While doing so, Mitch has gotten rich.

00:36:43.000 In fact, his China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.

00:36:47.000 Mitch's swamp people are now running false negative ads against me. 0.98

00:36:50.000 They are also childishly calling me despicable and mentally ill.

00:36:54.000 The war to drain the swamp and create jobs for West Virginia people has begun. 0.93

00:36:59.000 I will beat Joe Manchin and ditch Cocaine Mitch for the sake of the kids.

00:37:02.000 Cocaine Mitch?

00:37:03.000 And then I love the kids who are just like, why am I even here, man?

00:37:05.000 What is even going on?

00:37:07.000 Yeah, that may be the greatest dad of all time.

00:37:10.000 The Swamp People, China People, Cocaine Mitch. 0.97

00:37:14.000 Yeah, by the way, the only field poll of the race, it's a three-way race between a guy named Jenkins, a guy named Morrissey, and Blankenship.

00:37:21.000 Apparently Blankenship is getting 16% of the vote in the primary right now.

00:37:25.000 No!

00:37:26.000 Just stop! 0.89

00:37:26.000 If we lose any more Senate seats because we run crappy candidates, I'm gonna be like, seriously, enough guys, enough. 0.89

00:37:32.000 We just, we just can't.

00:37:33.000 Okay, Matthew writes, Hi Ben.

00:37:35.000 With Mother's Day coming up, I found myself in a moral bind.

00:37:37.000 My mother's an alcoholic. 1.00

00:37:38.000 Most of my childhood, she would leave us as a family and disappear for a few months until she and my father finally got a divorce. 0.52

00:37:43.000 She caused our whole family a lot of emotional and even physical pain, particularly myself, when in a drunken rage, she told me she wished she would have had an abortion. 0.89

00:37:49.000 This pain was a lot for a young teenager to handle, so I spent most of my time locked away in my room by myself, trying to mentally disassociate myself from her.

00:37:55.000 I rarely see her because when I do, I involuntarily become enraged because of the memories of what she did to us.

00:37:59.000 Now it turns out her liver is failing from the years of drinking and the doctor said she will die soon if she doesn't stop drinking.

00:38:04.000 As a somewhat newfound Christian, I believe in forgiveness, but I tried so hard to disassociate from my own mother.

00:38:08.000 Okay, so Matthew, obviously, all my sympathies to you.

00:38:09.000 And then to a broader question, what do you do with a parent who's just a bad parent?

00:38:11.000 What do you do with a bad parent?

00:38:12.000 Obviously, there are biblical injunctions to respect your parents, to honor your parents.

00:38:33.000 And it says, really, that you're supposed to honor your parents so your own life is long, so your life is long in the land.

00:38:38.000 The reason that it says that is because honoring your parents is not just about what you're doing for your parents, it's about what you're doing for you.

00:38:44.000 Whatever you have to do to come to peace with the situation with your mother is something that you ought to do.

00:38:48.000 If your mother dies, if your mother passes away,

00:38:53.000 You're going to want to be able to look back and say to yourself, I was the good person here.

00:38:57.000 I was the person who did everything that I could.

00:38:59.000 And that's how I would see this.

00:39:01.000 Yes, you're the one making the sacrifice.

00:39:02.000 Yes, you're the person putting yourself in a rough position.

00:39:04.000 And when it comes to forgiveness, I'm not going to stand in your shoes and say that you ought to forgive your mother for making your childhood miserable.

00:39:12.000 I'm not sure that that's something that anyone should be pushed to forgive.

00:39:16.000 But I do think that the best thing for you would be to come to some sort of satisfaction with your own behavior.

00:39:27.000 Some sort of standard for your own behavior that you can live with.

00:39:29.000 Where you're not going to beat yourself up later about the action that you took right now.

00:39:33.000 So maybe that means driving your mom to the doctor.

00:39:35.000 Maybe it means trying to be nice to your mom.

00:39:38.000 You know what?

00:39:56.000 Mac says, So, I try to go to bed early.

00:40:06.000 Like, last night I went to bed at like 10, 15, like an old person.

00:40:09.000 So, I would, you know, if I were you, I would try to keep by the Benjamin Franklin admonition, right?

00:40:15.000 Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

00:40:18.000 So far, it's worked out well.

00:40:19.000 So, that's my rule there.

00:40:21.000 Austin says,

00:40:23.000 Well, Austin, I have to say, I think that there is a good case to be made for private parks in many cases.

00:40:26.000 I do not know that Yosemite would have turned into a bunch of gas stations if it had not been for the national government.

00:40:45.000 Well, siphoning it off.

00:40:47.000 Now, I believe in environmental regulations.

00:40:49.000 I believe that there are certain externalities that we have to protect against.

00:40:52.000 But the national park system I find kind of controversial in the sense that most of the things that we find beautiful in life we are willing to pay for.

00:40:59.000 And there are plenty of private parks across the United States that are quite beautiful and quite magnificent.

00:41:04.000 I think that there would be plenty of people who would be willing to give money.

00:41:07.000 I'm sure that there are private, you know, I know several billionaires who would probably be willing to purchase Yosemite just to protect it.

00:41:13.000 So if it's just about people would have come in and exploited the land, I'm not fully sure that that's true actually.

00:41:20.000 I'm rather libertarian to the extent it's possible to be here.

00:41:23.000 Sure.

00:41:26.000 Overregulation means you have to fill out a lot of paperwork.

00:41:29.000 It means that insurance rates have gone up.

00:41:31.000 It means that doctors are being prevented from entering practice.

00:41:35.000 It means that they are forced to do a lot of things that nurses should be doing. 1.00

00:41:38.000 It means they have more work and less pay.

00:41:39.000 In short, when you have more work and less pay, that limits the number of people who want to go into a particular profession.

00:41:43.000 That is the very short answer.

00:41:54.000 Well, I mean, what I've always said to people who are my own age, it's... Okay, so let's be frank about this.

00:42:01.000 Trying to reason with adolescents is always a problem.

00:42:03.000 The reason for this is because the adolescents have overdeveloped amygdalas and underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes, meaning that their emotional centers are extraordinarily responsive and their logic centers are extraordinarily underdeveloped.

00:42:13.000 So trying to logic them out of all of this is very difficult.

00:42:16.000 What you can say is, you're going to make decisions now that you regret later, and if you're not getting ahead now, then you are falling behind.

00:42:24.000 The people who are most successful are going to be the people around you who are buckling down and doing their work, not the people who are partying and wasting their lives and putting themselves at risk.

00:42:31.000 Now, I understand that our culture has basically said that all fun is good, that 17 is the time to find yourself, that whatever fun you engage in at 17, you get past the rest of your life.

00:42:41.000 Maybe this is true for some people.

00:42:42.000 It's certainly not true for all people.

00:42:43.000 I think probably as a general rule, it is less true for girls than it is for boys because girls take particularly sexual activity a lot more seriously than boys do, just by virtually every psychological study that I've ever seen.

00:42:55.000 And so, yeah, I think that 0.99

00:42:57.000 The acting like a jerk is something that gets ingrained in your character. 0.98

00:43:00.000 If you're doing it when you're 17, my guess is that it's going to be harder to remove that from your character later than it otherwise would be. 0.98

00:43:05.000 So Gramsci, for those who don't know, was an Italian proto-fascist thinker.

00:43:09.000 He was a Marxist.

00:43:19.000 Who was actually much in vogue with Mussolini for a little while, and his basic theory is that Marxism had failed, and what you needed instead was cultural Marxism.

00:43:27.000 Marxism had suggested that there was an inevitable slide from capitalism and towards Marxism, and that eventually capitalism would degrade into Marxism over time.

00:43:34.000 It was a historical prediction.

00:43:36.000 Gramsci said, look, that's not what happened in World War I.

00:43:38.000 In World War I, there wasn't this great class uprising to stop the war, and so what we really need is we need to look at the culture.

00:43:44.000 We need to take over cultural institutions, and then we need to use those cultural institutions to re-inculcate a new sort of human being in the human heart.

00:43:52.000 I think that Gramsci's philosophy has been a lot more successful than the philosophy of Marx himself.

00:43:58.000 Cultural Marxism has been a lot more successful in damaging the West than the economic theories of Karl Marx.

00:44:04.000 Okay, Susan says, Hey Ben, how do we avoid whataboutism?

00:44:07.000 Trump is in the office and therefore the leader of the GOP.

00:44:09.000 Most of the leftists want to paint the entire GOP with one brush.

00:44:12.000 How do we discuss ideas, not people?

00:44:13.000 What we say is, when Trump does something wrong, it's bad.

00:44:16.000 End of story.

00:44:16.000 And when Trump does something good, it's good.

00:44:19.000 End of story.

00:44:20.000 And the only way whataboutism applies is not with regard to whataboutism, but you can say to the left, you're pretending to care about X, but you didn't care about Y. That's not whataboutism.

00:44:29.000 I care about both. 1.00

00:44:30.000 I think when Trump is being garbage, he's being garbage. 1.00

00:44:33.000 And when Clinton was being garbage, he was being garbage. 1.00

00:44:35.000 And that's consistent. 1.00

00:44:37.000 But you're not consistent.

00:44:38.000 So that's not whataboutism.

00:44:39.000 That's just saying to somebody that everybody should have an even standard across the playing field for everyone.

00:44:44.000 So that's how you avoid whataboutism in these conversations.

00:44:47.000 Alfredo says, Hi Ben.

00:44:48.000 I'm a current PhD student in philosophy, and I enjoy watching your show every day.

00:44:51.000 As a person in academia, it is one of the few things that keeps me from going insane.

00:44:54.000 Something I especially enjoy is when you relate the topic you're discussing to broader intellectual themes from the great philosophers of the past.

00:45:00.000 I'm excited to see prominent conservatives thinking seriously about philosophical questions.

00:45:03.000 I have two questions.

00:45:04.000 First, when did you start investigating philosophy more seriously?

00:45:06.000 Second, do you think more conservatives should study philosophy?

00:45:09.000 Also, what are some philosophy books you'd recommend to your viewers?

00:45:11.000 So, when did I first start reading philosophy?

00:45:14.000 Probably in college?

00:45:15.000 Maybe late high school?

00:45:17.000 Do I think more conservatives should study philosophy?

00:45:18.000 Absolutely.

00:45:19.000 I mean, I think the entire Straussian school, Leo Strauss, who's been sort of an

00:45:24.000 Ideological godfather to a lot of conservatives.

00:45:26.000 He obviously was very much engaged in the process of teaching Plato and Aristotle and the ancients.

00:45:33.000 I think that a lot of conservative thinkers, Mark Levin I know is very big on John Locke.

00:45:37.000 There's something worthwhile to studying philosophy.

00:45:39.000 In fact, my entire next book is probably going to be, I mean, I'm almost done with it.

00:45:42.000 The entire next book is basically a philosophy book.

00:45:45.000 And just check the bibliography for a list of books.

00:45:48.000 I recommended a bunch on the show.

00:45:49.000 I think some of the summaries of philosophy are really good.

00:45:52.000 There's one that's called A History of Political Philosophy with Essays on Various Philosophers, edited by Strauss.

00:45:58.000 His Natural Right in History, obviously, is a very good book.

00:46:02.000 The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant is a good user-friendly guide to a lot of philosophers.

00:46:07.000 I'm really fond of the writing of Walter Kaufman, who was an existentialist philosopher.

00:46:12.000 Well, he's actually, he's quasi-anti-existentialist, kind of.

00:46:15.000 But his books are really good.

00:46:18.000 William Barrett has a really good book on existentialism.

00:46:20.000 I love philosophy.

00:46:21.000 I think it's really interesting to read.

00:46:23.000 Try to read the primary sources first.

00:46:25.000 Try to read Nicomachean ethics.

00:46:27.000 Try to read Plato's Republic.

00:46:28.000 Try to read all of those things.

00:46:30.000 But I think that a lot of the summaries of philosophy are just as useful sometimes as reading, like trying to bully your way through 800 pages of Critique of Pure Reason.

00:46:37.000 It's probably not as user-friendly as simply reading a user-friendly summary from a reliable source like, for example, Durant.

00:46:44.000 Okay, let's see.

00:46:45.000 A couple more questions, then we'll do things I like and things I hate.

00:46:47.000 So, Nicholas says, Well, no, that number one, year one is the hard one.

00:46:50.000 Years two and three are not so bad.

00:46:52.000 Second,

00:47:00.000 I would say that whatever reading you are assigned, you should see if there's reading on the other side that has not been assigned.

00:47:06.000 I had a great time in law school because I did a lot of outside reading.

00:47:09.000 Also, get into a system early.

00:47:12.000 Get into a system early where you're summarizing cases and you have an outline and you take good notes because that's the only way you're going to be able to stay on top of the material.

00:47:24.000 Okay, so, it is really unclear whether Noah was a metaphorical character

00:47:40.000 In

00:47:57.000 As opposed to Noah, who could have been a more metaphorical creation.

00:48:02.000 The Tower of Babel is more of a metaphorical story than it is a story about something where people actually built a physical tower to heaven and then suddenly were struck with a bunch of different languages.

00:48:11.000 It's really a tale about fascism and about communitarianism trying to challenge God and breaking down.

00:48:19.000 So the story of Noah, I would say from a metaphorical perspective, and this is why I think it's important, is a story about the triumph of family over the sort of

00:48:29.000 So the story of Noah is a guy protecting his family from an inundation, a cultural inundation,

00:48:37.000 Now, it is true that there was some sort of flood, by the way, in Mesopotamia.

00:48:41.000 It wasn't a global flood.

00:48:42.000 It was probably a local flood.

00:48:44.000 And the story is wrapped into this, right?

00:48:46.000 If you actually read more ancient documents than the Bible, there are flood stories in those documents, right?

00:48:52.000 Ancient Mesopotamian myth has talk about giant floods happening in the Middle East.

00:48:56.000 So there probably was a flood of some sort that was happening in the Middle East at that time.

00:49:00.000 But the actual psychological impact of Noah

00:49:03.000 I would say that it's really more about that entire portion of the Bible is contrasting various types of civilization.

00:49:09.000 So you have the Tower of Babel, which is a civilization built on the idea that if we get everybody together and we build toward a common purpose, but we ignore the individual, then we'll be able to build something great and holy.

00:49:18.000 So basically, the communist empires of the USSR, and that breaks down into a bunch of squabbling, because it turns out that people are individuals, and they are tribal, and they're not going to bow to a giant, human-created tower.

00:49:30.000 Okay, so that's the story of the Tower of Babel.

00:49:32.000 That is juxtaposed to the story of the people who are surrounding Noah, who are sort of these libertines,

00:49:37.000 I don't know.

00:49:53.000 And Noah's model is what survives, right?

00:49:55.000 That in a survival situation, the only thing that survives is the core family who get on an ark and protect themselves from the inundation and then are able to spread out based on that family.

00:50:05.000 That's, I think, the metaphorical value of Noah.

00:50:07.000 Again, people who say that they don't take the literal truth of the beginning of Genesis as a guide.

00:50:14.000 Welcome to the religious world, where a lot of people have been talking about how the beginning of Genesis is a metaphor for a very long time.

00:50:20.000 And I've recommended books on this program about how to rectify breaches between science and the Bible.

00:50:25.000 I talk about this stuff all the time.

00:50:27.000 This is, I'm sorry,

00:50:28.000 It sounds like your daughter is a very simplistic atheistic thinker, and that's a problem. 0.77

00:50:32.000 I think a lot of the people who are the biggest proponents of atheism are people who have never spent five minutes with the Bible.

00:50:37.000 They're people who just look at the Bible, they find a couple of verses they think are awful, and then they don't bother trying to understand how that fit into context, why that was written at the time that it was written, whether it was a progressive thing when it was written, what the relationship is of revelation and reason, why it is that God gave a document to human beings as opposed to just changing human beings into angels.

00:50:56.000 Why would God give a written document to human beings and then say, live by this document?

00:51:02.000 Especially knowing that human beings are bound by their time and fallible.

00:51:07.000 What I believe is that God gave the Bible as the enzyme that catalyzed the progress of humanity.

00:51:12.000 Basically, what God said is, here is a moral guide for you, here, right now.

00:51:16.000 There are certain immutable principles in it.

00:51:18.000 There are certain basic principles, like the Ten Commandments.

00:51:20.000 There are certain basic moral principles about sexuality, because human nature doesn't change.

00:51:24.000 But, there are certain other elements of the Bible that are clearly dictated to time and place, because if I were to give an order of living to Mathis right now,

00:51:33.000 I think so.

00:51:54.000 To a specific set of people.

00:51:56.000 Here's how you ought to live.

00:51:57.000 And now it is your job to use reason to interpret what I am saying in conjunction with new evidence and new evidence as it arises.

00:52:05.000 Now, the reason that some of the Bible, so people will say, OK, well, the Bible means nothing because if everything can evolve, then why doesn't the Bible evolve?

00:52:11.000 And the answer there

00:52:13.000 We're good to go!

00:52:33.000 All I would say to your daughter is, if she's going to reject Christianity on the basis of she doesn't believe the just-so stories of the Bible, maybe she ought to do a little deeper reading into it before she rejects it.

00:52:44.000 Otherwise, she's doing herself a certain level of disrespect. 1.00

00:52:47.000 Also, if she believes that she's... I don't know why she would believe, by the way, that she doesn't believe everything in the Bible and therefore she's an atheist.

00:52:52.000 That doesn't follow.

00:52:53.000 There are plenty of other religions, there are plenty of other takes on God.

00:52:58.000 Just because you don't believe the words of the Bible doesn't mean that there isn't a supreme being that guides all of us and has set the universe on a certain course.

00:53:05.000 Okay, that was a pretty long answer so we'll have to cut the mailbag there and then we'll do some things that I like and some things that I hate.

00:53:11.000 So, speaking of, you know, we were talking a little bit about all these people on the left who cannot believe that people on the right would support Donald Trump despite his moral failings.

00:53:21.000 It's amazing how short people's memory is.

00:53:22.000 This is not whataboutism, okay?

00:53:24.000 People on the right should condemn President Trump's moral failings. 0.98

00:53:27.000 But it is worthwhile noting that people on the left, who are whining about why people on the right would still support Trump's tax cuts and support his administration, his continued presidency, despite the fact that he's garbage with women, 0.99

00:53:39.000 Right. 0.98

00:53:39.000 They seem to forget there was a guy named Bill Clinton. 0.98

00:53:41.000 So, if you've never seen the movie Primary Colors with John Travolta, it is a pretty good movie.

00:53:45.000 With Emma Thompson and John Travolta, it's a little too warm and fuzzy on the Clintons, but it is obviously an adaptation of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.

00:53:51.000 Emma Thompson is Hillary Clinton here.

00:53:53.000 And it is pretty good.

00:53:55.000 It's a pretty good movie.

00:53:56.000 Governor Stanton, this is Henry Perkins.

00:53:59.000 I met your grandfather once when I was a boy.

00:54:01.000 He was a great man.

00:54:03.000 Thank you, sir.

00:54:05.000 These people don't know you.

00:54:07.000 They probably don't even remember your state.

00:54:08.000 They're waiting to be swept off their feet.

00:54:10.000 Just wanted to say welcome aboard.

00:54:13.000 Let's go.

00:54:13.000 I said I'd meet with him.

00:54:14.000 Did you tell him I was coming on board?

00:54:15.000 No, no, no, no.

00:54:16.000 You call in sick.

00:54:17.000 I'm sure the kids want that.

00:54:18.000 I'm just delighted that you're on board.

00:54:20.000 Mrs. Stanton, I'm not sure.

00:54:22.000 I've never helped run a presidential campaign before.

00:54:24.000 Neither have we.

00:54:25.000 But that's how history is made, Henry.

00:54:28.000 If you had to swallow another word, 0.99

00:54:33.000 Garbage. 1.00

00:54:33.000 You can say it. 1.00

00:54:34.000 We're X-rated.

00:54:35.000 Yeah, me too, if you believe what you read in the paper.

00:54:41.000 It's gonna be the war thing, the drug thing, and the woman thing. 1.00

00:54:44.000 We're in trouble.

00:54:44.000 What are you suggesting we do?

00:54:46.000 Might be a good idea to get on some TV shows.

00:54:48.000 I'm not gonna go negative. 0.97

00:54:49.000 Any jackass can burn down a bar. 0.98

00:54:51.000 Not negative, it's self-assertive. 0.99

00:54:53.000 I'm not gonna do it!

00:54:54.000 Okay, so the entire movie is, I think, too glowing about Bill Clinton, but it does suggest that Bill Clinton has been involved in a lot of terrible, terrible things.

00:55:04.000 Which obviously is true. 0.73

00:55:05.000 And the reality is that Bill Clinton was involved in a lot of very, very bad things.

00:55:09.000 And the left was fine with all of it.

00:55:10.000 So, now when they're complaining about immorality in politics, it's a little bit galling.

00:55:14.000 It's a little bit galling to people.

00:55:16.000 Okay, other things that I like. 1.00

00:55:17.000 So, as we have heard from the left incessantly, Mike Pence obviously is a deep homophobe who hates gay people. 0.99

00:55:21.000 How do I know he's a deep homophobe who hates gay people? 0.99

00:55:23.000 Well, because yesterday he swore in Richard Grinnell, the first openly gay ambassador in U.S. 0.99

00:55:27.000 history, as the ambassador to Germany.

00:55:30.000 And Grinnell's husband is the guy holding the giant Bible there, on which Grinnell is swearing in.

00:55:36.000 So obviously, Mike Pence could barely stand this.

00:55:38.000 He had to run screaming from the room.

00:55:40.000 He actually tried to use electroshock therapy on Richard Grinnell to turn him straight again.

00:55:45.000 But when that failed, he had to swear him in as ambassador to Germany.

00:55:49.000 I, Richard Grinnell, do solemnly swear

00:55:51.000 I, Richard Bernal, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

00:55:56.000 That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

00:56:00.000 Against all enemies foreign and domestic.

00:56:02.000 Against all enemies foreign and domestic. 1.00

00:56:05.000 Okay, so obviously, so much hate for the gay guy there. 1.00

00:56:08.000 Wow. 1.00

00:56:08.000 Just everybody losing their mind. 1.00

00:56:10.000 You can see Mike Pence is so unhappy about all of this. 1.00

00:56:13.000 What ridiculous crap. 0.99

00:56:14.000 I mean, again, this is one of the things that people should understand about religious believers. 1.00

00:56:18.000 Religious believers can believe that you are participating in sin and still think that you are a good person. 0.87

00:56:22.000 Religious believers can believe that what you are doing is something that they do not agree with, but it's a free country.

00:56:29.000 It's so demeaning to religious people to suggest that because we think something that you're doing is a sin, therefore we think that you should be imprisoned or locked up.

00:56:36.000 Only lefties think this way, really.

00:56:37.000 Honestly, only people on the hard left who don't believe in a limited government believe that they ought to be imposing the morality from above.

00:56:42.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate. 0.89

00:56:49.000 So Bill Ayers is a terrorist. 0.80

00:56:50.000 Bill Ayers is a guy who started the weather underground.

00:56:53.000 And he tweeted out yesterday, there's a guy who tweeted at him, I served honorably as an infantry officer overseas.

00:56:58.000 How about you?

00:56:59.000 Bill Ayers tweeted back, I served honorably in the struggle against war for peace and justice.

00:57:03.000 This guy, it is an amazing thing.

00:57:05.000 When we talk about media bias, the fact that Bill Ayers was not a major campaign issue in 2008 is an incredible thing.

00:57:09.000 Can you imagine if Donald Trump had hobnobbed with a guy who legitimately bombed the Pentagon in the 1970s?

00:57:15.000 Okay, Bill Ayers built bombs that were set off at the Pentagon, at the New York City Police Department, or set off at the U.S.

00:57:21.000 Capitol.

00:57:22.000 A bomb that he designed went off in an apartment and killed three people, including his then-girlfriend.

00:57:27.000 And Bill Ayers was a guy who worked relatively closely with Barack Obama.

00:57:32.000 Barack Obama called him a guy from the neighborhood.

00:57:33.000 He lied about it.

00:57:34.000 Did you see any of the sort of hysterical media coverage over that that you've seen over Stormy Daniels?

00:57:38.000 Of course not.

00:57:39.000 It was considered gauche to mention Bill Ayers.

00:57:40.000 It was considered gauche to mention Jeremiah Wright.

00:57:43.000 Bill Ayers is a bad human, okay?

00:57:45.000 And Bill Ayers, I can say, and this is a guy who still has not apologized for having set bombs in the 1970s because obviously it's okay to try and bomb places and kill people so that you are making a change in favor of peace and justice. 0.51

00:57:57.000 Again, just demonstrating once again the bias in the media.

00:58:00.000 It's pretty, pretty amazing.

00:58:01.000 All right.

00:58:01.000 So we'll be back here on Monday.

00:58:02.000 Make sure that you subscribe because on Sunday, actually, we have our first special, our first Sunday special.

00:58:08.000 Please check it out.

00:58:08.000 I really think you're going to enjoy it.

00:58:10.000 It's me and Jordan Peterson for the full hour, as Larry King would say.

00:58:13.000 So go check it out right now.

00:58:14.000 And we'll be back here on Monday Live.

00:58:16.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

00:58:17.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

00:58:22.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.

00:58:28.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.

00:58:32.000 Edited by Alex Zingaro, assistant to the editor Julia Whittle.

00:58:35.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.

00:58:37.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera.

00:58:39.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.

00:58:42.000 Copyright Ford Publishing 2018.

The Ben Shapiro Show - May 04, 2018

The Media’s Big Boo Boo | Ep. 532

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