NBC screws up on a major claim about Michael Cohen, the Huffington Post is pushing fish sex, and we get into the mailbag. This is The Ben Shapiro Show, where the host, Ben Shapiro, talks all things politics, economics, and pop culture.
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00:02:29.000They 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.
00:02:39.000officials 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.
00:02:47.000Okay, well, that's not the same thing at all, okay?
00:02:50.000I 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.
00:02:58.000So, all that is, is just a list of phone numbers.
00:03:00.000And then you cross-check the phone numbers against the person who has the phone number.
00:03:03.000That is not the same thing as listening to the contents of the phone call.
00:03:07.000And again, this is just the latest crazy retraction from the media in a long line of them over the past few weeks.
00:03:14.000The media have been going so insane over Trump.
00:03:18.000They've been trying their best to take down Trump.
00:03:20.000Every story is going to be the tick tick tick boom that takes down Trump.
00:03:24.000Benjamin Wittes, who is a legal reporter, he's constantly using that sort of framework on Twitter.
00:03:29.000He'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.
00:03:35.000And you can see this is how the media cover these issues.
00:03:38.000I mean, yesterday there was another story that was just like this.
00:03:40.000There 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.
00:03:49.000The 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.
00:04:11.000Under 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.
00:04:20.000So 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.
00:04:27.000But the media went nuts over it anyway.
00:04:29.000You remember a few weeks ago, McClatchy reported that Michael Cohen, the president's personal lawyer, had in fact visited Prague.
00:04:34.000The 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.
00:04:52.000McClatchy 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.
00:05:00.000Well, they reported that Michael Cohen was in Prague and that he was lying.
00:05:04.000And then they provided no substantiating evidence.
00:05:06.000There's not been a second report that confirms that.
00:05:08.000So there's no more evidence of that than there was when McClatchy claimed it.
00:05:11.000And yet that story is just sort of sitting out there.
00:05:13.000This sort of error has become supremely common in the media.
00:05:16.000ABC 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.
00:05:26.000During 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
00:05:42.000Of 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.
00:06:57.000We've apologized for mistakes at Daily Wire.
00:07:00.000Way 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.
00:07:06.000It 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.
00:07:26.000That 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.
00:07:30.000We shouldn't have run it in the first place.
00:07:31.000Okay, that said, the question of which direction to make mistakes reveals your bias.
00:07:36.000Now, I was biased against Chuck Hagel, so I was probably more likely to believe a bad story about Chuck Hagel.
00:07:40.000The media proclaim that they are objective.
00:07:43.000The media proclaim that they are fully just trying to report the news, right?
00:07:53.000When every single error is in one specific direction, you have to acknowledge that something is happening there.
00:07:59.000And every error with regard to Trump has been against Trump.
00:08:02.000Every error with regard to President Obama seemed to be in favor of President Obama.
00:08:05.000The erroneous reporting by the media about President Trump is astonishing and stunning.
00:08:11.000It 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.
00:09:07.000All you're doing, media, you're playing into President Trump's hands.
00:09:10.000You're playing directly into President Trump's hands when you jumped the gun and you report things that have not been verified.
00:09:16.000It's a huge mistake, and I'm shocked that the media continues to make these sorts of mistakes.
00:09:20.000Meanwhile, President Trump continues...
00:09:22.000It's a struggle for a legal strategy on Michael Cohen.
00:09:25.000So Rudy Giuliani is still out there trying to play sort of offense for President Trump in the Michael Cohen investigation.
00:09:32.000He came out and he said that Jeff Sessions should end the Mueller investigation.
00:09:34.000He should end the — he should presumably also end the Michael Cohen investigation.
00:09:38.000He says that all of this has gone too far.
00:09:41.000Giuliani is, of course, Trump's new lawyer.
00:09:43.000And here's what he had to say about the Mueller investigation, which he feels is a witch hunt.
00:09:46.000Kim 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?
00:10:03.000I mean, everybody forgets the basis of the case is dead.
00:10:12.000If 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.
00:10:20.000Or Fire Rod Rosenstein, or he should go, presumably, and Rosenstein and Mueller.
00:10:25.000All of this is not going to benefit President Trump.
00:10:28.000The 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.
00:10:33.000Now, 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.
00:10:42.000So, 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.
00:10:48.000I 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.
00:10:55.000Well, it's about a year after he fired James Comey.
00:10:57.000So, I just don't think that's going to go the way that Giuliani thinks that it's going to go.
00:11:01.000And Giuliani, it seems, has been speaking a little bit out of turn.
00:11:04.000So, 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.
00:11:14.000And 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.
00:11:21.000Well, President Trump has now responded to Rudy Giuliani's comments.
00:11:24.000In a second, I'm going to show you what President Trump had to say about those comments, because it's pretty funny.
00:11:29.000But first, I want to say thanks to our sponsors over at Skillshare.
00:11:32.000So Skillshare is an online learning platform with over 20,000 classes in business, design, technology, and more.
00:13:19.000But what he does is he feels it's a very bad thing for our country, and he happens to be right.
00:13:23.000Okay, 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?
00:13:32.000And 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.
00:13:39.000It is my belief that this may, in fact, end up being a witch hunt.
00:13:42.000That this may, in fact, end up being nothing.
00:13:43.000There's new information out today that the prosecution of Paul Manafort may actually be falling apart.
00:13:57.000So, 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.
00:14:07.000You don't really care about Mr. Manafort's bank fraud, Judge T.S.
00:14:12.000You really care about getting information Mr. Manafort can give you that will reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment.
00:14:20.000Manafort 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.
00:14:42.000He's pleading not guilty to all of these counts, stemming from his work for a pro-Russian political boss in Ukraine.
00:14:56.000The 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.
00:15:03.000And it appears that the federal judge feels the same way.
00:15:05.000Again, 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.
00:15:18.000Now, that is a separate question from whether Trump should fire Mueller.
00:15:21.000Listen, I know that the popular talk radio position is that Trump should fire Mueller and we should just, you know,
00:15:26.000Throw four sheets to the wind, everything will be fine.
00:15:31.000I think that the president should let this play out.
00:15:34.000I think the president would be making a very large mistake if he were not to let this play out.
00:15:37.000Because again, what the left wants is for President Trump to step on his own toes.
00:15:41.000They 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.
00:15:50.000Instead, why doesn't Trump just let the investigation go nowhere?
00:15:54.000The polls right now have Trump at about 50%, according to Rasmussen.
00:15:57.000That's as high as he has ever been, and the economy continues to do well.
00:16:00.000I do not think all this stuff is really a threat to the Trump administration or to his viability as a 2020 candidate.
00:16:07.000Okay, so, meanwhile, President Trump continues to be in hot water.
00:16:11.000Over the Michael Cohen Stormy Daniels payment, right?
00:16:13.000That's a separate case from the case regarding Robert Mueller.
00:16:18.000That 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.
00:16:25.000Trump didn't have a lot of credibility to begin with when it came to matters sexual, but the media have been all over it.
00:16:30.000One 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.
00:16:39.000And the answer is, because we knew all of that, are we supposed to pretend that we are surprised in any serious way here?
00:16:45.000Are we really supposed to pretend that we are shocked and appalled by Trump's behavior?
00:16:48.000We've known about Trump the whole time, okay?
00:16:51.000The media knew about Trump when they were making him the apprentice guy on NBC.
00:16:55.000But 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.
00:17:01.000So, for example, a bunch of reporters went after Sarah Huckabee Sanders yesterday, asking, how can you expect anyone to believe President Trump?
00:17:08.000But 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?
00:17:27.000We give the very best information that we have at the time.
00:17:31.000I do that every single day, and we'll continue to do that every day I'm in this position.
00:17:35.000I don't know what that question's even supposed to mean.
00:17:37.000I mean, honestly, like, what is she supposed to say to that?
00:17:40.000Of course she was not informed the proper truth about Stormy Daniels, because Trump was fibbing to her, too.
00:17:56.000Here's Jim Acosta posturing on this issue as well.
00:17:59.000You said on March 7th there was no knowledge of any payments from the president and he's denied all of these allegations.
00:18:07.000Were you lying to us at the time, or were you in the dark?
00:18:10.000The President has denied and continues to deny the underlying claim.
00:18:15.000And again, I've given the best information I had at the time.
00:18:18.000Why can't you just answer yes or no whether you were in the dark?
00:18:20.000I think it's a fairly simple question whether you just didn't have the information at the time.
00:18:23.000I think it's a fairly simple answer that I've given you actually several times now.
00:18:26.000I gave you the best information that I had, and I'm going to continue to do my best to do that every single day.
00:18:30.000Okay, 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.
00:18:36.000Again, her job is to go out and dissemble on behalf of the president.
00:18:40.000Okay, that was also Jake Harney's job.
00:18:57.000Everyone knows when the president tells a fib, his press secretary is going to go out there and defend the fib.
00:19:01.000That is literally what they are paid to do.
00:19:04.000But again, the media have decided that they are hands clean in all of this.
00:19:08.000They can print as much nonsense and fake news as they want, and nobody is allowed to call their general credibility into question.
00:19:13.000But 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.
00:19:19.000Here is Sarah Huckabee Sanders going after April Ryan.
00:19:22.000So April Ryan suggests that Sarah Huckabee Sanders was blindsided.
00:19:26.000Sanders kicks back and then Ryan goes crazy.
00:19:29.000Why didn't you talk to the White House press office about his impacting stellar statements about what was happening?
00:19:37.000The White House press office wouldn't coordinate with the president's outside legal team on legal strategy.
00:19:41.000You said yourself you were blindsided.
00:19:44.000Well, I said it, but you were blindsided from what you said.
00:19:48.000Well, with all due respect, you actually don't know much about me in terms of what I feel and what I don't.
00:19:58.000Okay, 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.
00:20:06.000They should stop televising the press briefings.
00:20:39.000But, again, it just demonstrates that what the media love best of all about President Trump is the constant controversy.
00:20:45.000While they proclaim that they don't like any of this and they just want to cover the news straight, they really don't.
00:20:49.000They 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.
00:20:55.000Because now the story is April Ryan and Jim Acosta.
00:20:57.000The story is not really the president lying to the American people, and the American people not really caring, because we knew all of that.
00:21:04.000So, before I go any further, and I have a lot to say about some weird sex stuff in just a second.
00:21:10.000Now, if that's not a pitch, I don't know what is.
00:21:12.000But, before I get to any of that, first,
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00:23:50.000The 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.
00:23:59.000And 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.
00:24:08.000So there have been a bunch of think pieces about how to solve the problem of involuntary celibacy.
00:24:14.000Point number one, I don't understand why involuntary celibacy is a problem.
00:24:17.000If 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.
00:24:23.000But it just demonstrates that the victimhood mentality has taken over everyone in our society.
00:24:28.000You're a loser and you can't find somebody to marry you?
00:24:30.000Maybe it's because you ought to get your act together.
00:24:33.000Maybe the reason you're involuntarily celibate is because you have not made enough of yourself to earn somebody else's love and affection.
00:24:39.000But 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,
00:24:51.000When 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.
00:25:01.000Involuntary celibacy is obviously a societal problem.
00:25:05.000This is a very perverse view of sexuality.
00:25:07.000Ross Douthat at the New York Times has pointed out that for purposes of discussion, there are two types of incels.
00:25:12.000Men who can't get sex as a general rule.
00:25:14.000It's usually men who are worried about involuntary celibacy.
00:25:17.000And people perceived by the left wing to be victimized by a society that has unfair standards of sexiness.
00:25:21.000So, 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.
00:25:33.000Well, Douthat suggests that the solution posed by those who see involuntary celibacy as a problem to be solved will be the redistribution of sex.
00:25:40.000That 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.
00:25:48.000In 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.
00:25:56.000This is the sort of move that Doubt Hat sees coming with regard to involuntary celibacy.
00:26:00.000Now, we all rightly rebel at this idea because this idea is gross and stupid.
00:26:04.000It'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.
00:26:13.000But 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.
00:26:24.000So I was what you would call a voluntary celibate until I was married.
00:26:28.000I was somebody who did not have sex until I was married.
00:27:01.000Conservatives have had the solution for a long time.
00:27:03.000A sexual morality that takes into account commitment.
00:27:06.000If 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.
00:27:13.000And we have a society right now that values sex above commitment.
00:27:16.000That 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.
00:27:23.000Social science demonstrates that this is a lie.
00:27:25.000Promiscuity does not lead to happiness, it turns out.
00:27:27.000Sexual variety does not lead to happiness.
00:27:29.000Commitment tends to lead to happiness.
00:27:31.000But 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.
00:27:47.000Again, virginity should not be seen as something to be condemned.
00:27:50.000It's seen as a norm, not as a shortcoming, until you have earned somebody else's commitment.
00:27:55.000But that's not the way our society has viewed it.
00:27:56.000If 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.
00:28:03.000Again, the reality is nobody owes you sex.
00:28:15.000What 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.
00:28:33.000You rarely see... The guys who are complaining right now about involuntary celibacy, they're never complaining about involuntary lack of commitment.
00:28:41.000You 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.
00:28:51.000That 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.
00:29:00.000Well, we're making a generation of pathetic men.
00:29:03.000We'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.
00:29:19.000Meanwhile, speaking of people who are being made pathetic, it's not just exclusive to men.
00:29:48.000Time for the easiest game of if you love this movie, read this book ever.
00:29:51.000If 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.
00:29:57.000The cover literally shows a woman in an amorous clench with a fish.
00:30:00.000The novel actually tells the story of a woman who has a torrid love affair with a merman.
00:30:04.000And 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.
00:30:16.000These men who grope us and talk down to us and consistently fail to clean the bathroom.
00:30:21.000We're supposed to make lives with them?
00:30:30.000You shouldn't be having sex with fish, ladies.
00:30:32.000Okay, 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.
00:30:43.000Again, how about women focus on bettering themselves and men focus on bettering themselves and both of these things lead toward commitment.
00:30:57.000Okay, just because your husband voted for Donald Trump doesn't mean that he's a bad human being.
00:31:02.000So basically, you're going to opt to go after the whitefish instead of sleeping with your husband because he voted for Trump?
00:31:11.000Even 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.
00:31:23.000So many straight men we have been forced to accept are bad to us and for us.
00:31:27.000Why would we take the enormous risk of loving one of them?
00:31:30.000And yet straight women do have desires.
00:31:32.000Cutting men out of our lives isn't a simple proposition.
00:31:35.000And 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.
00:31:42.000The handsome prince of our imagination has been exposed as a dangerous fraud, but we still need some form of romantic hope and sexual release.
00:31:48.000One seductive yet impossible fantasy might be the romantic attention of a man who lacks the exhausting baggage of male entitlement.
00:31:54.000To find such fantastical being women, at least in fiction, have turned to the sea."
00:31:57.000Okay, 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.
00:32:10.000Maybe 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.
00:32:21.000Instead of emasculating men, you should expect men to be better, and men should expect themselves to be better.
00:32:26.000Women set the standard for men, and men set the standard for women.
00:32:38.000What that means is that women should expect men to be better.
00:32:42.000They should expect men to be better, but they should not expect men not to be men.
00:32:45.000Men are creatures who are going to want sex.
00:32:48.000But you can also dictate to a man, ladies, what kind of man you would like to have sex with.
00:32:53.000It's up to you to determine what type of person you think is going to make a good husband.
00:32:58.000And 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,
00:33:11.000We're leading generations of men and women to be unhappy.
00:33:15.000You 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.
00:33:56.000Every element of it is just marvelous.
00:33:59.000Beyond all of that, I want you to go and subscribe right now, if you have not, to our feed over at iTunes or SoundCloud or YouTube.
00:34:06.000The reason being, because this Sunday, May 6th, we have a brand new edition of my podcast, a Sunday edition.
00:34:10.000It's the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special, in which I host weekly in-depth conversations with the nation's best thinkers on politics, news, culture, sports, everything in between.
00:34:19.000The best part is for current subscribers to my show, because you won't even need to hit an extra button, it's just going to show up in your feed.
00:34:25.000And this week's episode is just fantastic.
00:37:07.000Yeah, that may be the greatest dad of all time.
00:37:10.000The Swamp People, China People, Cocaine Mitch.
00:37:14.000Yeah, 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.
00:37:21.000Apparently Blankenship is getting 16% of the vote in the primary right now.
00:37:38.000Most 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.
00:37:43.000She 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.
00:37:49.000This 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.
00:37:55.000I rarely see her because when I do, I involuntarily become enraged because of the memories of what she did to us.
00:37:59.000Now 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.
00:38:04.000As a somewhat newfound Christian, I believe in forgiveness, but I tried so hard to disassociate from my own mother.
00:38:08.000Okay, so Matthew, obviously, all my sympathies to you.
00:38:09.000And then to a broader question, what do you do with a parent who's just a bad parent?
00:38:12.000Obviously, there are biblical injunctions to respect your parents, to honor your parents.
00:38:33.000And 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.
00:38:38.000The 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.
00:38:44.000Whatever you have to do to come to peace with the situation with your mother is something that you ought to do.
00:38:48.000If your mother dies, if your mother passes away,
00:38:53.000You're going to want to be able to look back and say to yourself, I was the good person here.
00:38:57.000I was the person who did everything that I could.
00:39:01.000Yes, you're the one making the sacrifice.
00:39:02.000Yes, you're the person putting yourself in a rough position.
00:39:04.000And 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.
00:39:12.000I'm not sure that that's something that anyone should be pushed to forgive.
00:39:16.000But I do think that the best thing for you would be to come to some sort of satisfaction with your own behavior.
00:39:27.000Some sort of standard for your own behavior that you can live with.
00:39:29.000Where you're not going to beat yourself up later about the action that you took right now.
00:39:33.000So maybe that means driving your mom to the doctor.
00:39:35.000Maybe it means trying to be nice to your mom.
00:40:47.000Now, I believe in environmental regulations.
00:40:49.000I believe that there are certain externalities that we have to protect against.
00:40:52.000But 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.
00:40:59.000And there are plenty of private parks across the United States that are quite beautiful and quite magnificent.
00:41:04.000I think that there would be plenty of people who would be willing to give money.
00:41:07.000I'm sure that there are private, you know, I know several billionaires who would probably be willing to purchase Yosemite just to protect it.
00:41:13.000So if it's just about people would have come in and exploited the land, I'm not fully sure that that's true actually.
00:41:20.000I'm rather libertarian to the extent it's possible to be here.
00:41:54.000Well, I mean, what I've always said to people who are my own age, it's... Okay, so let's be frank about this.
00:42:01.000Trying to reason with adolescents is always a problem.
00:42:03.000The 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.
00:42:13.000So trying to logic them out of all of this is very difficult.
00:42:16.000What 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.
00:42:24.000The 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.
00:42:31.000Now, 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.
00:42:42.000It's certainly not true for all people.
00:42:43.000I 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.
00:42:57.000The acting like a jerk is something that gets ingrained in your character.
00:43:00.000If 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.
00:43:05.000So Gramsci, for those who don't know, was an Italian proto-fascist thinker.
00:43:19.000Who 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.
00:43:27.000Marxism had suggested that there was an inevitable slide from capitalism and towards Marxism, and that eventually capitalism would degrade into Marxism over time.
00:43:36.000Gramsci said, look, that's not what happened in World War I.
00:43:38.000In 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.
00:43:44.000We 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.
00:43:52.000I think that Gramsci's philosophy has been a lot more successful than the philosophy of Marx himself.
00:43:58.000Cultural Marxism has been a lot more successful in damaging the West than the economic theories of Karl Marx.
00:44:04.000Okay, Susan says, Hey Ben, how do we avoid whataboutism?
00:44:07.000Trump is in the office and therefore the leader of the GOP.
00:44:09.000Most of the leftists want to paint the entire GOP with one brush.
00:44:20.000And 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.
00:44:48.000I'm a current PhD student in philosophy, and I enjoy watching your show every day.
00:44:51.000As a person in academia, it is one of the few things that keeps me from going insane.
00:44:54.000Something I especially enjoy is when you relate the topic you're discussing to broader intellectual themes from the great philosophers of the past.
00:45:00.000I'm excited to see prominent conservatives thinking seriously about philosophical questions.
00:46:30.000But 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.
00:46:37.000It's probably not as user-friendly as simply reading a user-friendly summary from a reliable source like, for example, Durant.
00:47:12.000Get 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.
00:47:24.000Okay, so, it is really unclear whether Noah was a metaphorical character
00:47:57.000As opposed to Noah, who could have been a more metaphorical creation.
00:48:02.000The 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.
00:48:11.000It's really a tale about fascism and about communitarianism trying to challenge God and breaking down.
00:48:19.000So 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
00:48:29.000So the story of Noah is a guy protecting his family from an inundation, a cultural inundation,
00:48:37.000Now, it is true that there was some sort of flood, by the way, in Mesopotamia.
00:48:44.000And the story is wrapped into this, right?
00:48:46.000If you actually read more ancient documents than the Bible, there are flood stories in those documents, right?
00:48:52.000Ancient Mesopotamian myth has talk about giant floods happening in the Middle East.
00:48:56.000So there probably was a flood of some sort that was happening in the Middle East at that time.
00:49:00.000But the actual psychological impact of Noah
00:49:03.000I would say that it's really more about that entire portion of the Bible is contrasting various types of civilization.
00:49:09.000So 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.
00:49:18.000So 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.
00:49:30.000Okay, so that's the story of the Tower of Babel.
00:49:32.000That is juxtaposed to the story of the people who are surrounding Noah, who are sort of these libertines,
00:49:53.000And Noah's model is what survives, right?
00:49:55.000That 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.
00:50:05.000That's, I think, the metaphorical value of Noah.
00:50:07.000Again, people who say that they don't take the literal truth of the beginning of Genesis as a guide.
00:50:14.000Welcome 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.
00:50:20.000And I've recommended books on this program about how to rectify breaches between science and the Bible.
00:50:28.000It sounds like your daughter is a very simplistic atheistic thinker, and that's a problem.
00:50:32.000I think a lot of the people who are the biggest proponents of atheism are people who have never spent five minutes with the Bible.
00:50:37.000They'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.
00:50:56.000Why would God give a written document to human beings and then say, live by this document?
00:51:02.000Especially knowing that human beings are bound by their time and fallible.
00:51:07.000What I believe is that God gave the Bible as the enzyme that catalyzed the progress of humanity.
00:51:12.000Basically, what God said is, here is a moral guide for you, here, right now.
00:51:16.000There are certain immutable principles in it.
00:51:18.000There are certain basic principles, like the Ten Commandments.
00:51:20.000There are certain basic moral principles about sexuality, because human nature doesn't change.
00:51:24.000But, 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,
00:51:57.000And 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.
00:52:05.000Now, 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?
00:52:33.000All 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.
00:52:44.000Otherwise, she's doing herself a certain level of disrespect.
00:52:47.000Also, 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.
00:52:53.000There are plenty of other religions, there are plenty of other takes on God.
00:52:58.000Just 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.
00:53:05.000Okay, 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.
00:53:11.000So, 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.
00:53:21.000It's amazing how short people's memory is.
00:53:24.000People on the right should condemn President Trump's moral failings.
00:53:27.000But 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,
00:53:39.000They seem to forget there was a guy named Bill Clinton.
00:53:41.000So, if you've never seen the movie Primary Colors with John Travolta, it is a pretty good movie.
00:53:45.000With 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.
00:53:51.000Emma Thompson is Hillary Clinton here.
00:54:54.000Okay, 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.
00:56:14.000I mean, again, this is one of the things that people should understand about religious believers.
00:56:18.000Religious believers can believe that you are participating in sin and still think that you are a good person.
00:56:22.000Religious believers can believe that what you are doing is something that they do not agree with, but it's a free country.
00:56:29.000It'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.
00:56:37.000Honestly, 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.
00:56:42.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:57:45.000And 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.
00:57:57.000Again, just demonstrating once again the bias in the media.