The Ben Shapiro Show


You’re Blaming The Wrong People | Ep. 571


Summary

After a shooting in a newsroom, the media jumped to anti-Trump conclusions, Supreme Court talk heats up, and we ll check the mailbag. Plus, a new edition of Daily Wire Presents: Backstage with Andrew Klavan and Michael Knowles, to look back on our country s birth, and look ahead to its future with an ignoramus like Jordan Peterson, and a very well-informed Canadian like Jeremy Boring, who will be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day with us this Monday, July 2nd, with a live stream on the Daily Wire Live Stream Stream hosted by Daily Wire's own Jordan Peterson! Want more Shapiro? Subscribe to The Ben Shapiro Show on Apple Podcasts and leave us your thoughts and reactions in the comments section below. You can also join our FB group and join the conversation by using the hashtag on that hashtag , and find us on Insta . and tag Ben Shapiro so we can feature his work on our stories and videos! on the next episode of ! Subscribe, rate and review Ben Shapiro s show! and help spread the word to your friends about his new podcast! Thank you for listening and supporting Ben Shapiro! Love you, Ben Shapiro and all his work! - Your continued support is so appreciated. - The Weekly Standard - Thank you Ben Shapiro's work is so much appreciated, we make it real, it really does mean a lot to us. and we are so much more than you can do that we can be heard by us, too, we are grateful to you. thank you, thank you really really appreciate you, really really much, we really appreciate it, really deeply appreciate you. Ben Shapiro, too much, really means it, truly appreciate it... -- Thank you, very much, truly, really, truly means it. -- and we really do, really mean it, deeply appreciate it. Thank you... Thank you - Ben Shapiro & really, really Thank You, Really, really Really, Really Much, Really Thank You... - the whole world, really truly, truly Thank you ... - Eternally, Really Really, Thank you Again, Again, Really Good Morning, Really Truly, Truly, Thank You & Truly, Really Appreciate You, Truly Thank You ... Thank You - VOTED, Again & Truly -


Transcript

00:00:00.000 After a shooting in a newsroom, the media jumped to anti-Trump conclusions, Supreme Court talk heats up, and we'll check the mailbag.
00:00:05.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:00:06.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:00:13.000 Oh, tons to talk about today, and we'll get to all of it.
00:00:16.000 First, I want to remind you that we have a special live stream coming up this Monday, July 2nd, 7 p.m.
00:00:20.000 Eastern, 4 p.m.
00:00:21.000 Pacific.
00:00:21.000 We're going to be joined by special guest Jordan Peterson to celebrate Independence Day because he's the world's foremost Canadian.
00:00:26.000 God King Jeremy Boring is going to host a new edition of Daily Wire backstage with me and Andrew Klavan and the ex-Gribble Michael Knowles to look back on our country's birth and look ahead to its future with an ignoramus like Knowles and a very well-informed Canadian like Jordan Peterson.
00:00:38.000 Subscribers will even be able to write in live questions for us to answer on the air again.
00:00:42.000 That is this Monday, July 2nd, 7 p.m.
00:00:43.000 Eastern, 4 p.m.
00:00:44.000 Pacific, with special guest Jordan Peterson.
00:00:46.000 You can find our special livestream on Facebook and YouTube.
00:00:48.000 You're not going to want to miss it.
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00:02:12.000 Okay, so yesterday there was a horrific event.
00:02:15.000 It happened at a newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland at a place called the Capital Gazette.
00:02:20.000 Nobody's ever heard of the Capital Gazette newspaper because it's a local newspaper.
00:02:23.000 And a shooter walked into the building and proceeded to gun down a bunch of people, killed at least five people.
00:02:28.000 And this shooter was a peculiar human being, shall we say, aside from being evil.
00:02:33.000 He apparently damaged his fingers so that he could not be identified.
00:02:36.000 And then the investigators had to use facial recognition to identify him.
00:02:40.000 And the shooter had a history with the newspaper, it turns out, because he had sued them in 2012 for defamation after there was a story by a person
00:02:48.000 Who wrote for the paper about how this guy had basically harassed her online and then he sued for defamation and he lost.
00:02:55.000 The Capital Gazette reported in 2015 the suspect's lawsuit against the newspaper had been thrown out by a judge because the article is based on public records and the suspect presented no evidence that it was inaccurate.
00:03:04.000 The Capital Gazette reported at the time
00:03:07.000 So why is this national news aside from the fact that it's yet another mass shooting on American soil?
00:03:10.000 The reason it's national news is because everybody decided it was very important to jump to conclusions.
00:03:31.000 So, a bunch of people decided online that they were going to jump to the conclusion that this person had been inspired by Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:03:36.000 Now, I've been loathe to say the name Milo Yiannopoulos because I find him a loathsome human being.
00:03:41.000 But Milo Yiannopoulos has been sort of an alt-right provocateur for several years.
00:03:44.000 He's the kind of fellow who once sent me, on my son's birthday, a picture of a black child because I was a cuck, right?
00:03:50.000 I was somebody who didn't care enough about the whiteness of the United States and thus I would not have minded if my wife slept with a black person and had a black child.
00:03:58.000 That's the kind of person Milo Yiannopoulos is.
00:03:59.000 Well, Milo had said a couple of days ago, he was in a couple of exchanges with journalists, and he had written back to a journalist that he hopes the journalist gets shot.
00:04:07.000 So the entire left decided that this was Milo Yiannopoulos' fault, the shooting.
00:04:09.000 And then they decided also that it was Donald Trump's fault, the shooting.
00:04:12.000 This is before we actually knew why this guy had gone and committed the shooting in the first place.
00:04:17.000 And as I say, it turns out the reason that he committed the shooting is because a nut job who had filed suit against the newspaper and had a vendetta against the newspaper.
00:04:24.000 That did not stop the media from trying to blame Donald Trump
00:04:27.000 Yesterday, over all this.
00:04:28.000 Now, none of this is to say that Milo Yiannopoulos' words about journalists aren't excreble and terrible.
00:04:33.000 They are excreble and terrible, but lots of people say excreble, terrible things.
00:04:36.000 That does not mean that they are responsible for the actual shooting of other human beings.
00:04:41.000 Unless you are actually telling people to go shoot journalists, you're not responsible for somebody going and shooting journalists.
00:04:46.000 This is why when Bernie Sanders was blamed for the congressional baseball shooting by some, I said, this is not on Bernie Sanders.
00:04:51.000 I don't like Bernie Sanders.
00:04:52.000 I don't like anything that Bernie Sanders says.
00:04:54.000 But we're on a very dangerous slope here if we're going to blame speech for the actions of people who are crazy who go out and shoot other people.
00:05:02.000 Well, the administration immediately came out and condemned the attack.
00:05:05.000 Of course, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about it, and she condemned the attack.
00:05:08.000 She said, And it wasn't just Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
00:05:09.000 President Trump also tweeted out,
00:05:20.000 He tweeted, prior to departing Wisconsin, I was briefed on the shooting at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland.
00:05:25.000 My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.
00:05:27.000 Thank you to all the first responders who are currently on the scene.
00:05:29.000 Okay, so that's a perfectly nice tweet from President Trump.
00:05:32.000 Mike Pence did the same.
00:05:32.000 The Vice President, he tweeted something out.
00:05:34.000 Just arrived in Guatemala.
00:05:35.000 We're monitoring the horrific shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis.
00:05:38.000 Karen and I are praying for the victims and their families.
00:05:40.000 We commend the swift action by law enforcement and all the first responders on the scene.
00:05:44.000 Okay, so how did the media cover all this?
00:05:46.000 Did they cover this as a nutjob went into a newspaper he had a vendetta against with a shotgun and murdered a bunch of people?
00:05:52.000 No, they covered this as though it was Trump's fault, because they have no sense of perspective, because they have no sense of their own hypocrisy.
00:05:58.000 These are the same people who are, in many ways, defending Maxine Waters and her call for sort of mob confrontation.
00:06:06.000 A lot of these folks are the same people who are laughing about, you know, the various Kathy Griffin stunts with the heads of Donald Trump and such.
00:06:14.000 These same people are saying that it is Donald Trump's fault when a person who is totally unassociated with Donald Trump goes out and shoots up a newsroom.
00:06:20.000 And they dug up a tweet from 2015 in which the guy suggested that anti-Trump bias could be met with violence.
00:06:26.000 But again, he had tweeted something like that.
00:06:29.000 You can bring that tweet back up.
00:06:31.000 He had tweeted something to the effect of,
00:06:34.000 Uh, that the, uh, he had tweeted something like, the newspaper was unqualified and it could end badly again.
00:06:40.000 He tweeted something, the shooter tweeted, referring to Donald Trump as unqualified could end badly again.
00:06:45.000 Okay, well, he wrote that in 2015, which is about the time that he had filed his lawsuit.
00:06:50.000 His lawsuit against the newspaper had been dismissed, uh, and Donald Trump had filed a lawsuit against Univision.
00:06:55.000 So basically, you know, the only threat that I can see there is a lawsuit threat, even though this guy was a complete nut.
00:07:01.000 But a bunch of people in the media decided this is Trump's fault.
00:07:03.000 Trump's language about journalists, the fact that journalists are booed at all of his rallies, the fact that people chant CNN sucks.
00:07:08.000 This is responsible for some unrelated nut job going out and shooting up a newsroom, even though it's very obvious that this guy went and shot up the newsroom because he had a vendetta against the people at the newsroom.
00:07:18.000 So Brian Stelter, for example, on CNN, he says this is the moment that so many journalists have feared.
00:07:23.000 It's a moment that I think so many journalists have feared for a long time.
00:07:27.000 Regardless of whether this newsroom was targeted or not, this has been a fear on many journalists' minds.
00:07:33.000 Okay, so it's not a fear on many journalists' minds.
00:07:36.000 Okay, it isn't.
00:07:37.000 As a journalist for nearly my entire life, an opinion journalist for my entire adult life, I can say that I don't have significant fear that people are going to randomly come into our Daily Wire offices and start shooting the place up, unless I were talking about an actual politically motivated attack.
00:07:49.000 For Stelter to say that, as though journalists have a special fear, is just weird, okay?
00:07:53.000 The fact is that journalists are not routinely targeted by the general public, and what he's really implying there is that the tenor of anti-media activity has grown so strong that people are going to go out and shoot people.
00:08:04.000 So he's attempting to, in backhanded fashion, I think, blame President Trump.
00:08:08.000 And it's not just him.
00:08:09.000 There's a political reporter, Josh Meyer in D.C., who tweeted something out similar.
00:08:13.000 He said, every journalist and those who support us should retweet this.
00:08:15.000 I can't think of a single other president in my lifetime who would have acted like this.
00:08:18.000 Perhaps he fears questions about whether his anti-media rhetoric played a role.
00:08:22.000 And that was Josh Meyer referring to President Trump being asked about the Maryland shooting.
00:08:26.000 So here are reporters harassing Trump about the Maryland shooting yesterday.
00:08:30.000 Any words about the dead in Annapolis?
00:08:35.000 Any words about the dead in Annapolis, Mr. President?
00:08:39.000 Can you talk about the active shooters in Annapolis?
00:08:42.000 Can you please talk to us about the dead reporters in Annapolis?
00:08:49.000 Okay, so the reporters are screaming at him and they're yelling at him.
00:08:53.000 This happens virtually every day, okay?
00:08:55.000 I've been to the White House several times and every day the president comes out and reporters scream at him and he doesn't answer their questions.
00:09:01.000 It's actually pretty rare that the president breaks off and does like an impromptu press conference over this whole thing.
00:09:05.000 He tweeted out what he thought about it, but this is being taken by Politico and others as evidence that Trump doesn't care if journalists get shot.
00:09:11.000 And then Maggie Haberman, whose reporting I generally think is good, she came out and she did sort of the same thing.
00:09:16.000 She tweeted this out.
00:09:17.000 She tweeted out,
00:09:19.000 This is the New York Times reporter.
00:09:20.000 The New York Times reporter blaming Trump.
00:09:21.000 This is Maggie Haberman saying,
00:09:33.000 Well, there's no connection between Trump doing that and the guy shooting up the newsroom.
00:09:39.000 The attempt to make a connection, to strain, to make a connection between Trump's language and the shooting, I think is foolhardy.
00:09:47.000 Now, again, I don't like Trump's language with regard to the press.
00:09:50.000 I've been very critical of President Trump's language with regard to the press.
00:09:53.000 When they report on fake news, I think that that is perfectly...
00:09:57.000 I think it's perfectly appropriate for him to say that fake news is fake news when it's fake news.
00:10:00.000 But his tendency to call the press the enemy of the people, I don't like.
00:10:03.000 I never have liked it.
00:10:04.000 I've always thought that it was a serious problem.
00:10:06.000 But the attempt to paint that as responsible for a shooting that he had nothing to do with is really quite amazing.
00:10:12.000 It really is.
00:10:13.000 And again, it was many members of the media doing this routine yesterday.
00:10:15.000 For example, the editor-in-chief of Reuters tweeted something out.
00:10:19.000 Along these lines, this is the tweet from, this is 17.
00:10:22.000 So this is the statement that was put out by Steve Adler, who's editor-in-chief of the Reuters, regarding the Rob Cox tweet.
00:10:28.000 So the Breaking View's editor, Rob Cox, actually tweeted about the shooting in Annapolis.
00:10:32.000 Let's see the tweet first, and then the response from Reuters.
00:10:34.000 So he said, this is what happens when Donald Trump calls journalists the enemy of the people.
00:10:38.000 Blood is on your hands, Mr. President.
00:10:40.000 Save your thoughts and prayers for your empty soul.
00:10:42.000 At least four people killed in Maryland newspaper shooting reports.
00:10:44.000 Okay, so he's blaming President Trump for all of this, and the fact that the media are eager to leap to this.
00:10:49.000 But, for example, when President Obama was incentivizing riots in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, or when cops were shot in Dallas, the media rightly said that this is not Obama's fault.
00:10:58.000 It's not Obama's fault the cops got shot in Dallas by a Black Lives Matter ally.
00:11:03.000 That's not Obama's fault.
00:11:04.000 It's not even Black Lives Matter's fault, I think.
00:11:06.000 But the media was in a real hurry to defend President Obama over that, but they are in a real hurry to blame President Trump for this particular shooting.
00:11:14.000 So, all of this is just disgusting.
00:11:17.000 Because if you're going to blame somebody for actual violence against somebody else, you ought to have some evidence that the violence is connected to the thing that somebody said.
00:11:23.000 As in, journalist should be shot, somebody goes out, reads that tweet, says, great tweet, now I'm gonna go shoot journalists.
00:11:29.000 Okay?
00:11:29.000 That is a fair connection.
00:11:31.000 But to connect vague language with regard to how much you dislike the media and how you hate the media with somebody going and shooting up members of the media, if we're gonna do that, then every shooting in the United States can be tied to somebody else's First Amendment-protected rhetoric.
00:11:44.000 Because here's the reality.
00:11:46.000 Incitement is not protected under the First Amendment.
00:11:47.000 If I say, Mathis, shoot Senya, okay, that is not protected under the First Amendment.
00:11:52.000 If Mathis goes and shoots Senya, I actually bear some criminal liability for incitement.
00:11:55.000 Okay, but the same thing is not true if I would say, you know, Senya's a really terrible producer, and something bad should happen to Senya.
00:12:02.000 Like, that's actually First Amendment protected.
00:12:04.000 It'd make me a piece of crap, right?
00:12:06.000 It'd be a bad thing to say, but it doesn't actually mean that I'd be responsible for something bad happening to Senya.
00:12:11.000 By the way, nothing bad should happen to Senia.
00:12:13.000 Senia's wonderful.
00:12:14.000 But all of this said, it's amazing to watch as the media immediately mobilize to make a narrative out of something that does not meet the standards for that narrative.
00:12:23.000 Okay, in just a second, I want to talk about how the left is, again, embracing a certain level of violent rhetoric and violence that is really disturbing.
00:12:32.000 They're going to talk about President Trump being violent in his rhetoric.
00:12:35.000 The left certainly does not have clean hands on this.
00:12:38.000 I have a clip from Michael Moore I want to show you in just a second all about this.
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00:13:53.000 Okay, so while the media have focused deeply in on President Trump's rhetoric about the press to suggest that he is responsible for a whack job who had a vendetta against a newspaper shooting up the newspaper, you've got people on the left who are mainstreaming mob action.
00:14:07.000 One of those people is Michael Moore.
00:14:08.000 Michael Moore has a new movie out called Fahrenheit 11.9, or it soon will be out, Fahrenheit 11.9.
00:14:13.000 Of course, this is a play on Fahrenheit 9.11.
00:14:16.000 11.9, of course, this time refers to the fact that Donald Trump was elected because this is an emergency for our republic.
00:14:20.000 The clip that he showed from his movie, by the way, is just awful.
00:14:23.000 Now, I'm supposed to be on Bill Maher tonight and I'm really disappointed because I can only be on Bill Maher for the first 15 minutes of the show.
00:14:29.000 I would love to be on Bill Maher's show for the full hour because then I'd be on a panel with Michael Moore and I could ask him about his terrible preview.
00:14:37.000 But I can't actually do that because Sabbath is coming in early so I can do the first 15 minutes of the show.
00:14:42.000 And I'm looking forward to that.
00:14:42.000 But Michael Moore will be on the show tonight as well.
00:14:45.000 Michael Moore was on Stephen Colbert last night pushing his new movie, and he started talking about incivility in our culture.
00:14:52.000 Listen to how Michael Moore describes incivility, because it really is telling.
00:14:55.000 The same left that says that we should really ratchet down the rhetoric, something with which I generally agree, the same left will at the same time say, well, but I don't really apply that to, you know, like treatment of conservatives or treatment of Republicans.
00:15:06.000 Like, that's a different thing entirely.
00:15:07.000 Here's Michael Moore.
00:15:08.000 Calls that are coming from the uncivil, asking Democrats who are usually so wimpy and weak and, no, it's okay, you know, we'll take half of universal health care, we don't need the whole thing.
00:15:21.000 You know, that's how our side sounds all the time.
00:15:24.000 We're constantly giving in.
00:15:26.000 And then a few people want to stand up and say, no, I've had enough.
00:15:29.000 That's it.
00:15:30.000 And we don't have to be violent.
00:15:32.000 We have to remain non-violent.
00:15:34.000 But, you know, the worst that's going to happen to anybody in the Trump administration is that they don't get to have a chicken dinner in Virginia.
00:15:43.000 I mean, I don't know.
00:15:45.000 The only way that we're going to stop this is eventually we're all going to have to put our bodies on the line.
00:15:50.000 You're going to have to be willing to do this.
00:15:52.000 It is funny.
00:15:52.000 I was having lunch with a particularly famous Hollywood player yesterday whose name shall remain anonymous so he can continue to get jobs.
00:15:59.000 And we were doing so at a restaurant in the middle of Beverlywood yesterday.
00:16:04.000 And I was just looking around.
00:16:05.000 We were talking.
00:16:05.000 He was a Trump supporter.
00:16:06.000 And we were just looking around.
00:16:08.000 And noting that this is a Tony Ritzi restaurant.
00:16:11.000 Everybody in this restaurant is earning significant six-figure money.
00:16:14.000 This is a very, very glamorous place.
00:16:17.000 And we're sitting, I'm looking around, and I realize that everyone who's there sipping their bubbly water, everybody there who is sipping their Chardonnay in the middle of the afternoon, all those people think that we are living in the middle of a civil war and in the middle of a crisis.
00:16:32.000 As they're sitting there sipping their Chardonnay, they think that we are living in the middle of a fascist takeover of the United States.
00:16:38.000 And it's just astonishing that this is how they think.
00:16:40.000 Like, all those people would be nodding along to Michael Moore saying, we need to put our bodies on the line, as they sit there eating their $200 lunches, having driven there in their Porsches.
00:16:48.000 And it occurred to me that this is all delusional.
00:16:50.000 This is all delusional.
00:16:51.000 Listen, we're in the political space a lot.
00:16:53.000 We spend all of our day in the political space.
00:16:54.000 I spend all my day in the political space.
00:16:56.000 And it's easy to get caught up in the back and forth.
00:16:58.000 It's easy to feel that politics is really fraught right now.
00:17:01.000 But the reality is, if you took somebody from 1930 and you plunked them down in the middle of 2018, they would literally think they died and went to heaven.
00:17:08.000 They would literally think that.
00:17:09.000 They can get anything they want, at any time, for any reason.
00:17:13.000 They are not going to be poor, because poverty in the United States is better than wealthy people were living in 1920.
00:17:19.000 And yet, we still think that we're in the middle of this massive civil war.
00:17:22.000 That has to stop.
00:17:25.000 In a second, I'm going to explain why that has to stop.
00:17:28.000 So the reason that we have to stop with the crisis mentality is because crisis mentality leads people to the belief that harsh, sometimes evil action is necessary.
00:17:39.000 And sitting around in a place like Los Angeles while the sun streams through the big windows and everybody is eating their lobster, you know, I had a Coke, while everybody is doing that,
00:17:50.000 It just, it occurs to you that the more we think that our neighbors are our enemies, the more likely we are to start anticipating tactics that are bad.
00:17:59.000 So the shooting that happened in Maryland has nothing to do with President Trump.
00:18:04.000 But I don't think that it's, I don't think it's questionable that the temperature in the country has risen to a certain extent.
00:18:09.000 I'm trying to be reflective about this as I possibly can, and honest with you.
00:18:12.000 I think the temperature in the country has risen to a level that is unsustainable.
00:18:17.000 And I think it's based on nearly nothing.
00:18:19.000 I think our political differences matter an awful lot.
00:18:21.000 I think politics matter an awful lot.
00:18:22.000 I think our rights matter an awful lot.
00:18:23.000 And I think that some of our rights are at crisis point in terms of our defense of those rights.
00:18:28.000 But I don't think that we are at the point where Americans are ready to put their bodies on the line, as Michael Moore says, that it's time to see this as a civil war in any real way.
00:18:38.000 And there may be an intellectual civil war going on, but that intellectual civil war has been going on for generations in the United States.
00:18:43.000 Maybe it's a little worse now than it was any time since 1960s, but I don't buy into the idea that this is a time that is deserving of the kind of vitriol and insanity that we are seeing.
00:18:57.000 And it's being promulgated by people on both sides, but particularly on the left right now, because what the left is doing is they're doing what Michael Moore does, which is, I love civility.
00:19:04.000 Civility is great, but I can't be civil with these evil Republicans, so civility must end.
00:19:08.000 Maxine Waters is the case in point of this.
00:19:10.000 So Maxine Waters has now said, the representative who said just earlier this week that there should be mob justice against a bunch of people going to gas stations if you disagree with them.
00:19:18.000 She said on Thursday she's seen an increase in threats since she made controversial comments encouraging protesters to heckle and harass members of Trump's cabinet in public spaces.
00:19:26.000 She said that she got threatening messages and hostile mail at her offices.
00:19:30.000 She canceled two scheduled appearances in Alabama and Texas.
00:19:33.000 She said she got one very serious death threat on Monday from an individual in Texas.
00:19:36.000 And she says,
00:19:48.000 I mean, this is indicative of the way that our politics is working right now.
00:19:50.000 Maxine Waters doesn't like when anybody attempts to assault her because no one would like that because it's terrible stuff.
00:19:57.000 But then she'll go out and encourage people to assault people at gas stations.
00:20:00.000 And she did encourage people to assault people at gas stations.
00:20:02.000 The word assault, by the way, does not mean battery.
00:20:04.000 In the legal terminology, she encouraged people to get in people's faces at gas stations and threaten them.
00:20:08.000 Okay, that is not battery.
00:20:11.000 Battery is when I hit you.
00:20:12.000 Assault is when I threaten you.
00:20:13.000 She did encourage that.
00:20:14.000 There's no question she encouraged that.
00:20:16.000 And she felt okay encouraging that because it was somebody on the other side.
00:20:18.000 So in other words, everybody is in favor of civility as long as it applies to people on their own side, but nobody is in favor of civility when it's applied to people on the other side.
00:20:25.000 And the reality is that we live in the most civil of times.
00:20:28.000 Violence in the United States is at 50-year lows.
00:20:31.000 It is.
00:20:32.000 The level of vitriol may be at a 50-year high, but violence in the United States is at a 50-year low.
00:20:36.000 We're living in a pretty paradisiacal situation.
00:20:39.000 The economy is doing great.
00:20:41.000 There is no excuse for this level of insanity in our current politics.
00:20:45.000 And yet, everybody continues to go insane.
00:20:47.000 And that's only being exacerbated, of course.
00:20:49.000 by the situation with the Supreme Court, because now that Justice Kennedy has stepped down, the left is fully convinced that the right is coming for everything that they hold dear.
00:20:57.000 Not understanding, of course, how the Supreme Court works in the first place, having used the Supreme Court as the tool of their leftist politics for nigh on 80 years at this point.
00:21:05.000 The Democrats are now firmly convinced that the Republicans are going to come in, they're going to swoop in with the Supreme Court at their behest, and they're going to run roughshod over everybody's rights, and we'll be living in a Nazi state.
00:21:16.000 This kind of insane, over-the-top talk is not good for the country.
00:21:20.000 And again, I think there are a lot of people in the country who right now feel justified in being uncivil.
00:21:25.000 Incivility can bleed into violence.
00:21:27.000 I'm not going to blame people who are uncivil for violence.
00:21:29.000 But I will say that when you raise the temperature every so often, you are going to get the pot boiling over.
00:21:34.000 When the temperature is room temperature in the pot, it doesn't boil over ever.
00:21:37.000 When the temperature is a little bit high and then you put the lid on, then it is more likely that the pot is going to boil over.
00:21:42.000 I think that the likelihood the pot is going to boil over right now is a lot higher than it has been in the past and there is no real excuse for it.
00:21:47.000 So I'm going to talk in a second about this fallout from the Supreme Court.
00:21:50.000 But first, let's talk about the national debt.
00:21:52.000 21 trillion bucks and counting.
00:21:54.000 Our national debt, money we owe other countries, it is greater than the entire economic output of the United States.
00:21:58.000 If your life savings is tied to the U.S.
00:21:59.000 dollar, you might want to ask yourself, what is your plan for inflation?
00:22:02.000 What happens if the Chinese begin selling our bonds?
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00:23:02.000 As I mentioned, with the temperature on politics so high, the Supreme Court retirement of Anthony Kennedy is raising the temperature even higher.
00:23:09.000 And I encouraged people yesterday to calm down about this.
00:23:11.000 The reason I encouraged people to calm down is because it is not the job of the Supreme Court, according to conservatives, to implement their preferred policy prescriptions.
00:23:18.000 The Supreme Court is not going to rule tomorrow that abortion is banned across the land.
00:23:22.000 It was the Supreme Court that ruled that abortion was legal across the land because the leftists on the court decided to use the Supreme Court as a tool of their will instead of a tool of judgment.
00:23:30.000 The same thing was true of same-sex marriage when the Supreme Court decided unilaterally that same-sex marriage was now mandated by a document that was ratified in 1791 and an amendment that was ratified in 1868.
00:23:42.000 That was the Supreme Court that did that.
00:23:43.000 The way conservatives view the Supreme Court is that it's the job of the Supreme Court to essentially get out of the way when it comes to what states have to do, so long as it is in consonance with the Constitution of the United States.
00:23:56.000 So the Supreme Court is not an activist Supreme Court.
00:23:58.000 When conservatives run it, it strikes down a lot fewer laws generally.
00:24:02.000 It gets involved in national mandates almost never.
00:24:06.000 The fact is that because the left has used the Supreme Court as a tool for so long, they think that now the right is going to use the Supreme Court as a club.
00:24:12.000 And what they are most worried about, of course, is the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
00:24:14.000 They're under the wildness impression that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, that immediately makes abortion illegal across the United States.
00:24:19.000 Would that it were so, but it is not.
00:24:22.000 The reality is that if Roe v. Wade is reversed, as it should be, then what happens is that all of these laws go back to the states.
00:24:28.000 All of these laws go back to the states.
00:24:30.000 And so California will have abortion on demand and Alabama will not.
00:24:33.000 That's that's the way that this will work.
00:24:34.000 And if you want an abortion, you will simply cross state lines and you'll go get an abortion.
00:24:38.000 That's that's the high likelihood as to how this thing ends up working out.
00:24:42.000 Federalism ends up prevailing unless there is some sort of constitutional amendment or federal law to bar abortion across the board, which
00:24:50.000 You know, it would be hard to pass, I think.
00:24:52.000 But that's not stopping the insane rhetoric coming out of the left.
00:24:54.000 So the left is in full panic mode.
00:24:55.000 I think one of the reasons they're in full panic mode is because, again, I think that they thought that there was going to be a thousand-year rule by the left.
00:25:00.000 After Obama, they thought they're never losing an election again, so why would we even worry about Donald Trump?
00:25:05.000 And then it turns out not only did they lose the election, they lost the Senate, the House, most state houses, and most governorships.
00:25:09.000 And they turned around and looked around and said, wait, this isn't the America Obama promised.
00:25:13.000 Well, Whoopi Goldberg is leading the charge against overturning Roe v. Wade.
00:25:18.000 The level of insanity in this rhetoric is extraordinarily high.
00:25:22.000 And again, I just, I don't know why any of this is good for the country.
00:25:25.000 But here's Whoopi Goldberg going after Meghan McCain.
00:25:27.000 Okay, Meghan McCain is not a, she's a Republican.
00:25:31.000 Meghan McCain is certainly not an extreme conservative by any stretch of the imagination.
00:25:35.000 Meghan McCain is a moderate conservative at best.
00:25:38.000 And Whoopi Goldberg is telling Meghan McCain, who's pro-life, to get out of her vagina, which I can safely say most people are very happy to do.
00:25:45.000 Here is Whoopi Goldberg.
00:25:47.000 If you take my right away from me to judge what I do for my family and my body, I got a little problem with that.
00:25:53.000 You got a problem?
00:25:54.000 You don't want people to take your guns?
00:25:56.000 Well, get out of my behind!
00:25:58.000 Get out of my vagina!
00:26:01.000 Okay, no one wants to be there, Whoopi.
00:26:04.000 That's not a thing.
00:26:06.000 And again, this is the idea that Republicans are suddenly going to be doing Handmaid's Tale stuff, that they're interested in putting things up Whoopi Goldberg's vagina in search for babies she cannot have because I assume she's postmenopausal.
00:26:18.000 What?
00:26:19.000 But but this is the tenor of the rhetoric that we have now reached.
00:26:23.000 Now, with that said, right.
00:26:24.000 And like Nancy Pelosi says the same thing.
00:26:26.000 Right.
00:26:26.000 Nancy Pelosi says that the Supreme Court is doing violence to our democracy, violence to our democracy.
00:26:32.000 Well, if you're going to equate speech with violence, is it any wonder when violence is is a response to that?
00:26:38.000 When people say, OK, well, the Supreme Court is doing violence to us.
00:26:41.000 What if we do violence to the Supreme Court?
00:26:42.000 This is the problem that I have with a lot of what's going on in college campuses.
00:26:45.000 I visit 25, 30 college campuses a year.
00:26:47.000 And when people say my speech is violent, well, then their answer very often is, OK, Antifa's answer is, well, what if I use violence against the violence that is the speech?
00:26:55.000 Nancy Pelosi, by the way, said that the Supreme Court did violence to our democracy.
00:26:58.000 How?
00:26:59.000 They did violence to our democracy by saying that the government could not point a gun at you and force you to pay dues to a union.
00:27:06.000 That's really what she's saying here.
00:27:08.000 And then we're hearing from the left that it's Trump whose rhetoric is extreme?
00:27:12.000 Guys, do you own mirrors?
00:27:13.000 Here's Nancy Pelosi.
00:27:27.000 OK, so there we go.
00:27:33.000 You know, the Supreme Court is doing violence now.
00:27:36.000 And yet, again, the left will blame Donald Trump for shootings at a Maryland newspaper.
00:27:40.000 So it's all good.
00:27:42.000 It's all good.
00:27:42.000 Everything's fine.
00:27:44.000 Nothing to worry about here.
00:27:45.000 Now, as far as the Supreme Court seat,
00:27:47.000 The only possibility that President Trump does not get his pick that he wants for the Supreme Court seat is if Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who are the two most left-leaning members of the Senate caucus, decide that they are going to somehow hold up any Trump nominee unless that Trump nominee pledges fealty to Roe v. Wade.
00:28:02.000 I don't think that's actually what's going to happen here.
00:28:04.000 Susan Collins says that Roe v. Wade is settled law because she's wrong, but here's Susan Collins making that case.
00:28:10.000 From my perspective, Roe v. Wade is an important precedent and it is settled law.
00:28:17.000 Okay, it's always funny how people say things are settled law when they like those things, but the minute they don't like those things, those things have to be overturned.
00:28:23.000 So it turns out that one of the things that was settled law in the United States for legitimately the entire history of the United States is that traditional marriage was the only way marriage was done.
00:28:30.000 Nobody said that was settled law.
00:28:31.000 The minute that Obergefell happened, it was settled law.
00:28:33.000 The minute Roe v. Wade happened, it was settled law, according to people like Susan Collins.
00:28:36.000 But is Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski actually going to hold up the show on President Trump's Supreme Court pick?
00:28:41.000 I think not.
00:28:42.000 And the reason is because no Supreme Court
00:28:45.000 Possibility is going to answer straight the question as to whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade.
00:28:49.000 This is one of the sad outcomes of how we've done judicial nominations since the Bork era, which is that every judge now has the absolute interest in hiding their opinions for as long as possible so they don't get Borked.
00:29:00.000 Judge Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Reagan.
00:29:04.000 We're good to go.
00:29:20.000 None of these judges are going to have to answer straight the question as to whether they would overturn Roe v. Wade because no judge has had to answer that question in the last 25 years.
00:29:27.000 So do I think that this is going to end up with Murkowski and Collins holding up a Trump nominee?
00:29:31.000 I don't.
00:29:33.000 I really don't, which is a good thing.
00:29:34.000 So Trump ought to go for Bro.
00:29:35.000 Trump ought to go for the most
00:29:38.000 The most originalist, textualist judge you can find.
00:29:42.000 You should go for the home run, because there's no excuse for not to get a home run out of all this.
00:29:47.000 Okay, so, in just a second we're going to jump into the mailbag, but before that, you're going to have to go over to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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00:30:04.000 So Matt Walsh does a show.
00:30:04.000 If you didn't know about that,
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00:31:02.000 Alrighty, so let's do some mailbag, because it's been a long week.
00:31:05.000 Let's take a little bit of time with the mailbag this week.
00:31:07.000 So if you got live questions, now's the time to send them in.
00:31:10.000 John writes, Hi Ben, I was wondering if since the First Amendment dictates that Congress cannot make a law restricting the freedom of expression, could the left make such laws such as hate speech, religious expression restrictions at the state level and have them be upheld by the Supreme Court?
00:31:21.000 P.S.
00:31:21.000 I wish we could vote for Supreme Court justices.
00:31:23.000 You'd be my top choice.
00:31:24.000 Thanks, love the show and your work, John.
00:31:26.000 Okay, so the First Amendment,
00:31:29.000 So, there are two questions here.
00:31:31.000 One is, does the First Amendment, as it is currently constituted, does it stop hate speech laws, religious expression restrictions, etc.?
00:31:39.000 The answer there is yes, unless the left takes hold of the court and uses the court as a club to beat to death the First Amendment like a horse in the street.
00:31:47.000 Hate speech laws are unconstitutional because there's no actual definition of hate speech.
00:31:51.000 There are a bunch of people on the left who think that my show every day is hate speech.
00:31:53.000 It is not, but they're idiots and they think that, and so they could try to outlaw my speech.
00:31:58.000 In the state of California, presumably they would try to outlaw it if I say on the show that a man is a man and a woman is a woman and a man can't become a woman, then they would try to outlaw that.
00:32:05.000 Hey, that would be a violation of the First Amendment.
00:32:07.000 Now, you're asking about what's called incorporation doctrine.
00:32:09.000 So incorporation doctrine is the idea that the First Amendment really should have applied only to the federal government.
00:32:13.000 Clearly, that's true.
00:32:14.000 This is why we have state constitutions, not just a federal constitution.
00:32:17.000 The state of California has its own constitution.
00:32:19.000 Texas has its own constitution.
00:32:21.000 Every state has its own constitution that have sort of mirror provisions with regard to the First Amendment protecting, you know, the state version of the First Amendment.
00:32:29.000 Originally, the federal constitution did not protect free speech rights at the state level.
00:32:33.000 So the state actually could
00:32:35.000 Quash First Amendment rights at the state level, and the federal government would have nothing to say about it.
00:32:40.000 Then there was something called the Incorporation Doctrine.
00:32:43.000 The Incorporation Doctrine really came about in the early 20th century when people began trying to use the 14th Amendment, which applies to the states, to read the First Amendment into law.
00:32:52.000 So the 14th Amendment suggests that everyone at the state level, not just the federal level, everyone at the state level, is guaranteed due process and equal protection of the laws.
00:33:02.000 And the Supreme Court basically said, well,
00:33:04.000 We're also going to say the due process requires that your First Amendment rights be respected.
00:33:07.000 Now, I don't think that incorporation doctrine actually is legally justifiable, even if I like the outcome on a lot of it, but it has been incorporated.
00:33:15.000 So the First Amendment is incorporated.
00:33:16.000 The Second Amendment has been incorporated.
00:33:17.000 All of the First Amendments have been incorporated into state constitutions, essentially, or into state law via the so-called incorporation doctrine.
00:33:25.000 Brian says, Hi Ben, I was born and raised in the Midwest.
00:33:26.000 I'm visiting California for the first time.
00:33:28.000 My perception has always been that California is a bastion of liberal and hippie ideals.
00:33:32.000 Having been here, those stereotypes have been confirmed.
00:33:34.000 From the feces on the streets, to the rampant homeless, to the trash strewn streets, the liberal ideal is everywhere.
00:33:39.000 My question is, how did California turn from a state created by the pioneer spirit, the state that gave us Ronald Reagan, to this?
00:33:44.000 Thanks, and Shapiro for Supreme Court.
00:33:46.000 Well, I'm glad that the groundswell for me for Supreme Court has been so successful.
00:33:50.000 If it doesn't work out, then I'll just be here with you every day crying myself to sleep.
00:33:53.000 But the reality is that
00:33:56.000 California started down this sort of path in the 1990s.
00:34:00.000 The last kind of gasp of California conservatism was Pete Wilson.
00:34:05.000 And then after Pete Wilson, we got Gray Davis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
00:34:09.000 And there had been a significant move in the California legislature to the left over the previous decades anyway.
00:34:16.000 California had always been a little more liberal than the rest of the country, I would say, although for a while it had sort of a conservative streak with regard to the governors that it elected.
00:34:24.000 That ended in the 1990s.
00:34:25.000 There's a solid case to be made that as the demographics in California shifted, so too did the electoral politics.
00:34:30.000 That as the state became more immigrant-based, that a lot of those new immigrants were voting Democrat more often, and that changed the constituency in California pretty massively.
00:34:42.000 I think that case is pretty good.
00:34:43.000 I don't think it's dispositive.
00:34:45.000 Texas, for example, has had a lot of immigrants as well.
00:34:47.000 The Hispanic population in Texas has grown massively.
00:34:49.000 Texas remains a very red state.
00:34:51.000 But California is also extremely urban in the sense that most of the population lives in like two or three big cities, right?
00:34:58.000 Most of the population lives in L.A.
00:35:00.000 or San Francisco, and big cities tend to
00:35:03.000 Well, the general traditional interpretation of the Second Amendment is very similar to the interpretation of the First Amendment, which is the First Amendment which guarantees freedom of speech and says that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.
00:35:25.000 That does not apply to defamation.
00:35:26.000 It does not apply to libel.
00:35:28.000 It does not apply to incitement to violence.
00:35:30.000 Virtually every amendment has certain curtailments of the amendment that allow for public policy to be made.
00:35:34.000 The question is, are those public policy curtailments as minimal as humanly possible in order to achieve the public policy that is being pursued?
00:35:41.000 There is no such thing as any right that is untrammeled.
00:35:45.000 Even First Amendment rights, right?
00:35:47.000 Freedom of religion is not untrammeled, given the fact that if you pass a neutral, facially neutral statute that has nothing to do with religion, that may not necessarily violate religious rights, even if those religious rights are in fact curtailed by the operation of that law.
00:35:59.000 I don't know enough about that to answer that question.
00:36:00.000 That is extraordinarily specific.
00:36:02.000 So I will check that out and get back to you, Justin.
00:36:03.000 Well, the answer is that it is an artificial distinction created by the left
00:36:24.000 The way they've defined, so, the left does this thing, where they say, there's a difference between sex, which is your biological sex, and gender, which is the way that your, sort of, your sex manifests.
00:36:34.000 So, in other words, are you an effeminate man?
00:36:37.000 Well, then maybe you are, your effeminacy is now part of your gender.
00:36:41.000 If you're a woman who likes to wear pants and a butch haircut, then this is some part of your gender.
00:36:45.000 So they create this sort of false distinction, they use the word gender to encompass all of this, but then they do this weird trick where they say gender is sex.
00:36:52.000 So they'll say sex is not gender, but gender is sex.
00:36:54.000 So in other words, gender has nothing to do with your biology, right?
00:36:57.000 You can be a biological male, but your gender can be female because you can be really effeminate and you want to wear dresses and you are a female in your mind, but your sex is male, but your gender is female, right?
00:37:06.000 And this is when you are non-cisnormative, right?
00:37:09.000 You're non-cisgender.
00:37:10.000 The gender that you express is not the sex that you were born with or the gender you were assigned at birth, as they like to put it.
00:37:17.000 And then they will say, but it's biological.
00:37:18.000 This was built in.
00:37:19.000 So in other words, sex is not built in, but gender is built in.
00:37:23.000 Which makes no sense at all.
00:37:24.000 And they also like to say that sex and gender are completely disconnected.
00:37:26.000 So there are all these inherent contradictions in the way that the left defines gender.
00:37:30.000 If the left just wanted to say, listen, there's your sex, your biological sex, and then there's how that biological sex manifests in your daily behavior,
00:37:37.000 There's nothing even remotely arguable about that.
00:37:40.000 Of course, that's true.
00:37:41.000 But the attempt is to say that you are a gendered female, but a biological male.
00:37:45.000 And unless you are biologically intersex, there is no basis for this whatsoever.
00:37:49.000 There's no basis for this.
00:37:51.000 Because the left's argument is that if I think of myself as a female, I am a female.
00:37:54.000 They're not saying that if I did a brain scan and it turned out that my brain worked like a female, then I'm a female.
00:37:58.000 They're saying that the way that that manifests in my behavior and my choices and my thinking, that's what makes me female.
00:38:03.000 And that cannot be sustained on any logical level.
00:38:06.000 Joe says, hey Ben, in my once a week graduate class, the professor's students bashed Trump for about two hours and then we watched Justin Trudeau YouTube videos for another hour.
00:38:14.000 I'm sorry to hear that and I'm sorry for the loss of your brain cells, the late lamented brain cells you used to have.
00:38:18.000 As a former teacher who is conservative, I didn't find it very difficult to stay away from preaching my political agenda.
00:38:22.000 Why do you think the left seems to be guilty of doing this much more regularly and blatantly in the classroom?
00:38:26.000 Thanks.
00:38:27.000 Well, I think the reason is because many people on the left have a very difficult time distinguishing between their opinion and fact.
00:38:33.000 I think this holds true across political boundaries.
00:38:35.000 I think there are people on the right who have this trouble, too.
00:38:37.000 But when you live in an echo chamber like the educational system is, then you start to think that everything that you think about life is actually a fact because all your friends believe the same thing.
00:38:46.000 This is why you'll hear people say things like, Trump is a Nazi.
00:38:49.000 That's just a fact.
00:38:49.000 You can't argue with that.
00:38:50.000 Well, no, that's an opinion, and I certainly can argue with that.
00:38:55.000 There are certain things that are facts.
00:38:56.000 2 plus 2 equals 4.
00:38:57.000 This is a fact.
00:38:58.000 It is not a fact that Trump is a Nazi.
00:38:59.000 That is an opinion and a wrong opinion in my belief of that.
00:39:02.000 So I think that echo chambers tend to create a belief that your opinion is a reflection of reality rather than just a subjective interpretation of reality.
00:39:12.000 Greg says, Hey Ben, if Mike Lee were nominated for Supreme Court,
00:39:16.000 Well, that's actually really unclear.
00:39:24.000 So, theoretically, he could recuse himself, but I'm not sure that he actually has to recuse himself.
00:39:28.000 So, he theoretically could vote for himself.
00:39:30.000 Even if he were to recuse himself, that slot would immediately be filled by the governor of Utah, who's a Republican.
00:39:34.000 So, he'd have a Republican senator in there voting for it.
00:39:37.000 Plus, the Republicans have 50 votes.
00:39:39.000 They would gain another couple of votes from the Democrats.
00:39:41.000 I think Mike Lee would be easily confirmed.
00:39:42.000 I don't think there's a lot of question about that.
00:39:44.000 Jeremy says, Hey Ben, since Roe v. Wade is now front and center in the news, would you please explain the legal argument of the majority opinion in the ruling and what about it you think is so flawed?
00:39:51.000 Thanks so much.
00:39:52.000 Huge fan.
00:39:52.000 Love the show.
00:39:53.000 OK, so we can go through Roe v. Wade in a little bit of detail here.
00:39:56.000 Let me actually bring up the case.
00:39:57.000 So Roe v. Wade.
00:40:00.000 It was a case in which the Supreme Court decided that abortions had to be legalized across the nation.
00:40:05.000 The case was Roe, who later, it turns out, became a pro-life person, sought to terminate her pregnancy by abortion.
00:40:10.000 This is according to Oyez.org, which is a really good place to summarize these cases.
00:40:14.000 Texas law prohibited abortion except to save the pregnant woman's life.
00:40:17.000 After granting cert, certiorari, the court heard arguments twice.
00:40:20.000 The first time, Roe's attorney could not locate the constitutional hook of her argument for Justice Potter Stewart.
00:40:24.000 Her opponent, Jay Floyd, misfired from the start.
00:40:26.000 Weddington sharpened her constitutional argument in the second round.
00:40:29.000 Her new opponent came under strong questioning from Justice Potter Stewart and Thurgood Marshall.
00:40:33.000 The court held that a woman's right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy, recognizing Griswold v. Connecticut protected by the 14th Amendment.
00:40:39.000 So, as I pointed out yesterday, I said, emanations from Penumbra.
00:40:43.000 And somebody said, right, that's from Griswold v. Connecticut.
00:40:45.000 That's an earlier case.
00:40:46.000 Griswold v. Connecticut was a case in the 1960s in which the court decided that the—it may have been 1958—in which the court decided
00:40:54.000 That there was a right to contraceptives for single people.
00:40:58.000 So, I believe it was Vermont, or Connecticut, rather.
00:41:01.000 It was Griswold v. Connecticut.
00:41:02.000 It was Connecticut decided that there's a law in the books that single people could not obtain contraceptives.
00:41:07.000 And the court said, there's a right to privacy that allows you to buy contraceptives.
00:41:10.000 Now, where in the Constitution does it say you have a right to buy contraceptives regardless of your marital status?
00:41:15.000 It doesn't, right?
00:41:16.000 None of that is there.
00:41:17.000 But they say there are emanations from penumbras.
00:41:19.000 What they meant was that if you look at the Fourth Amendment search and seizure provisions,
00:41:24.000 And you sort of look at them with squinty eyes, kind of, like a magic eye puzzle, then you can get out of the prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure that there's a right to privacy.
00:41:34.000 And then from that generalized right to privacy, we can then read into that that there is a right for you to buy a contraceptive if you're a single person.
00:41:41.000 Now, I think that decision is wrongly decided.
00:41:43.000 And by the way, I think single people should certainly be able to buy contraceptives, but this is why I think legislatures are not judges and judges are not legislatures.
00:41:49.000 With that said, you know, the stupidity of the idea that the Constitution mandates that is evident.
00:41:55.000 There is no right to privacy, generalized right to privacy, in the Constitution.
00:41:58.000 There are several different aspects of what you could term a right to privacy.
00:42:01.000 The right against unreasonable search and seizure, the right to free speech, right?
00:42:04.000 There are certain things that you could look at the Constitution and say, that has to do with privacy, but there's no generalized right to privacy you can then take and implement.
00:42:12.000 And that certainly would not apply to a rather non-private decision like having an abortion with the use of a medical provider.
00:42:18.000 Right.
00:42:19.000 It's so funny when it comes to medical provision of services, the left believes that is completely public act.
00:42:24.000 Right.
00:42:24.000 The left believes that the government should pay for that.
00:42:27.000 Then my dealings with my doctor should be subject to government regulation every single way, except when it comes to abortion, in which case that is completely private.
00:42:34.000 You have no business saying anything about it.
00:42:35.000 So Roe v. Wade was decided on right to privacy grounds.
00:42:38.000 And then they made a secondary argument in Roe v. Wade about the issue of viability, the viability of the fetus.
00:42:44.000 And so they said that laws in the third trimester might be okay, because if you have laws in the third trimester, then you're talking about the viability of the fetus.
00:42:51.000 Maybe the fetus can survive on its own, so maybe the fetus has some rights.
00:42:54.000 They basically fudged the entire decision.
00:42:56.000 It's one of the worst constitutional decisions in American history.
00:42:59.000 Just from a purely legal perspective, it's incredibly, incredibly stupid.
00:43:02.000 So there is your brief summary of Roe v. Wade.
00:43:04.000 Anybody who says Roe v. Wade is legally justifiable has never read the case.
00:43:07.000 It's an insane case.
00:43:08.000 Or they're so ideologically driven that they believe that anything is justifiable so long as they reach the conclusion they want.
00:43:14.000 Elise says,
00:43:21.000 Has the thug life also chosen her?
00:43:23.000 I would say that the thug life chooses her a little less frequently than the thug life chooses me.
00:43:27.000 But the thug life lives within her, just as the doctrine lives within Amy Barrett, who I hope President Trump nominates for the Supreme Court.
00:43:35.000 The thug life lives within my wife.
00:43:36.000 It comes out at random times.
00:43:37.000 My wife is legitimately the nicest person ever.
00:43:40.000 Like anyone in the office who's met her knows, she's an extraordinarily nice human being.
00:43:43.000 And it is so funny because every so often, it's usually once every couple of years, she will say something that is so cutting
00:43:51.000 And I'll look at her and we'll both just start laughing because it's so out of character.
00:43:53.000 It's really, really funny.
00:43:55.000 I had to marry a nice person.
00:43:56.000 Otherwise, our kids would have been just the worst.
00:43:58.000 So, Jeremy says, let's see, we did Jeremy already.
00:44:00.000 Spencer says, which Supreme Court cases, in your opinion, contributed most to the expansion of federal power beyond the constraints defined in the Constitution?
00:44:08.000 Furthermore, aside from the rulings, you obviously violated the civil rights minorities, Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu.
00:44:12.000 Which cases would you rank as the worst three in Supreme Court history?
00:44:16.000 Wow.
00:44:16.000 Okay, so there have been a lot of bad decisions in Supreme Court history.
00:44:20.000 As I mentioned, Dred Scott, Plessy, Korematsu.
00:44:22.000 I would say Wickard v. Filburn is one of the worst cases in Supreme Court history.
00:44:26.000 That is a case in which a guy was growing grain for his own consumption in 1940s America under FDR.
00:44:33.000 And FDR had passed all of these new laws that attempted to restrict the amount of grain that you could actually grow because he was trying to artificially boost the price of grain on behalf of farmers.
00:44:43.000 And this person said, wait a second.
00:44:44.000 Like, I'm not, in Wickard v. Filburn, the farmer said, I'm not even growing this for interstate shipment, right?
00:44:50.000 I'm not shipping this across state lines.
00:44:52.000 What does the federal government have to do with me growing grain for my own consumption, right?
00:44:56.000 Or even growing grain for intrastate commerce, like I'm just trading it inside the state.
00:45:00.000 What does the federal government have to do with that?
00:45:02.000 Wickard v. Filburn said, anything you do that could possibly have an impact on a market is now considered interstate commerce for purposes of federal regulation.
00:45:10.000 What that basically means is anything you do any day has federal implications.
00:45:14.000 Which is an insane, it's an insane standard, right?
00:45:16.000 I mean, that standard basically suggests that you are, uh, every time I flush the toilet, that has an impact on the water prices in the state of California.
00:45:24.000 And that water price in the state of California has an impact on federal water regulation.
00:45:28.000 And therefore, the federal government has the right to regulate how I flush my toilet.
00:45:32.000 Legitimately, this is what the case was in Wickard v. Filburn.
00:45:35.000 The Commerce Clause, which was designed to constrain the federal government, has instead been read to allow the federal government to run roughshod over everybody's rights as far as humanly possible.
00:45:43.000 So Wickard v. Filburn is an awful, awful case.
00:45:46.000 Other cases that are really bad, there's a case called Skinner v. Oklahoma that is famously awful.
00:45:52.000 Skinner v. Oklahoma, if I'm not mistaking, the case was decided by, was it Oliver Wendell Holmes?
00:46:01.000 I'm trying to remember who actually wrote the decision in this.
00:46:19.000 The Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough Decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
00:46:23.000 I'm trying to remember the name of the case.
00:46:24.000 I don't want to screw it up.
00:46:26.000 That would be Buck v. Bell.
00:46:27.000 So Buck v. Bell, 1927, is the one that I'm thinking of that's really bad.
00:46:30.000 Not Skinner v. Oklahoma.
00:46:31.000 Buck v. Bell was a decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
00:46:34.000 Oliver Wendell Holmes was a proponent of eugenics.
00:46:36.000 And the case basically said that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the mentally disabled for the protection and health of the state did not violate the Constitution of the United States.
00:46:47.000 That's an insane decision.
00:46:48.000 It's a fully crazy decision.
00:46:50.000 A decision so bad, the Nazis actually cited it at the Nuremberg trials to show that they were not outside the mainstream of Western political thought when they started using sterilization against their political opponents.
00:47:01.000 So Buck vs. Bell would be up there.
00:47:02.000 So I've done Wickard, Buck vs. Bell, and I mentioned Roe already.
00:47:07.000 So Roe, I think, is obviously
00:47:10.000 If it's not the worst Supreme Court decision in American history, it's top two.
00:47:13.000 It's either Dred Scott or Roe.
00:47:15.000 I was hoping that you could explain this.
00:47:17.000 Thanks.
00:47:27.000 A couple of things about slavery in the Bible.
00:47:29.000 So slavery in the Bible is not mandatory, right?
00:47:31.000 There's nothing in the Bible that says you have to own slaves.
00:47:33.000 In fact, the Bible has pretty strict restrictions on how slavery is supposed to operate.
00:47:37.000 If you own somebody who is sold into slavery and they are a fellow Jew, right, then the way that it works in the Bible is that you must release them after seven years.
00:47:47.000 And if they don't want to be released, then you actually have to pierce their ear with an awl, because the idea is that they should want to be released.
00:47:52.000 They should want to be a free person.
00:47:54.000 Also, the
00:47:56.000 Restrictions on slavery in the Bible suggest that you have to treat your slaves with an extraordinary amount of care and decency.
00:48:04.000 Now, all of that said, is slavery in the Bible a wonderful thing?
00:48:06.000 No.
00:48:07.000 But the question is, and this is a general question about the Bible, obviously, is what was designed for the time and what is designed for now?
00:48:13.000 And it's pretty clear in the Bible that what the Bible is trying to do, because it's speaking to a particular group of people at a particular time and place, it is trying to curb slavery.
00:48:21.000 It's moving in the direction of curbing slavery, just as the Constitution of the United States
00:48:25.000 The Bible has provisions outlawing the importation of slaves after 1808, and that is a move away from slavery, not a move towards slavery.
00:48:33.000 The Bible is trying to move people away from slavery and has heavy restrictions on how slaves are to be handled and how they are to be taken.
00:48:39.000 And again, slavery is universal in the world at that time.
00:48:41.000 It is not that it is a thing that only exists under the Bible.
00:48:45.000 It is something that is literally universal.
00:48:46.000 So when you're talking about something that is literally universal throughout all of human history and has only recently changed,
00:48:51.000 Then you have to ask yourself, was this document attempting to move us away from slavery, or was it attempting to enshrine slavery?
00:48:56.000 There's a reason that all of the abolitionists use the Bible as the impetus for their anti-slavery zeal.
00:49:02.000 And that goes all the way up to and including John Brown, who actually used the Bible as an excuse to go and kill slave owners.
00:49:07.000 So the idea that the Bible is a pro-slavery document, I think, is a wild misread of the Bible.
00:49:12.000 As to the idea that
00:49:13.000 We're good to go!
00:49:29.000 Right.
00:49:29.000 She's cursed with the idea that he's cursed with the idea that he's going to have to till the land.
00:49:33.000 And then it's not that Eve has to submit herself to Adam.
00:49:35.000 The idea is that the curse is that he that Adam is going to lord it over her and that she is going to long for him nonetheless.
00:49:42.000 That's a description.
00:49:43.000 That is not normative.
00:49:43.000 It's not an order that Eve has to become Adam's slave.
00:49:46.000 Right.
00:49:46.000 That she is that he is supposed to be her master.
00:49:48.000 Read the text.
00:49:49.000 What the text actually says is that your curse is that he will lord it over you.
00:49:52.000 It's a descriptive thing.
00:49:53.000 The description is that men are going to treat you like crap and you're still going to want to be with them.
00:49:58.000 Which seems to be
00:49:59.000 Fairly accurate as to how men have acted for most of human history.
00:50:02.000 So, you know, the state of absolute equality that existed in the Edenic pre-Exilic period was ended with the Fall.
00:50:11.000 And basically what the Bible is saying is that your curse is that this is the way the world is, and it is your job to try and get back into Eden, right?
00:50:17.000 It's your job to try and make your life better.
00:50:20.000 It's men's job not to treat women that way, and it's women's job to be better human beings as well.
00:50:26.000 So I just, I think, again, that's a deliberate misreading of the Bible.
00:50:29.000 Okay, so that brings us to the end of the mailbag.
00:50:32.000 So let's get to a quick thing that I like and then some things that I hate.
00:50:36.000 Alrighty, so the thing that I like today is a book by Antonin Scalia.
00:50:40.000 If you are into constitutional jurisprudence, then one of the classics in the field is Justice Scalia's A Matter of Interpretation, Federal Courts and the Law.
00:50:48.000 It describes his judicial philosophy.
00:50:50.000 I would say that my only quibble with Justice Scalia is that Justice Scalia was a little too attached to stare decisis.
00:50:56.000 I don't like stare decisis, the idea that the case has been decided precedent.
00:50:59.000 I don't think the precedent ought to rule because I think there have been a lot of bad precedents.
00:51:01.000 I just mentioned a couple of them.
00:51:03.000 I think Buck v. Bell was a bad precedent overturned by Skinner v. Oklahoma.
00:51:07.000 And that is a worthwhile way to... Bottom line is, if a decision is bad, it's bad.
00:51:12.000 But Justice Scalia, obviously one of the great minds ever to sit on the court, certainly one of the best writers ever to sit on the court, in his book, A Matter of Interpretation, is a really good description of how it was that he thought.
00:51:21.000 So go check it out.
00:51:22.000 Antonin Scalia's book, A Matter of Interpretation.
00:51:24.000 Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:51:30.000 So you'll recall there's a guy named Michael Bennett.
00:51:32.000 Michael Bennett plays for the Seattle Seahawks, and he levied a bunch of accusations of racism against the Las Vegas police.
00:51:41.000 And it turns out that he was not telling the truth about this.
00:51:45.000 So Michael Bennett suggested that the police had attacked him for no reason in Las Vegas just because he was black.
00:51:52.000 What actually happened is the police received a report of an active shooter and Michael Bennett started crouching and then hiding behind a slot machine.
00:52:00.000 He ran to hide behind a slot machine.
00:52:02.000 And when officers took note, he jumped up and took off at a full sprint and failed to listen to officer commands to stop.
00:52:08.000 He said this was all because of racism.
00:52:10.000 And now he's trying to lecture President Trump about racism.
00:52:13.000 If Trump is really wanting to listen and to, you know, find out why we're taking a knee, that would be something that I'd be down to do.
00:52:19.000 If it's an opportunity to change the way that America is or change my communities, I'm always going to take those opportunities to express my knees and express the passion of other people.
00:52:29.000 OK, so listen, I'm fine with people talking about racism.
00:52:32.000 I'm fine with people talking to President Trump about racism.
00:52:34.000 I'm fine if Trump wants to talk with people about racism.
00:52:37.000 But using people who have lied about police officers as the spokespeople for the anti-racism movement seems deeply counterproductive.
00:52:43.000 That is not how we are going to reach any sort of consensus in the country.
00:52:46.000 There are better spokespeople for the anti-racism cause than people who fib about police officers for political gain.
00:52:52.000 OK, well, we'll be back here next week.
00:52:53.000 We may have a new Supreme Court justice nominee on our hands by that point.
00:52:57.000 So keep an eye out for that.
00:52:58.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.
00:52:58.000 This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
00:53:03.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Senya Villareal, executive producer Jeremy Boring, senior producer Jonathan Hay.
00:53:09.000 Our supervising producer is Mathis Glover, and our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
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00:53:15.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Carmina.
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00:53:18.000 The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire Ford Publishing production.
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