Ben Shapiro Invades Canada! | UBC Free Speech Club Talk

Just a note on how things are gonna be played out tonight Ben will be doing a speech which will be followed by Q and A. The Q and A is available for everyone in the house. But priority will be given to the orchestra the parterre then the following balconies. With that being said. If you are someone who disagrees with Ben or wants to challenge him we will allow you to jump the line. That's how benevolent we are. So. I personally guarantee if you have a gripe with him you're going to get your chance. Finally I just want to say a few words about our organization and what we went through to make this happen. The UBC free speech Club is a nonpartisan organization and committed to cultivating an open dialogue on campus where arguments are made with reason rather than rhetoric and personal attack. We cherish a diversity of opinions and seek to promote an open debate stage where political correctness no longer holds sway. This mantra however is not loved by all. There are a few groups at our school who don't understand it. They don't understand why there needs to be a free speech club. They think "Well nobody wants to go see a conservative speaker" And to that I say this. The second we announced this event. We had. Radicals trying to shut it down. We had. Our Posters vandalized, smeared with anti-Semitic remarks and we had the AMS which is our own student union a union which prides itself on unity and goodwill. Officially come out against this event. It's a good thing we aren't part of the Union. So to those who say there is no need for a free speech club look at the past five months. And to those who say that nobody cares about free speech on campus look around. It's a full house. And. On that note. And on that note it is my great honor to introduce Ben Shapiro! Thank you so much. love you too. It's wonderful to be here. Really excited to be here. Thanks for spending your Halloween with me here. I thought of dressing up tonight as. Elizabeth Warren but then. I realized that I didn't want it culturally appropriate her heritage. I'm just not white enough. And then I thought maybe I'd dress up as a Canadian. I'm not nice enough for that. Thank you. That's nice of you. I want to begin by thanking the UBC free speech club and the university for what it's worth for making tonight possible. I also want to thank security for ensuring that everyone can hear different opinions in a safe environment. No thanks however to some folks on the left who insist that the university should have canceled the speech in particular. No thanks to the UBC AMS. For apparently very concerned that my talk will quote Stoke intolerance and discrimination based on race gender identity and sexual orientation. They say that they fear that some students at UBC will feel threatened and targeted by my message. And then they follow that up by saying that they denounce all forms of violence and marginalization on campus presumably not including marginalization of a mainstream conservative worldview. They're okay with that sort of marginalization. I have never. It should be noted never called for incivility. I have never called for violence but that doesn't stop anybody from accusing conservatives of doing exactly that. Stating facts stating conservative opinions that is not threatening. And if you believe that it is threatening. I have two words for you. Grow up. This is still a somewhat free society in which we all get to exchange viewpoints without running to the fainting couches. Now I agree with the AMS that folks who wish to peacefully protest should do so be even better if they would come inside and ask questions. As you heard right beforehand we have a long Q and A session. It's my favorite part of the evening and I always urge folks who disagree to go right to the front of the lines we can actually have some civil nice conversation discussion about issues that matter but instead the AMS is preemptively referring people to places like the sexual assault support center. There are a lot of black marks on my resumé probably. But I do have a fairly clean record when it comes to sexually assaulting people. When i say fairly clean. I mean like spotless record when it comes to sexually assaulting people. So I don't think anyone's gonna need to go to the Sexual Assault Support Center tonight. They say that people should go to speak easy which I guess is for peer support and guidance in a safe space. I've nonjudgment I admit that this is not going to be a safe space in the sense that they mean it since they mean safe from having your feelings hurt. And I believe that safety exists in a free country when you are allowed to express your opinion. There are also directing folks to safe walk which is a transportation service accompanying students walking after dark. So I don't know they think I'm doing after this. This might be an overreaction but. No thanks also to Dr. Charles Menzies who's an anthropology professor and Board of Governors representative who said it was a bad choice to bring me to campus and mentioned the university's policy three in objecting to my potential speech policy three apparently implements the B.C. Human Rights Code which is as foolish and overbroad a piece of legislation as it has been promulgated in a purportedly free society. For folks who don't know these human rights code states a person must not publish issue or display or cause to be published issued or displayed any statement publication notice signs symbol emblem or other representation that indicates discrimination or an intention to discriminate against a person or a group or class of persons or is likely to expose a person or a group or class of persons to hatred or contempt because of race color ancestry place of origin religion marital status family status physical or mental disability sex sexual orientation gender identity or expression or age of the person or that group or class of persons. No one is in favor of hateful speech but this policy simply defines as hateful anything which is quote unquote likely to expose people to hatred and contempt which is utterly subjective. Now they say that what they really mean is anything that would be a reasonable person would assess as likely to expose people to hatred or contempt. Unfortunately the people who are going to interpret that law are all members of the political left who will determine that it is reasonably likely that any sort of conservative speech may in fact be likely to provoke bad action on the part of people who agree with the conservative. This is why in the United States which I'm an American so I get to say what I believe is a superior country to your own. Making friends and influencing people everywhere I go. In the United States we don't have such laws because such laws are violative of basic precepts of the first amendment free speech precepts. We understand there's such thing as hateful speech in the United States but we also understand that the definition of something like hate speech is endlessly malleable and can be used by people in power to simply quash people with whom they disagree. In fact the UBC policy goes further than the B.C. Human Rights Code it actually bans activities harmful to a respectful environment which is an amazing statement. These range from expressions of disrespect such as rudeness and gossip. Have they ever been on a college campus? To bullying or harassment then they define harassment as intentional or unintentional which includes ostracism or exclusion of a person that undermines an individual's self-esteem. It must never undermine anyone's self-esteem deeply imperative. Again this is rather overbroad. Speech codes do not end well for freedom of speech as a general rule and a free people are going to have to grow a thicker skin. This doesn't mean you should be uncivil. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be a virtuous person. But when you start setting standards like no one must be offended no one's self-esteem must be damaged. You are in for a hell of a ride. So Tonight, here is my plan. I'm gonna say a bunch of things that I think are simply facts and then i'm gonna state some conservative opinions and we'll see if I get arrested. So here we go. You're ready? This is a fact. There are two count them two sexes two of them not three. Not three not nine not infinite not attack helicopter two. I know horrifying. Women are women. Men are men. Men cannot become women because we don't live in a magical land in which men can become women or vice versa. Men who believe they are women are not biological women. Transgender women are not women. They are biological men with a mental disorder. There are two sexes. People with a Y chromosome are almost universally male people without a Y chromosome are almost universally female. The only reason I say almost is because there do exist tiny variations in the population with gender disorders sexual developmental disorders. These folks are intersex. They may have primary or secondary sexual characteristics that do not match the presence of a Y chromosome. These are called genetic abnormalities and this does not mean that there is a third phantom sex that exists somewhere out there. Why. Because the promulgation of our entire species is based on sexual dymorphism The fact that folks are willing to completely subsume biology under the rubric of political correctness is complete idiocy and anti. Objective truth. And indeed it turns out the transgender advocates claim that no evidence must actually be shown of intersex genetics. That's just a red herring when they say that folks are transgender. They don't mean the person's intersex they mean that a person who is fully biologically male believes that he is female is actually a female in order to achieve this particularly nonsensical combination both in terms of biology and logic. Transgender civil rights advocates create a new category from sex in this thing called gender gender. In this view about maleness or femaleness that's an entirely subjective category not linked to biology it's a social construct it's not linked in any way to biology. So a couple of problems with this right off the bat just in terms of internal logic. First off stereotyping OK so if you believe that there is a gendered female and a gendered male you're assuming there are stereotypes that describe femininity and masculinity feminists would argue with that. Second this actually presumes that there are only two genders maleness and femaleness. And then there are mixes of those various characteristics. So if you believe that there are actually a bunch of different genders or the gender exist on a spectrum then you have to explain why there are eighty nine genders and not seven point one billion genders because it turns out that every human being on planet Earth all of them have a different combination of feminine and masculine characteristics. So if gender is just more feminine or masculine characteristic then you as an individual have your own individual gender which means that the term gender has no meaning. It's just called being a human most obviously separating maleness or femaleness from genetic influence is scientifically illiterate. To say that a biological male is a gendered female is a basic contradiction in terms a biological male may have feminine characteristics. He is still a biological male. We all know many men who are feminine. We all know many many women are masculine. Does not mean that the woman is a man or that the man is a woman. That's just silly talk. Is Transgenderism a condition from birth that is genetically encoded and unchangeable? Well the argument would be yes people are born like this. They've lived like this all their lives for a certain subset of the population. I'm sure that this condition is in fact genetic and unchanging. But let's remember that 80 percent of all children who supposedly have gender confusion grow out of it by the time they hit teenage years Is transgenderism a mental disorder? Of course it is and it was defined as a mental disorder by the DSM until about four years ago when politically correct doctors decided to switch the definition of mental disorder itself. So originally a mental disorder was just anything that was obviously at odds with reality. And then they switched it to be anything at odds with reality that also causes depression. So in other words if you are a schizophrenic but it doesn't cause you some sort of difficulty in your everyday life you are not mentally ill. It's difficulty in your everyday life that is that we link to mental illness. Otherwise you can believe that your head is a toaster and if you're living a happy fine life then everything is hunky dory and you don't have mental disorder. Transgenderism gender identity disorder gender dysphoria. This is a form of body dysmorphia just like anorexia or body identity integrity disorder when you're anorexic you are not fat you believe you are fat. This does not mean you're a fat person. This means you are an anorexic your body identity integrity disorder you have two arms you believe that you're a one armed person in the body of a two armed person. This does not mean you are actually a one armed person in the body of a two armed person. It means that you have a mental disorder. Now the reason that I stress all of this is not to be mean. It is not is to be straight in our diagnosis. We would never treat any other disorder this way. My grandfather suffered from schizophrenia and bi polarity he was treated with lithium. If society simply decided you know what Nate the radio is talking to you the curtains are trying to strangle you. He would have been worse off. Not only that when an entire society decides it is going to redefine basic terminology about biological sex in order to make room for the sensitivity of a people of certain numbers of people who are suffering. You are doing great damage to the fundamental distinctions that lay at the root of society plus you're confusing kids who don't actually get to teach my four and a half year old daughter that she can be a boy. OK. Let's move on to some other facts that will probably get me arrested Ok. Fact number two radical Islamic theology is not a fringe proposition. A large number of Muslims across the world believe what we in the West would consider to be radical propositions about government morality and individual rights. This is not a rip on Islam as a religion. I am not purporting to be an expert on Islam as a religion. I would not purport to be an expert on Christianity is religion. I have no interest in browsing Islamic texts or Christian texts or any other religious texts for evidence of violence intent. I am much more focused on how people think and how people act. So let's begin with a couple of definitional facts. If Christians in the United States or Canada wanted to be governed by Christian theological law we would call them theocrats and radicals. If Muslims want to be governed by Sharia law this would make them fundamentalists and radicals. Here are the percentages of Muslims who want their country to be officially governed by Sharia law across the world according to Pew Global Research Russia. 42 percent. Indonesia 72 percent. Afghanistan. 99 percent. Pakistan 84 percent Bangladesh 82 percent. Iraq 91 percent. Palestinian territories 89 percent. Egypt 74 percent Jordan 71 percent. Niger 86 percent. Nigeria 71 percent. Those are all groups of people who believe that Islamic law should govern their country. How do I know that's radical because again if you applied the same rule to Christians or Jews you would believe that it was radical for a Christian or a Jew to believe that. Let's take an even better indicator. Let's take a let's take an indicator that I think we can all agree is even more radical than just governance of Sharia law. How about support for ISIS. If you support ISIS. I think we can all fairly agree. You're probably radical here are the percentage of folks in various territories and countries who say they don't know whether they're favorable toward ISIS or favorable toward ISIS. By the way if you say you don't know whether your favorable toward ISIS your favorable toward ISIS. The Palestinian territories 16 percent Indonesia 22 percent Turkey 27 percent Nigeria 34 percent Malaysia 36 percent and Pakistan a whopping 71 percent of people say that they either like ISIS or they don't know about or they don't know which again means you like ISIS. How about support for suicide bombings. The vast majority of Muslims across the world condemn suicide bombings but not in particular areas like the Palestinian territories. According to a 2011 Pew poll only 19 percent of Palestinians said such bombings were never justified. Egypt only 38 percent said such bombings were never justified. Now distinctions must be drawn. Western Muslims are significantly more moderate than their core religionists in other parts of the world. That is just a fact. By every available poll still a 2006 poll in Britain found that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted Sharia law in the United Kingdom. A 2011 poll from Pew found that 19 percent of American Muslims said they were either favorable toward al-Qaeda or they didn't know. Again none of this is meant to suggest that every Muslim is violent. I've said specifically many times in the past three minutes that that is not the case. None of this is to suggest that any Muslim that you know is a member of a radical group that of course is untrue. None of this is to suggest that Islam is a religion is inherently violent. Because I think you can look at a lot of religious texts and see violence there if you wish to see violence there. What this is to say is that to suggest that radical Islam is just a fringe thing affecting only a very small number of people is not true. It is not true and it is anti factual more facts that could get me arrested. Women are not widely discriminated against in Western societies. Women in the United States are not paid 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. That's just a bunch of bullshit. It's not true. Christina Hoff Sommers the factual feminist writes The bottom line is that the 23 cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full time. It does not account for differences in occupations positions education job tenure or hours work per week. When you actually consider all of the relevant factors the wage gap narrows to the point of managing actually when you look at it. Young childless women with the same amount of education in the same professions in America's major cities earn significantly more than men according to a new analysis of two thousand communities by a market research company in one hundred and forty seven out of 150 of the biggest cities in the United States. The median full time salaries of young women are 8 percent higher than those of the guys in their peer group. Now there are a few things that are kind of hilarious about discussions of the gender gap. Some as some of the facts are really inconvenient for feminists who suggest that all of this is due to discrimination. So here are a couple of really really inconvenient facts. First of all societies that work to end the gender gap have actually created a larger gender gap. So particularly this is true in the fields in STEM fields. So societies that are freer for women actually have fewer women by percentage in the STEM fields than societies that are less free for women and less prosperous for women largely because when women are free a lot of them don't want to be in the STEM fields. Women and men have different preferences as to which types of jobs they like to go into. Women tend to like jobs. A lot of other human contact men like to play with things right. Men are just over there like my two and a half year old son they like to bang on electronic toys and shout at people. In the United States. Twenty seven percent of students who took the AP Computer Science exam were female in Algeria. Not exactly known for its pro female policies. Forty one percent of college grads in STEM were female. Across all countries boys had relative strengths in science and math. Girls have relative strengths in reading. Gender equality means that sometimes women make choices feminists don't like. And that undergird the basic reality that men and women are different at some fundamental levels Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker explains differences between the sexes are part of the human condition. This is also true with regard to how women and men perform with regard to math and science. What the studies tend to show is that men and women on average perform nearly identically in math and science. But the bell curves are not equally shaped. The bell curves for men tends to be a lot thinner in the middle and a lot fatter at the end. What that means that means is that men are really bad science or really good at science. Women tend to be on average just as good at science as men. When you get out to the tail end those are skinnier. That means that if you actually look at like the ninety nine percentile performance in math and science or if you look at the one percent performance in math and science a lot more men than women in that particular cohort a couple of other facts. Talk of a campus rape epidemic. This is pure fantasy. This idea that women are everyday walking on campus and are in danger. One in four women will be raped while they're on a college campus. It's just not true. And by the way women if you actually believe that were true What the hell are you doing here? Honest to God if I believe that my sisters in college were gonna be raped I would've gotten them the hell out of there as fast as humanly possible. Professor James Alan Fox of Northeastern University and Richard Miranda Mount Holyoke College points out the estimated 19 percent sexual assault rate among college women is based on a survey a large four year universities which doesn't reflect colleges overall. Also the survey had a large non-response rate with the clear possibility that people who are more victimized were more apt to actually respond. Also a lot of these studies tend to include things that are not actually rape in the statistics they'll say sexual assault or what they actually say in the survey data are things like did a man try to kiss you and you turned away. Where. Frankly I'm shocked that the numbers is 100 percent for women. Other inconvenient facts. When men or anyone else talks about the right to life for unborn children it's not because they're sexist it's because they care about babies. Biological fact is that human life begins at conception. End of story. When human life begins. They can make a lot of excuses to why you think that human life should be snuffed out a particular times in the pregnancy. But you cannot overcome that basic fact that a new human life is created at the point of fertilization that is just a basic biological truth available in any biology textbook for the last hundred years. Everybody knows this and yet we all ignore it in favor of ridiculous moral stupidities like the notion that you get to choose subjectively whether you think that a child is a child or not. Which is the same sort of logic by the way that was used with slaves you get to choose that or black person is a person or not for purposes of holding them as property or what Nazis used to say about Jews. You get to decide whether there's a human or a cockroach for purposes of killing them. You don't get to do that with other human beings. You don't get to do that human life at least face up to what it is that you're talking about and stop using euphemisms when you talk about abortion. More facts. Capitalism does not harm the poor. Capitalism makes. Capitalism makes the poor the richest poor people in the history of humanity by a long long shot. As Pew Research points out looking at the United States the U.S. stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world more than half of Americans 56 percent were high income by the global standard. Another 32 percent were upper middle income. In other words almost nine in 10 Americans had a standard of living those above the global middle income standard. Only 7 percent of people in the United States were middle income. 3 percent were low income. Only 2 percent of Americans 2 percent were poor by global standards. And how about the idea that the rich people in Western societies aren't paying their fair share. Obviously that is untrue. That is particularly untrue in the United States where the highest income quintile is financing 96 percent of all net costs all the talk about the divisions between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. All of this is based on a couple of bad notions. One is that you should be deeply worried about what your neighbor makes. If you're if your neighbor isn't stealing your silverware you have no business caring about what your neighbor makes. It actually violates one of the Ten Commandments are not supposed to do that even God says so You're not supposed to covet your neighbors ass which would be a good lesson for Bill Clinton. Or maybe. To be bipartisan Donald Trump. It is also true that when we talk about the 1 percent and the divisions between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Lots of people move in and out of the 1 percent. It is not a group of people who are born in the 1 percent and stay in the 1 percent. There are times in your life when you will probably be in the upper 1 percent. There are times in your life when you will not be in the upper 1 percent. People tend to get richer as they get older they have more savings as they get older they tend to have more earning power at certain times in their life. There is this weird notion that if you're in the 1 percent you're screwing everyone in the 99 percent. Again no evidence of that and also no evidence that once you get in the 1 percent you stay in the 1 percent there is tremendous economic mobility in capitalist countries also. The root of poverty in the end in free western societies has to do with personal decision making. And now that doesn't mean that where you're born doesn't have some impact on where you end up. Obviously it does. It doesn't mean that it has no impact on the challenges you face in your life. But in a free capitalist society you basically have to do three things in order to succeed to the point where you're not poor anymore. These are very all everyone in this room is capable of these three things. You have to finish high school. You have to get a full time job. You have to wait till you're married to have kids. Those three things you won't be poor. According to the Brookings Institute of American adults who follow these three simple rules only 2 percent are in poverty. Nearly 75 percent have joined the middle class we are all capable of these three things. I mean when people say that societal discrimination prevents you from making good decisions I'm confused how societal discrimination forced you to have sex with that girl and then take off or forced you to have sex with that guy out of wedlock and unprotected. Nobody was there with the gun to your head if you did that that's on you. And that's not societal discrimination the entire world would be better off if we all started. Take a little more personal responsibility about the decisions that we have within our own control. A couple more facts. The vast majority of disparities in the United States are not due to ongoing discrimination they are due to the after effects of historical discrimination and to invidious choices made by individuals. So when you see statistics about in the United States the racial breakdown of people who are in prison for example. That's because there is a differential racial rate of crime that does not mean that you're inherently more likely to commit crime because your skin color is a certain color or because of anything else. It does mean that different people commit crimes at different rates individuals within certain groups commit crimes differently. If we broke down this auditorium into quadrants presumably it would not be an equal number of people who score the same on all the tests they'd actually be disparities in those groups. Disparities does not mean discrimination the Justice Department under Bill Clinton found that black folks in the United States had a lower chance of prosecution than whites in seventy five major American cities as of 1994 as early as 1994 for certain study from Siu NY found that adjusted for the homicide rate in United States white folks are actually one point seven times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of the police. In July 2016 Harvard professor Roland flyer who happens to be black surveyed over a thousand police shootings found black suspects are actually shot less often than white suspects in comparable situations so a lot of the disparities that you see in American society are again caused by folks making bad decisions at differential rates and some of that is due to historical after effect. Some of that is due to yes a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and a lot of that can only be broken out of thanks to personal decision making like don't commit a crime don't have babies out of wedlock finish high school. These are all things that are within people's control and to attribute them to societal failings is to ignore the fact that in a free country your life is under your own control. So here's the conclusion. Virtually everything that I just said there are a lot of facts and a lot of figures there. Virtually all of those things were objective facts. I then drew conclusions from those objective facts. They can argue with the conclusions that I draw. And you can argue with the facts if you can bring a set of competing facts to argue with those facts. That is fine but if you are going to label my viewpoint racist or bigoted if you're going to label conservatism racist or bigoted you're going to label fact inappropriate for a broad audience to hear. Well then you are quashing free debate. You are quashing free speech. This basic Idea is too much for some folks some folks are already so deeply offended they feel no need to actually offer an argument. Instead they just suggest that I'm being offensive that I'm somehow making light of their truth. One of the most invidious phrases in human history. Your truth there is no thing as your truth. There is just that truth and your opinion. We can't have a common conversation without a common basis of fact. And that's why I at least try to show my work here. So here's what I hope for for the rest of the night and for our debates in general that the other side of the aisle shows its work. The other side of the aisle brings its own facts. The other side of the aisle explains why the facts that I've cited are insufficient to support the conclusions that I've made that we argue from common premises that we don't attack each other's character simply over disagreement or suggest that hate speech means that I can't express my opinion if facts offend you tough in a free society you're going to have to hear them because of course facts don't care about your feelings. Thanks so much. You know I actually I'm having on Stephen Harper on the Sunday special next week. I should be. I have to admit that the first time I met Prime Minister Harper I was I went up to Ontario. We were doing Sun news hit back on Sun news a thing for the 2012 election. And so I went I met Prime Minister Harper and when Barack Obama was president and I will admit that I went up to him and I said "So when can you guys invade?" And he said "doesn't that make you a traitor" And I said "Not if you win" Alright Mr. Shapiro We have our first question over here. Hi Ben. Big fan of your work. My name is Fiona. Just a little concerned about what you said regarding people having individual choice which I believe is very important. But I think in today's society I see a lot of men and what they go through is a lot of injustice from the legal system especially in family law because it's very disadvantages for men. So I was wondering would you consider that as a structural issues especially today when you see there are women who make false allegations against men and then the legal system just kind of believe woman. What do you say about that? Sure. I mean whenever there is a violation of due process so the basic philosophy that I espoused that was espoused by the founders of the United States again we should have annexed you guys. But. The basic philosophy that I espouse individual rights given by God protected by limited government and those individual rights extends to due process of law. The fact that we have overturned due process of law in certain areas of the Western canon and instead suggested that the burden of proof lies with the accused rather than with the accuser and that we can simply adjudicate whether somebody is guilty or innocent based on their group identity which is the most nefarious idea of all the idea of social justice is deeply nefarious at least the model of social justice. This idea that I can determine whether somebody is guilty or innocent based on their group identity does the same excuse that folks used to use when they were stringing up black folks Because they're racist and evil. So it's you know it is deeply disturbing to see folks embrace a group identity that that is supposed to substitute for justice. And it's also deeply disturbing when folks decide to railroad somebody based on a lack of evidence specifically because they have more sympathy for one side or the other in a particular debate. You don't get to do that. So would just say that is a structural issue though. Sure. I mean I'm not gonna pretend that every law that's ever been passed in the West is great. I mean there are lots of crappy laws that I hate and I will say that I think there are some structural issues that cut against justice as an individual rights and basic human fairness. Hi Ben I'm feeling the dragon energy in this room. I have a question as a Jewish person as well. I wanted to ask you something that we can relate to one of the questions I have is yesterday today I had a vigil for the Pittsburgh massacre that happened recently which was really sad for me and of course you also felt as well. But I noticed that at the vigil a lot of the Jewish people were speaking up about intersectionality and being compassionate and being nice and that's how we're going to resolve all these issues. And I've noticed that a lot of like young American Jews also kind of abide by this saying and kind of avoid Israel and that kind of topic. So how do we get more Jewish young Americans young Canadians to be interested in Israel and knowing that that's the only way we can defend ourselves. And yeah and one more quick question. If the Democrats win the House in the midterms do you think Trump will be impeached? Well I mean as far as the impeachment question I think they'd be foolish to do it because they don't really have good grounds to do it and so it probably backfire against them in the same way in the same way. That was bad for Republicans when they tried to impeach President Clinton back in 1998 when they did have pretty solid grounds for such impeachment. As far as talking about Israel I think the first step to understanding Israel is to say that not every criticism of Israel or Israeli policy is anti-Semitic but every anti-Semite that you know hate Israel they're not not all squares right and not all rectangles are squares but all squares are rectangles. So the fact is that if you believe that Israel should be held to a different standard than any other nation you're an anti-Semite. If you believe that Israel is the serious problem in the Middle East then you're either ignorant or an anti-Semite. Those are the only two available options. If you believe that Israel deserves the same sort of criticism or more criticism than Iran or Saudi Arabia or Egypt or Turkey or Jordan or Lebanon or Egypt or Sudan or Yemen or any of the countless other countries in the region you don't know what the hell you're talking about as far as Israel's role in protecting Jews. And it does make a difference that the Jews have a country where they know that they will be protected. And also it does mean that the rest of the world cannot necessarily target Jews without those Jews having a safe haven to go to. I mean one of the big problems during World War Two obviously is the Jews literally had no place to go. All the borders were shut to them. That is not true in Europe where Jews have been leaving here pretty rapidly for Israel. So Israel is deeply important to Jews it should remain deeply important to Jews obviously. And by the way and by the way it should Israel should remain important to non Jews because it is a canary in the coal mine in the fight against Islamic extremism. It's the only democracy in the region it's the only true ally that we have in the region. Can I follow up really quick too?. Just like I asked like as well like how do we get more young American Jews and young Canadian Jews energized about Israel? Well I mean I think there's a decline. Well I think that to be frank the the care about Israel is very much connected to a certain level of religious observance. I mean this is just what the polls tend to show the more religious you get the more you tend to care about the state of Israel and the more irreligious you get the more you treat Israel is most secular leftists would. And so if you actually want to get the question about Jews if you wanna get Jews interested in Israel you first have to get them interested in Judaism. Happy Halloween Ben. Thank you. So I have an issue with your stance on abortion. OK. So you defined life as starting at conception through biology. Right. Pretty much. But I think you took the stance that life is intrinsically valuable because it's life and that's where I disagree. I think there's two things that make life valuable. I think consciousness the ability to experience pain senses and stuff like that and personal identity in particular psychological continuity identity. So the fact that we have memories we have relationship to of relationships to us I think what's. Do you mean both of those who is an either or? I just want to clarify your position. 1121 00:38:45,542 --> 00:38:45,541 Either or Okay so if it's either or than people with Alzheimer's have real continuity problems you can't kill them. No because people still have relationships with them. All right so you just love. I mean you have relationship with them but with people that advanced stage Alzheimer's they really don't have a relationship with you. for The sake of example let's say someone dies right. The family gets to decide what you do with the body because I know what you say when you say someone says consciousness and then they're brain dead. You say well can you stab them. No you can't because it's the family's decision what's it with the body. It's a person's decision what they want. So if the family decides to stab them it's okay to stab the. When they're brain dead.? Yeah. They want. No not not not brain dead. Let's say that you're comatose for a for a specifically and predictably short period of time say nine months. What does the person. I would say on the legal grounds would depend if the person put it in their will. If the person has made clear statements like Hey don't pull the plug on nine months then don't do that because I think the first choice is right. Let's say the person has not made such clear statements say the person can't make such clear statements so that he's just in a complete coma. Let's say the person has not done a Living Will or had conversations like this they in a car crash you know that in 9 months they're going to come out of the coma and they're going to be fine. are you allowed stab- can the family say "hey you know what it's been 9 months, lets do this thing" If they're going to get their memories back. Let's say they don't get the memories back. I would say that that person is dead and if the family wants to pull the plug that's fine. I'd have no problem with that. Yeah I would have no problem with that. Because I don't like because that like that person is dead. You're getting into some dicey territory dude Right. And that's the best way to define life his personal identity and consciousness. That's what makes life valuable. Right so I think that again if you were to say both that's too much and if you would even say either I don't think either one of those legs stands on its own because what you really mean that this is a thing about having a baby. It's a process of development and this is the point that I'm making. There's a period in this human life when that child does not have or fetus or embryo whatever you call it when this living thing does not have consciousness and does not have a sense of identity but in nine months it will have consciousness. Well babies babies don't have a sense of identity for at least a certain number of months after they're born. Babies. Babies can recognize their parents as voices after they're born. Thats not a sense of identity. Rats can identify. It is because they know it's a form of memory though right. That's what I was- are you a Jainist? Because animals also have a conscience. Yes. I would say that killing animals is wrong. You have no problem with that. So just to get the straight. Killing. Killing Fluffy the hamster. Deeply wrong. Killing a dude who wakes up from a coma who is going to wake up from a coma in nine months with memory problems. Totally cool. And. I mean that's fine you can have that position I'm just not gonna put you in charge of the NHS. Alright Thank you very much for a question. But we have to move on. I was listening to Peter Boghossian on Joe Rogan today and it just made me think of you because you were bringing some you brought that up on your podcast before. I just think like the West is eating itself I'm part of the Iranian diaspora and your own people and my people go back and I sympathize with the Jewish people. I really do. I just think like I've been I've been fortunate to travel around the world. I've. I haven't seen this kind of nonsense and idiocy anywhere else around the world. I mean if you go to Thailand they're not worrying about 73 gender pronouns or Japan or even Buenos Aires. Like do you think that this is a problem of just the West and Western Europe. I mean luxury breeds people creating new problems for themselves. No question. Well we are very bored people and we we can create problems out of Halloween costumes. So. If. So do you think clinging to a historical canon is the answer to this kind of. For sure. I mean I think that that pursuit of of virtue meaning kind of traditional Judeo-Christian values and a sense of objective truth and reason are necessary. It makes for a lot of hard conversations as we've seen a little bit tonight but I think that if we don't cling to a sense that truth is not merely a subjective construct. If we don't if we don't cling to the idea that there's such a thing as objective truth we can't have conversations and we tend to eat ourselves. And it's also a navel gazing is as I say navel gazing which is basically what we've decided to do as a society navel gazing and moral preening is a luxury that extraordinarily rich countries have but everybody else still has to eat. My questions about climate change. So if I remember correctly. I heard you once in a video that you do believe that human activity does have some sort of effect on the climate. So one I would just like you to explain a little bit of your understanding of climate change. Sure. And another question is are there any government policies that you would support in terms to mitigate carbon emissions. Yes. OK so. So my perspective on climate change is number one I'm not a climatologist but excepting the IPCC reports you have to take into account the fact that modelling has been wrong for 20 to 30 years it's always been overestimating the amount of climate change that's actually taking place. But virtually every reputable scientist including folks who are who are called Skeptics believe that the climate is warming. There's an argument about as to how much. And that over 50 percent of that warming is probably attributable to human activity. Now that raises other questions which is OK so let's say the Earth is warming. What kind of damage is that actually going do. And this is a serious question. Right. Let's say that the Earth is warming and we're causing it. Does that mean that it's the day after tomorrow and massive floods in New York and Dennis Quaid running around Jake Gyllenhaal trying to avoid the freeze. No it doesn't. Right it means that over the course of the next hundred years that the water level is going to rise a rather predictable number of inches or feet and then humans will migrate based on those weather patterns as humans have done since human beings became human beings and started walking on two feet. So you know I'm a little more sanguine about the possibility of long term climate change than a lot of catastrophists. You seem to assume that there's going to be tremendous damage done all the talk for example about the storms are becoming more severe and they're they're they're doing that much more damage. The statistics really don't back that up. What they really back up is that we're just building more stuff in the path of hurricanes. We're building more expensive stuff in the path of hurricanes. So when the storms break that stuff then it's more expensive for us to fix that stuff. Because the number of hurricanes actually hasn't changed markedly over time. And when folks say the intensity of hurricanes is changed what they really mean is that the amount of cost associate with hurricanes changed as far as what should be done about that. Well the biggest problem that you have is a serious collective action from let's assume that you really think there there's a huge problem you still have to decide whether you believe what was put this way what level of climate change requires what level of cutbacks in terms of the global economy. So there's a fellow whose name escapes me right now who just won the Nobel Prize in economics who legitimately made his entire career out of studying the economics of climate change. What does he think that intervention economically is called for. He says that until he believes that over the next century there's three point five degrees centigrade of climate change. That intervention actually would be counterproductive and cost more to intervene than it would to actually allow the damage take place and just cope with it because the economy is going to continue to grow over time. So. I don't see any reason why I think that I would know better than he does. It's also a basic fact that the only countries that have really been abiding by any of the the attempts to reduce climate change have an extraordinarily developed countries developing countries have no interest in sacrificing their own people at the altar of climate change. And the number one reducer in emissions over the past year was actually the United States. The United States pulls out of the Paris Accords, the Paris Accords of course by the way did nothing. They were completely useless. It was basically signed a piece of paper saying you what you don't like climate change. Okay fine. I signed it yay. And then it was gone. We saw it's climate change now no you didn't. What does solve climate change is technological progress and technological progress has led to a reduction in carbon emissions in the United States. It will not lead to a reduction in carbon emissions in developing countries for another 10 to 15 years including places like China. So it's a it's a complex issue and other folks are basically like let's just kill capitalism good luck with that. Thank you. Hi Ben My name is JJ. I just wanted to ask you a question on a topic that I've never heard you address before and it's an issue that's kind of big in Canada as well as the U.S. and that's the issue of Indian reservations. I was just kind of curious as to what your general perspective is on them at a philosophical level. Do you think there are good or bad things. Do you think there's not more power or less power. What's your just general take on them. So I mean this has been an issue a little bit the United States obviously not to the same extent as it has been in Canada. Little know little bit about Canada but not a tremendous amount. So I'll speak in the U.S. context which I know a little bit better. You know when you sign a treaty with a with a group of folks who you forcibly expelled from their land it seems to me only fair to allow them to govern their land as they see fit. With that said I think that we should make it a lot easier for folks to leave Native American reservations if they want to. I don't think that we should be forcibly taking children out of non reservation areas and returning them to reservations as has happened a couple of times in the United States. And you know I think with freedom of movement and the freedom of movement in trying to offer more opportunity to folks inside reservations I think that a lot of those folks to be better off leaving those reservations but that's an individual choice for them to make. I think that you know delegating that authority down to local levels is probably the best available solution. Ben I have two questions. I guess one of my questions pertains to the conservative movement in Canada. What do you think of Andrew Scheer and Bernier ? I guess my second question is any thoughts on religious freedom. I guess in terms of its direction how do you think it's going and not just the states and Canada but North America in general. Well I mean in the United States is going to garbage religious freedom that's because. There's been an overt attempts to quash religious freedom in the name particularly of anti-discrimination law. And that's mainly a generalized attempt to quash broader freedoms like in the United States freedom of association freedom of speech. So the idea there is that I can tell your religious school how to operate I can tell your your synagogue how to operate or your church how to operate. And that is a basic violation of religious freedom. I can tell your business how to operate and tell you how to operate your business in violation of your own religious precepts. I think that violates certain fundamental principles of being free and that holds what freedom really is about is your freedom to do stuff I don't like. It's not really called freedom if you're just doing a bunch of stuff that I like because then it's just called stuff I like. And then if I'm the dictator then I get to tell you exactly what it is you should do. And then we all agree on what you should do because you all agree with me. So everybody's happy. dictatorships usually aren't happy because freedom is premised on the idea you're gonna do a bunch of stuff I'm not real fond of. And then I have to just deal with it. Unfortunately that is a perspective that seems to be going by the wayside in a lot of areas. Your first question was about what Bernie Sanders. No of course not. I'm sorry. My question is about the Conservatives in Canada. Andrew Scheer Maxime Bernier. Oh sorry. Yeah when you say Bernie we Americans we automatically go to the Larry David looking fella. Any thoughts on them. No I haven't studied enough. I wish I knew more. I don't. I have a question about Rwanda for you today. In Rwanda less 25 years ago eight hundred thousand mostly ethnic Tutsis were murdered not by the government but by their neighbors. Since then Rwanda has improved remarkably. But the process has favored forgiveness over justice and safety over journalistic freedom. How does Rwanda recover while still moving towards Western liberalism. And what should the U.S. have done during the buildup in combination with the genocide. OK so again i'm going to plead a certain level of ignorance because I'm certainly not an expert on Rwandan politics. Suffice it to say that the the government of Rwanda remains a tyrannical dictatorship. It's there are a couple of very good books on this. One was recommended to me my friend Jane Kostin who's of the left. The basic problem in Rwanda is that the genocide is used very often as a club by the dictatorship in order to curb journalistic freedom. If we let you look around and perform journalism then you are going to reopen all of these old wounds or you're can undermine the government which leads to chaos which leads to renewed genocide that is obviously a serious problem. I would suggest the problems run extraordinarily deep in a society where neighbors literally picked up machetes and murdered eight hundred thousand of each other within the course of what two months three months. So that's that's you know I don't know how to solve that overnight. I don't have solutions for everything. You know all I would all I would say is that you know freedom obviously comes with responsibilities and a culture that is not necessarily ready for freedom may not be best governed by a by freedom I don't think democracy is an automatic draft. I don't think that you can take democracy plunked down in Afghanistan and boom it works I don't think that's the way it works. It's an overly optimistic view of human nature. What should have the United States have done during that period. Well I mean the United States always has to determine its own interests in these areas how much of a sacrifice would it have had to make in order to prevent that genocide. I was 10 when that happened I remembered all that well but the you know the idea that the United States could have done more in order to intervene is probably the case the United States did do more to intervene during the during the Kosovo war by using airpower to. Prevent a furthering of the genocide in Kosovo. So. I'm sorry. That's what I said. But the. The the situation in Rwanda it seems to me that you know again I wasn't the decision maker seat and I wouldn't want to speak out of turn but the use of American airpower might have been more necessary than than it was than what it was used at the time. Do you think extreme partisanship and political polarization between the Democrats and Republicans are detrimental to the democracy. In your opinion what is the best way for Congress and society to reach consensus on controversial issues. In terms of gun control same sex marriage and abortion. So number one I don't actually think that I don't think that consensus is what the American government was built for was built for competing interests fighting against each other and creating a certain level of gridlock as far as gun control. That's not a national issue nor should it be one localism in government is in my view always significantly better than control from the top down. I don't think Congress should really be involved in those issues. It seems to me that local governments are best. Situated to analyze whether gun control is necessary. I don't believe in gun control as general principle when it comes to same sex marriage. I've been libertarian on this. I think the government should be involved in marriage at all. I think that the government has no business in how people behave in their personal life. And as a religious person well I religiously opposed same sex marriage. Who cares right. Go to if you want to go to a church and get same sex married. More power to you. You have to care what I think and I ndon't have to care what you think. Welcome to a free society. So. Abortion I think is a little bit of a different issue because I believe that the Constitution was constructed to protect life liberty and property life is one thing life liberty and property. I respect your answer and I think we all respect the Constitution. We respect the law. The horror. I also want to point out that there are some aspects of law that may not be good for people in general. And the reason why I say this is because law are enacted by people and people make the law. And you're only so eloquent. People who break the law. For example if you have a debate with Piers Morgan then I believe that you can write other conclusion which everybody believes. So my question is we all recognize the importance of free speech. Wouldn't it be unfair if one side of the political spectrum has a lot of eloquent debaters and persuasive persuasive speakers for example Republicans are better off with people like Jordan Peterson, Ben yourself and Piers Morgan. So do you agree with that. Do I think that Jordan and I are better debaters than peers. Yeah I mean I. Wouldn't say that's a sarcastic. But I mean I will say this about the United States Constitution it's not just to me a form of you know legal creation. It's based on certain underlying principles every law is based on certain underlying principles. I think that the underlying principles that were meant to be preserved by the Constitution of the United States are eternal truths. I think that the ambition of human beings is an internal truth. I think the fact that we are better governed locally than we are nationally is any eternal truth. I think that the idea that you have individual rights that were given to you by nature or God in the view of the founders those are eternal truths. And so designing a system based on those fundamental premises is more likely to arrive at a proper conclusion than basing a system on the idea that the community's rights outweigh the individual's rights for example which is sort of the French declaration of rights and then the South African constitution by contrast. Hello Ben. Tonight I want to ask you about emotionalism and in particular fear. I believe in freedom and I believe fear is the antithesis and can be compared to a panopticon of the mind. For example my father Barry Neufeld has taken a stand against SOGI 1 2 3. Rather than debate his stance rational. Rather than debate his stance rationally the B.C. Teachers Federation and Canadian Union of Public Employees have opted for the fast track to section 318 hate speech code and sue him into silence. A move I believe is motivated by fear and goes far beyond casual conversation. What can individuals and communities do to combat creeping emotionalism and restore conscientious reason to discourse in this country. Well I mean I think that the first thing that has to be done. Is there does have to be a mass movement against the use of the government gun to silence people that you don't like talking to. That has to stop. And it's why I opened the speech by ripping into the B.C. Human Rights Code. I don't like hateful speech any more than anybody else does. But I am not willing to give the government the power to shut down speech that I find offensive or hateful simply because I don't like it. The other thing we have to do is we have to we have to announce which speech is linked with action. Otherwise no one care what anybody else had to say. But to equate speech with violence which is really what so many members of the left have done these days. I make an argument that means that you now have to go running to the sexual assault center because somehow I've assaulted you. It's nonsense and it's counterproductive and it leads specifically to the argument that because my speech is violence you can use violence to silence my speech speech and violence are completely different. And unless you are openly inciting violence against somebody your speeches ought to be legal. last night you mentioned the Cartesian duality and that piqued my interest. And it has me thinking. How much do you think this is a problem. How do you how much do you think that's linked to actual mental illness. so I mean the argument that I was making last night I spoke last night at Vancouver Hebrew Academy and I was talking about somebody asked a question about transgenderism. Even that speech that anti-Semitism and the I and I was talking about this this bizarre idea that you have a female mind inside of a male body. And I suggested that this was a kind of reversion to Cartesian duality. This idea of the ghost in the machine that your mind exists separate from your body and that your body has nothing to do with your mind and your genetics and your and your brain workings have nothing to do with who you are as a person and therefore you know you can create weird TV shows about people switching minds everything is freaky friday and it seems to me that a lot of what is being argued right now which is that the mind is completely separate from like completely separate from the body and therefore all you have to do is change the body to meet with the mind wants it to be is rooted in certain illogical precepts about what Biology is and what reality is. And again it's its gut churning to talk about these sorts of topics publicly particularly when you know you're hurting people's feelings. I actually as much as I don't care about people's feelings I actually kind of do. I don't spend a lot of time talking about people's feelings because I feel like people use their feelings as a way to shut down debate but the last thing that I want to do is to have people walking out really upset about things. I think that that's why I prefer a society in which we all grow a thicker skin. But it is true that that a movement back to a sort of nearly pagan association with subjective truth is not good for anybody including folks who are suffering from mental disorders. I want to preface this with i run about 50/50 with your opinions and what I agree with and disagree with but I've heard a good statement that says that there's rarely black or white new situations of broad policy whether it involves a body count or not. So what I want to ask you is that you've stated that it's our generation that tends to have these extreme views and how it forms the sub-adult Culture in terms of maturity and whatnot. And I want to ask you why in particular do you think it's the West Coast because there's a blue red divide all over the United States. Why in particular do you think it's on this coast that this hotbed of extremists left. diaspora for lack of a better word has formed. Well I mean I think that as it's a lifelong resident of California there's an echo chamber that's formed and the only acceptable opinions are the ones that are to the left of the echo chamber. So I think that America as a broad whole has moved to the left. I think that's true in most other Westernised countries as well. And that's most extreme and most pronounced in areas where you basically have one party rule which is what you have in places like California and where kids are essentially indoctrinated in certain principles of leftism in public schools and by the entertainment complex that exists in Hollywood. So. You know I do think that you know the society is moving ever further to the left. No I wouldn't say that our generation is particularly disconnected from reality. I think the baby boomers are pretty disconnected from reality. I mean the baby boomers I think pretty much ruined America. I mean they they they basically bankrupted the country and then made all of us pay for it and my kids pay for it and then suggested that they've saved the country by creating all these social programs that are going to never be paid for under any circumstance then screaming and yelling whenever we talk about the necessary measures to cut them. So I'm not particularly fond of the generation that brought us the 1960s. Basically there are a couple of things that were good about the 1960s and they were very good at the civil rights movement was a wonderful thing about the 1960s. The first wave feminist movement was really earlier than 1960s. There are some good things about the 1960s as an overall thing aside from the civil rights movement they really sucked. They're not good for the country. As a follow up in red or blue in the government what actions do you think that the ruling party could take to avoid this delay in adulthood that's present among the current generation. I mean I think the first thing is you have to make people not dependent on the government into adulthood. We are not demanding anything of anybody until the point there 28 29 30 years old and then we're acting like they're victims up till the point that they're 28 29 30 years old. Oh my God you graduated from college with a gender studies degree and you can't get a hundred thousand dollar job. No shit Sherlock. We're teaching. We're teaching folks and this is true for politicians are in the business of lying to you and the common lie that they're fond of telling you is that they're going to solve all of your problems. No politician has ever or will ever solve all of your problems or even to my new fraction of your problems. And you're seeing this from left and right. It drives me up a wall. People say well you know you're living in a town your economy is dying in this town. I'm coming home to save your town. Nonsense. That person is not going to save your town. They just want your vote and they're going to lie to you until they get your vote. Okay. The only way that your town is going to be saved is if you become an entrepreneur and you create jobs you not the government. Again the. Only way that you are going to the only way that you're going to have a nice family is if you make good decisions about dating and marriage and having children. The only way that you're going to have a nice career is if you make solid decision after solid to in a chain of solid decisions about what you decide to major in what job you decide to take whether to quit that job for an apprenticeship in a different field whether you're willing to move right. We spend so much time in politics talking about the society in which we bathe in which we simmer how the society is unjust and how it's done. It's not good and it's crushing us and all of these things. The reality again for the 1000 time is that if you want to have a good life look in the mirror first then start worrying about everybody else. Hey Ben big fan I just want to say quickly I really appreciate your approach to politics and it means a lot more about discussion. Makes it better especially for people who the left hate especially why straight Christian male conservatives like myself. A question on your stance of evolution. I was just wondering as a Christian obviously I was raised a lot. Evolution Christianity was the big debates. My social circles and I was just wondering if you spent a lot of time looking at younger creationist theories like from Christian Christian ministry. I've been in the States sometime because there's some of that in the Orthodox Jewish community as well. I don't believe any of it. All right. I believe that the earth is billions of years old and that it human and that life is hundreds of millions of years old and that human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years in modern form. And you know I believe in the generalized theory of evolution although I believe in punctuated equilibrium which tends to fit better with the sort of fossil record than the idea of a continuous evolution that occurred at a constant rate across time which even Darwin didn't really argue for. And by the way I think all of this is square with the Bible. I don't actually think that you have to think that God speaks the language of people. And so if you're a Bible believer as I am and as many Christians are I don't see why you would think that for example young earth creationism assumes that when it says six days in the Bible I mean six literal 24 hour days. I don't know why you have to read it that way considering that the sun is not created on day one. It says it says the first day. Well what what's a day in a world where there's no sun and where the earth doesn't revolve around that sun. There are some good books on this. There's one by Gerald Schroeder that I'm particularly fond of called Genesis in the big bang. That's kind of fun to read. I don't think you have to leave science at the door because you're a Bible believer. I'm a believer as Maimonedes was as Thomas Aquinas was that God speaks in a couple of different languages. He speaks the language of scientific truth and he speaks the language of the Bible. And if you're not scoring them properly that's your fault not his. Would you would you ever debate someone like someone like Ken Ham who believes that young earth theory say on a sunday special or somethibg like that? I mean I'd be happy to have mine. I'm always happy to have conversations with anybody. You know if I if I felt I didn't have the proper expertise to argue that point I'd probably want to bring on somebody who's more of an expert in evolutionary theory to talk to Ken Ham I think to be a better debate. If if if now like the Sunday specials are really for me to ask questions like an ignoramus that's what's fun for me is there a place for me to learn. But if it were to be a debate on those things what I'd really want do is have back to back Sunday specials with like him and then Richard Dawkins for example. Really I was just a fun one. Do you not. We gotta move on. With a yarmulke. I'm sorry. do you sleep with the yamulka on your head? No no. Jews don't sleep with the yamulka on their head Hi Ben. I'm a big fan of yours and at the meeting and greet. I told you I watched all your shows and. Well thank you appreciate it. So this question I know no one's asked you yet because it's a relatively new phenomenon but to your face before we get onto the question you've mentioned before to which I agree too that the women back in the days more with the Christian values and Judeo Judeo Christian values that they realized men act a certain way. Therefore we should take preemptive measures so that men don't act that way because we know how they act. Where is the new third wave feminist movement sees men and says well if men act that way. Therefore women can act that way as well. So what this is leading to is the new phenomenon as the SlutWalk movement. I don't know if you've known about that with Ambrose. Yes so I'm just wondering what do you think are the ramifications of women saying well if men can go out and dress however they want and women can do the exact same thing. Do you think that leads to a loosening of the fabric of society or a shame is a necessary determinant in society. Yeah. and that it leads to like sexual assault and increase in things Well I mean things. OK. So I think that first of all if somebody commits a sexual assault the only person to blame is the person who commits the sexual assault. That right off the bat. Victims are not to blame for their own sexual assault. Yeah. I also think that if you put yourself in a risky situation then you've put yourself in a risky situation right. We do this everyday everyday we make decisions about what sort of situations to put ourselves in. If I walk through a high crime neighborhood waving a hundred dollar bills above my head and then I am robbed then is the fault of the person who robs me it is not my fault. But I also made a bad decision to do that. Yes. I said two things can be true at once and it is not blaming the victim to say that it's a bad decision to walk through a high crime neighborhood at night waving a wallet over your head. Yeah. Right. It is it is also not a good idea to go to parties where drinking and drugs are commonplace with a bunch of guys who are pigs. Yes. Right. That's just not a good idea. Now does that relieve responsibility from the guys 100 percent not if a guy rapes you or sexually assaults you. He should be castrated or killed. Yeah. I'm very strict on this. One more question. One of the things that I hate so much about this conversation is that people assume two things can't be true. that if I think that rape is bad and I also think that you shouldn't make decisions that heighten your own risk factor that I'm somehow blaming the person who heightened the risk factor for the bad thing that happened to them. No two things can always be true at once and normally they are. I just think the slut walks increasing the sexual liberation society. As as far as far as you can walk again I don't know why anybody would be prideful about their own promiscuity man or woman. Yeah it's confusing to me as somebody who is a virgin until marriage and very proudly so and believe the that has made my relationship with my wife better and stronger and holier. I am I am I am perfectly consistent on this. I hold women to a particular standard I hold mental a particular standard that standard is being classy. Yeah. I know that word is kind of lost on its meaning these days but being classy. On one thing Cenky Uygur from the young Turks he says that the Politicon Debate that you're with. You said that it wasn't a real debate because debating who was like debating with a robot and he preferred Tucker Carlson's debate. How do you respond to Cenk I mean he he preferred Tucker Carlson's debate make he Tucker agree on more things. I mean really thats not a rip on Tucker again He and Tucker agree on all this stuff about corporations need to be restricted and Tucker's more of an economic populist and cut out campaign spending and all this kind of stuff. I mean if he doesn't like debating me that's his prerogative. He agreed to it. I mean it. And as far as debate and as far as debating debating a robot like I'm sorry I'm good at my job. Ben I am a liberal but I'm a big fan of yours. I really appreciate the way that you talk and articulate yourself. The reason I bring that up being one thing that I've noticed that I'm not a huge fan of just in the political world is the sort of increased divisiveness between the left and right. Yep. So I'm wondering what are in the spirit of that what are some things about liberalism and liberals that you would admire. So I would. OK so a couple of things one I make a very strong distinction between people who are leftists and people who are liberals when it comes to issues of free speech. So I admire folks like you who are willing to come out and actually listen to the other side and have conversations and debate and use a hand for that and. By the way. So does it. This is why. You know it upsets me when folks walk out. So does the. So does the person who came in and asked about the transgenderism question. Anybody who comes in disagrees deserves enormous credit for coming to a room where they know they're going to be in the minority viewpoint wise that person. I feel that persons not here to receive a hand that person should receive a hand. So that's number one. Number two you know I think that the liberal concern with fairness is coming from a good place although I think the policy ramifications of that concern are very often wrong. And I think that if you don't have that conversation constantly being had then it could be easy to lose yourself in sort of the in sort of the the realm of an anarcho libertarianism. I think it's it's a reminder that look my view is when it comes to my own family I'm a liberal. Why. Because my own family we have income redistribution. I have a joint bank account with My wife and I'm it's a patriarch it's a paternalistic society because I'm literally the petro familia. I literally am the head of my family. And so that means that you know I admire some of the sentiments that backed this. I don't think they're applicable to government. I don't think they're applicable to broader social strata but they're a reminder that if you don't actually do the hard work of building up a social fabric at home and being kind to the people around you and your community then there will be a call for that to be crammed down on you from above. Ben I'm a huge fan. Thank you for coming here. So I kind of wanted to. I was thinking about this question on the way in and I knew is going to be a contentious one for you i just wanted to ask you a question about your best friend Milo Yiannopolous I know you guys have a lot of history. I'll say bluntly but I was thinking about this a lot and I know that I pay a lot of attention to Milo. I'm kind of a big fan of his too so I mean I'm sorry about that. You're. Really even like the tooth caps and all that. I mean I wasn't I wasn't down on the veneers and the butt injections. I thought who I thought is beautiful before then. So I mean but no I really I'll get to my question. So I know you guys are really really split. And he said some horrible things about you and vice versa maybe. Not quite. But I was kind of wondering. I said he's not a conservative. He sent me a picture of a black child on the day of my son's birth. I know. Not quite the same. You know I know I know but my point my point is that like conservative speakers like yourself like there's the intellectual dark web there's a group of you guys that kind of you know help bolster each other up. And I know that he's not necessarily a part of that but I was wondering if like if people in general could see that someone like yourself is willing to extend an olive branch of some sort. And this is like totally. Well here's the olive branch that I extended to Milo and I will say this I don't feel the need to extend an olive branch to somebody who sends me pictures of black children on the day my son was born. But the olive branch that I extend to Milo is the same olive branch that I extend to anyone with whom I have significant disagreement when he was banned from Twitter I said he shouldn't been. And that's even though a lot of the Twitter trolls I was receiving who sent me anti-Semitic memes on a fairly frequent basis for Milo fans. So you know I'm so I think that you know if Milo you know I don't believe that people should generally be banned from social media platforms. I think Milo said a lot of really terrible things. I think that he has been a detriment to the conservative movement by linking the conservative movement with a lot of very bad ideas. Now does that mean everything that he's ever said is bad. No. I mean when he. There are some things that he has said about political correctness with which I generally agree. My biggest problem Milo and this was my problem before he imploded right. My biggest problem Milo we had this argument even before he went into full. Alt-right or alt-lite Or whatever wants to call himself My biggest problem with him was in like early March 2016 when he suggested that the future of America was not conservatism not constitutional conservatism it was a new big government populism that was going to take over where that left off. And I fundamentally disagree with that. And he added that he thought the political that that basically being politically incorrect. Was. The same thing as being an asshole. I don't think those two things are the same. I think he can be politically incorrect which is to say you say valuable things that people find unpalatable but they are actually valuable they are arguments that need to be made and be politically incorrect that's not the same thing as somebody dropping the N-word or somebody dropping a slur or somebody you know doing what Milo was doing and showing pictures of actual transgender people on screens and mocking them for the crowd. I don't think that's necessary. I think you can make a fully cogent argument about what transgenderism is or what we ought to do as a society about sexual differentiation without doing that sort of thing. I think that it actually lends a lot of credence to the other side which is politically correct in cracking down on free speech. When you conflate those two things when you conflate incivility or being a jerk with being politically incorrect. So those are my main problems with Milo as far as like. Having a conversation again I don't really see the need cause i dont see The productivityi don't have conversations with a lot of folks but I also don't think Milo should be banned. And I've never called for him to be so in fact I've openly called even when we were you know but even when this was at its worst I said that he shouldn't he should not be down from Twitter. Ben a big fan of yours first of all. And the question that I have for you is you're kind of guilty of it a little bit and most of the Americans are. My background is originally came from Russia and my stances for example in the debate that you brought up was Rwanda. Why does America have to have a stance on everything and why does America have to actually go into a country and potentially prevent the genocide or something like that. Why does America have to be involved in all the world's affairs. So America doesn't the answer is America does not. But there is a good argument made that if you can help you do so if it's very little cost to the United States to send a few bombers over a particular area to stop a million people from being killed. Then is that worth the sacrifice. I believe yes because I believe that the United States is an empire of liberty and that when you show that liberty the world that that is a good force for the United States that we should be involved interminably in every conflict no every single conflict you have to make a cost benefit analysis about what is worthwhile and what is not but does morality play a role in American foreign policy. Sure. I mean I think that it does but again it has to be done on a case by case basis which is why foreign policy is so murky and why you see a lot of folks who are isolationists before they take office suddenly becoming non isolationist as soon as they're in office you see Barack Obama arguing the war in Iraq is something we totally shouldn't get involved in and suddenly we're bombing Libya. You see Donald Trump saying the war in Iraq is the biggest disaster in American foreign policy history and suddenly we're bombing Syria right. It's easy to be isolationist in a vacuum or to be interventionist in a vacuum. It's a very different thing when the chips are down. Ben My name's Mitch. I was just wondering gonna ask you a question about this whole media issue going on today where you see easily people on Fox News like Lauren Graham get called out for saying Lebron has shut up and dribble when yet on what I call the left wing even though they claim their objective CNN where you have guys like Don Lemon saying you know this is kind of what happens with with Kanye when black folk don't read and write. Blaming Trump and Trump supporters for even possibly this bomb bombing packages and the synagogue shooting and yet everyone kind of sees it hears it and kind of goes you know. But as soon as someone like on the right like Laura Ingram would say something like that it's like oh she should be boycotted protested stepped down fired. All right so this stuff I was just wondering like Is is there any way for people to maybe call out people on the left media. I mean. Yeah. I mean I think we do it on a regular basis in the right wing media. The left is constantly looking for excuses to silence. And they've been on Laura's trail for a long time. Done the same thing to Mark Levin. They've done something Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and everybody else I'm sure they'll do it to me. It's it comes for everybody. And then the question is whether it's legit or not. Almost universally it is not one of the one of the great irritants. I mean I did my entire episode today on my show about this. One of the great irritants that I see right now and something that is making people crazy is the gaslighting where you where you see that they'll call out rhetoric on one side but they won't call out rhetoric on the other side. And this this cropped up its ugly head with regard to anti-Semitism or violent rhetoric where they'll say well President Trump is responsible for violent rhetoric and that's what caused what happened in in Pittsburgh and then they'll turn around as well. And Don Lemon will literally get on TV and say on national television you've never seen a Democrat shoot anybody. And Steve Scalise is over here going Hello. Right. The fact is that the inability to objectively measure the facts because you don't want to look your own side in the face is not good for politics. It does happen on both sides I think these days it happens a lot more frequently on the left than on the right. Hi Ben, i just want to say how much I appreciate what you do and you're the main reason that I got into politics. I thank you. For your thug life compilations. My question is to do with the Conservative Party of Canada and just conservatives in general kind of caving in on a lot of views such as abortion. I don't know other ones kind of saying that we need to get votes and I'm kind of caving in on views just just to get votes and cater to to society. For example it's like get Justin Trudeau out of power. So I just want to know what your thoughts on that is. I mean we had similar problems in the United States. I'll speak to the analog quick note on Justin Trudeau handsome Bernie Sanders does not qualify to be prime minister of a country. As I said last night like I'm real happy he's got a six pack and all but I do not understand what that has to do with knowing a single thing about governance. As far as. As far as political parties as far as political parties caving on on particular hot button issues you know I'm never in favor of abandoning internal truth for temporary political gain. And it doesn't seem to work out well because all that happens that the country continues to move left and sooner abandoning more ground and more ground and more ground. That's particularly true on the life issue. There are certain issues where I feel like. A consensus can sort of be reached. I'll take an example same sex marriage. So as I said I was an advocate. So I'm an advocate of traditional marriage. I don't believe that same sex marriage has the same societal benefit as heterosexual marriage because of biology and it's not to say that I don't think that gay people can't live together in happiness. That's fine. But if you're talking about what benefits society. Well marriage was always built around bearing and rearing of children which obviously is going be a lot more common in heterosexual couples than homosexual couples. With that said it appeared to. Me that what was happening in the United States that the ground was shifting and folks wanted the government to become the great imprimatur for a virtue. And now the government was going to grant same sex marriage. My response to that was here's a better idea Why don't we just all get out of this business. That's something that I think can make everybody happy because when the government gets out of everybody's business we all tend to be a little bit happier. And then if you want to do what you want to do at your church. Totally fine. Is that me abandoning the traditional marriage issue. No it's me acknowledging that the government is not good in a particular area and that the social fabric has to be rebuilt in a particular area and that the social fabric has to be protected by getting government out of that realm entirely. I've said the same thing with regard to things like marijuana legalization or decriminalization. I've never smoked pot in my life I find it irritating it smells terrible. But. But with that said the government sucks at regulating it at least in the United States. So that means that maybe the solution is deregulation or decriminalization of marijuana specifically with the goal of allowing folk allowing to find a certain market level and then allowing the social fabric to be built around the idea that maybe smoking pot is bad as opposed to just being basically here's my view. If the government is last repository of virtue there is no last repository of virtue. The government is never going to be the great guarantor of decency or virtue. There has to be something under undergirding it or the government has nothing to stand on. Hi Ben. I actually did come dressed as Elizabeth Warren today. I'm a divorced mom of four children and because of personal tragedies in my life I'm raising two boys who have a distinct lack of positive male role models in their life. And I'm wondering what can women in my situation do to foster a sense of positive male identity. In this climate of toxic anti man hate. I mean. I do think it's a great question. Good good for you for we're number one. Good for you for worrying about that issue because there are too many people who don't. I Think that you have to make an active attempt to find people who you think are good positive male role models and put them in your son's life. And I think this is true by the way even if it were a two parent family you want to surround your kids with good people who can have a good influence on them. There is a fascinating study about single motherhood in the United States and what actually showed is that the single best predictor of whether somebody was going to succeed or fail was not single motherhood per say it was actually the number of single moms in a particular area. Meaning that if you can find a surrogate father figures then you did OK. If you're living in a heavily married area with a lot of men around to model particular behavior you OK. So there's certain areas of life that men male father figures still predominate. Sports is obviously a big one. Religious Institute. Excuse me religious institutions are obviously another big one. But I don't know whether grandparents are in the picture. or grandfather in the picture, you can give her back the mic for a second. My father recently passed away. oh i'm sorry to hear that. Her paternal grandfather lives six hours away. would he be- moving is not a possibility and he's not like that. Dad's side of the family name calls a lot. They call the kids retards stupid. Yeah that's not good. But what I would suggest is I mean are there men in your life who you feel are would make for good role models. Well in my church we don't at the ages my kids are out they're not around a lot of men. But we have male missionaries they're 19 to like in their early 20s. So I have them over for dinner twice a month and I try my best. can your sons be involved in any of these groups where they're around other men who can provide a good example for them. I have been trying to get men into the children's organization that they currently go to activities for and it looks like we will be getting some male leaders. And that's great. Well so I mean I think that the fact you're even thinking about it means that your sons will be OK because if you continue to seek this out you will find it. So it's big. I think the bottom line is good for you. I mean because again if. Being proactive in seeking good male role models is absolutely vital for them. So again I have nothing but praise for you. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. So my question is I've seen a lot of conversations break down because of differences in the importance placed on action and intent. focusing on what someone has said and know what they mean. My question is the following When is it necessary to take someone's intentions into account and what are their actions. All that needs to be considered. Okay so my general rule and this is something I've tried to work on also I think we all should try and work on it so I'm not going to exempt myself from this category. I've made mistakes along these lines. There's a there's a Jewish principle called "Donafkaskus" what it means is that you're supposed to try and see everybody in the most favorable possible light. So when somebody says something and it has two possible interpretations do you see it in the worst available light. The one that makes them look the most racist the most terrible the most sexist the most bigoted. Or do you try to read it in the light where you know maybe that's not what they actually meant and when you when you try to view people like that you're likely to have better conversations than when you immediately go to the character attack which is the easier place to go and more cynical place to go. You know that that I think is is the place where intent matters where intent does not matter is when somebody actually takes an action to hurt another human being then intent does not matter at that point. And if a person does it repeatedly then intent certainly doesn't matter if it's an accident as one thing. But if you're pursuing a policy publicly that has the same impact over and over and over and over you keep going for this policy over and over and over and over to a certain point I can't grant you that sort of. License of good of good intent as at a certain point your intent doesn't matter anymore to certain point negligence becomes purpose. And you know that that I think requires repeated action also require we have to discuss the severity of the action being taken. So first rule of thumb try to treat people you know with the best of intent. Second rule of thumb it's not always possible. Well thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Ladies and gentlemen Ben Shapiro!

Channel: The Free Speech Club

Views: 1,669,019

Rating: 4.8524904 out of 5

Keywords: ben shapiro interview, fox news, politics, ben shapiro, ubc, vancouver, university, fox news channel, ubc free speech club ben shapiro, ubc free speech club, social justice warrior, feminist, feminism, SJW, liberal, republican, Trump, free speech, transgender, lgbt, owned, destroyed, university of british columbia, ben shapiro debate, midterm elections, politics news, midterms, democrats, conservative, donald trump, news, political news, jordan peterson, social justice, trump news, cringe

Id: EymDXH-u8Y0

Length: 90min 23sec (5423 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018