Ben Shapiro - The Death of Virtue

as the cliche entails our keynote speaker for the evening needs no introduction and yet it is fitting that we greet him accordingly right the host of the Ben Shapiro show and the editor-in-chief of The Daily wire Ben Shapiro among many things is a best-selling author a columnist a speaker a brilliant political cultural observer and communicator a regular contributor to TV radio news a Titan for objective truth and a bronze wall against illogical thought and while I've sometimes wondered what it would be like to challenge him to a game of chess I've seen and heard from him enough from a distance that now that we've been together in person and had a chance to talk I know that I'd never actually want to test the depth of his intellectual prowess it's not a pretty sight to see me so quickly and so easily defeated and deflated it's pretty ugly ladies and gentlemen it is both a privilege and a pleasure to introduce to you one of the brightest beaming minds in America and a friend to this humble congregation in Hartland Michigan mr. Ben Shapiro [Applause] [Music] thank you so much I really appreciate what a beautiful congregation you have it really is an honor and a pleasure to be here I talk a lot on my show and you know kind of in in the various speeches that I give about the necessity for social fabric and the fact that diversity is wonderful so long as it's directed at a common goal when I see communities like this congregations like this it really does give me hope for the country and I want to talk about that tonight because I think one of the things that the country is missing is there's a tremendous focus on Liberty and there's very little focus on virtue and that's where we all come in as religious people as people who actually care about God as people who actually care about Central eternal values our role right now has never been more vital because we are more divided than ever that's because Americans really unfortunately don't have very much in common anymore if you go back and read the Federalist Papers the founders talk about the idea that were common people we have a common heritage we have a common background we have a common history we have a common set of values and all of those things seem to be gone our institutions are under Grievous assault right now and a lot of folks on one particular side of the aisle these days who are very angry at a series of institutions this week we saw a lot of folks in the Democratic Party who are suggesting that the Senate actually be made non to say should be changed it should be representative by population as opposed to two senators per state this is because they're very angry that the Senate is dominated by Republicans and so Republicans were able to appoint a couple of justices they didn't want to see appointed so that institution has to go by the wayside they obviously also don't like the electoral college these days because of president Trump's election victory institutions all across America are under attack churches particularly are under attack from a left that believes that churches are trying to cram down a certain set of values and thus they must be stopped they must be stopped out of state the state has to stop churches from teaching their kids actual eternal meaningful values the state has to stop us from operating our businesses the way that we see fit our cultural is under attack as well the the philosophy of multiculturalism that suggests that all cultures are equivalent that they are all equally valuable that if somebody comes across the border and it has a different set of values that that value system must be taken as though it is exactly the same in terms of what it brings to the United States as any value system that has already pre-existed adhere and that's not a case against immigration but that is a case against the idea that all cultures are equal and that all cultures are equally capable of melting into the assimilating melting pot that was the United States of America our history is under attack as well there are two visions of history in the United States right now on the one hand you have folks who say that America is the greatest country in world history you say that our value system is the greatest value system in world history the Declaration of Independence on the one hand and the Constitution on the other enshrine certain valuable principles that mean something and that don't change over time and that we haven't always lived up to those principles but the history of the United States is a history of a glorious people doing glorious things and falling short by picking ourselves up again and moving toward the fulfillment of those principles and then on the other side you have a bunch of folks who believe that America was rooted in hierarchical evil it was rooted in racism sexism bigotry homophobia America was rooted in all these terrible power structures and power relationships and that therefore American history is really a series of bad things punctuated by a few accidental lucky steps that everything that is bad in the world can be attributed to America and everything that is good in the world can be attributed to Universal civilization so landing on the moon is not an American achievement that's an international achievement but slavery is uniquely American and this is the view of a lot of folks on one side of the aisle when you believe that when you believe that for example that you shouldn't be able to quote Churchill this is a controversy this week there's an astronaut named Scott Pelley and Pele had the temerity on Twitter to quote Winston Churchill and then he actually was forced to apologize by people for quoting Winston Churchill because Whitney he said oh I didn't know that Winston Churchill was a racist I didn't realize that Winston Churchill stood for atrocities now he didn't know anything about Winston Churchill so he just took everything that was being said about Winston Churchill at face value suffice to say all of the social justice warrior 17-year olds who were very angry it's got that Scott Kelly for quoting Winston Churchill would be speaking German if it weren't from Winston Churchill but that doesn't really matter these days all that matters according to a lot of faux one side of the aisle is that our history is a history of sin George Washington was not the father of our country or a great man he was a slaveholder Abraham Lincoln was not the man who preserved the Union and ensured that the blessings of the Constitution and the guarantees of the Constitution were applied to black folks in the United States Abraham Lincoln was a racist who originally wanted to recolonize black folks from the United States back into Africa and so he has to be thrown out as well we can always dig up something historically that makes people look like anachronism Tsar terrible it's really not hard to do that because the history of the world is filled with bad ideas the question is why is America such a great place and the answer is because America is filled with great ideas and was always filled with great ideas but there's one side of the aisle that doesn't believe that well if you have that fundamental disagreement there's no way to bridge that gap and finally there is just an enormous amount of personal dislike in our society right now and a lot of that has to do with the fact that people don't actually hang out with each other all that much outside of places like church so if you don't go to church with somebody the chances that you're hanging out with them outside of church are actually pretty low there's a famous sociologist from Harvard named Robert Putnam you wrote a book called Bowling Alone he pointed out in the 1950s the number one growth area in the American economy was bowling alleys that bowling alleys were popping up everywhere why because every single person was basically a member of a bowling league now very few people over all our members of bowling leagues and so you've seen all of these bowling alleys shuts down instead we have fake friendships on social media or we have a text or a have phone but very few people are actually spending the amount of time with one another to allow them to supersede the vision they have on the other person it's it's fascinating how personal contact with other people actually allows you to see people in a better light there's a famous study that was done in the 1930s a really kind of interesting study in which these scientists went around social scientists went around the United States that are Asian and they went around the United States and they stated a bunch of different hotels and no problem that folks let them in they were allowed to stay at all these various hotels and they called up the hotels on the phone and they said do you allow Asian people to stay in your hotels and virtually all of these hotels that they just stayed at said no we don't allow Asian people to stay at the hotels what changed is that they actually showed up and they had a face to face conversation with someone in things changed that's fallen by the wayside as well so hatred antipathy anger at each other this is it highs that we haven't really seen in the United States since the 1960s at the very least now question is why I think the actual reason is because of the decline of judeo-christian values in our society I think judeo-christian values have taken a real 2x4 in the face I think that the values that were embedded in biblical living have basically been thrown out in favor of this new idea that secular humanism is going to save all of us the only problem with that is that secular humanism has not actually saved all of us problem because secularism inherently does not give us the fundamental basis for why human beings have value the most important single sentence ever written in human history and my opinion and I'm sure most of the people in this room wasn't written by humans the the single most important sentence is that man was made in God's image that is the single most important verse in the Bible in my view it is the single most important image in the history of mankind is that human beings have innate value and that innate value is what you can build on you can build on that but we've decided that we don't need the Bible for that anymore reason can bring us to it the only problem of course is the reason cannot bring you to that reason can bring into a lot of places but it can't bring you to the inerrant value of each individual human being because it turns out that for most of human history people didn't believe that for most of human history people enslaved one another because they didn't believe every individual had value for most of human history men thought that women were lesser beings for most of human history people thought that people of different tribes and different races did not have these same sorts of value it took a revelation for that to be understood by human beings and without that revelation everything collapses it collapses into dust in the United States we are built on basically two central foundational principles liberty and virtue this is what we are built on liberty and virtue and these can only coexist their intention liberty and virtue because liberty sort of suggests you can do whatever you want and virtue suggests you obviously can't where you have duties the only way that liberty and virtue can co-exist is if you believe that the goal of being free is to be virtuous if you believe that the goal of being a free human being a person with rights is to fulfill your duties then these two things can coexist if you believe that Liberty on its own is just an inherent good then no matter what whatever you do Liberty is the fundamental conceit well pretty soon things are gonna collapse because people tend to use their Liberty against one another if unconstrained by dou T this is what religion comes in this is why religion matters Liberty was always embedded in judeo-christian ideals right the idea of freedom ringing out and the idea of the exodus from Egypt but it was always counterbalanced by duty people always forget the end of the verse in Exodus when God says to Pharaoh via Moses let my people go it's not just let my people go it's let my people go so that they may serve me in the wilderness it's connected with that second half liberty has to be connected with actual obligations or Liberty devolves into libertinism into doing whatever you want and mistreating other people if you see fit to do so in Judaism it's pretty clear I speak more about Judaism because everybody in the room knows more about Christianity than I do so I speak but on Judaism I know a few things so on Judaism the funny hat says so so Judaism is very big on the idea that you're supposed to live as we say but simcha enjoy God commands you to live in joy but what does it mean to be happy in Judaism well in Judaism being happy is to walk with God Rabbit our phone says in ethics of the fathers the day is short the work is great the workers are lazy but the reward is great and the master of the house is knocking at the door serving God and following God is where you find joy as Solomon says there's nothing better for a person than to enjoy the work because that is their lot if you're not enjoying what you were put on earth to do then you're doing happiness wrong you may be experiencing something akin to pleasure but it's not the same thing as the deep abiding spiritual happiness that arises when you know that you are living in accordance with a more important purpose this isn't just unique to Judaic thought or Christian thought either by the way there was this idea sort of embedded in ancient Greek thought as well which is why early church leaders and I would say the New Testament is replete with an attempt to merge the revelation of Sinai with some of the rationality of grace and is why the the New Testament beget is written in Greek it's one of the reasons as opposed to Aramaic which was actually the the lingua franca of the time it's also why the the term logos is used at the very beginning of the New Testament and specifically because the idea is that in the Christian view Christ is the logic of the universe the reason is supposed to be attached to all of this well the ancient Greeks saw a similar requirement for purpose that happiness was not just about your day-to-day pleasure it was also about living a life in a well lived fashion so how did you do this well you did this by pursuing the good what was the good the good was not some moral idea that we made up the good was being useful what was good was what was useful in the Greek thought so what makes a good hammer what makes a good hammer is that it serves its purpose as a hammer a bad hammer is a hammer that falls apart as soon as you hit a nail with it a good hammer is a hammer that you can strike many nails with and it continues to function properly what is a good human being a person who operates according to their purpose a person who operates according to virtue which in the Greek view meant fulfilling your reason well these two twin poles reason and revelation this is what built the West these one of the foundations of the West and this was reflected in the American bargain America was the apotheosis of this America was the apex of this idea because on the one hand you had the reason of the founding fathers who believed in enlightenment philosophy who did believe that human beings had a unique capacity for reason that ought to be applied to the problems in front of them and to the evidence in front of them and on the other hand the founders were in large part deeply religious human beings and even if they were not personally religious they certainly recognized the value of religion for a society even the most deistic of the founders recognized that the presence of a God standing behind history and providing a logic to the universe was required in order for people to live virtuous lives George Washington put the synthesis well in his letter to the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1789 quote the consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the progress of the former by inculcating the practice of the ladder he said even better in his first inaugural address he said the foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality private morality this was the thing that the founders did it was truly unique because for most of human history even those people who believed in virtue believed that government could help cram virtue what the founders believed is that virtue could only truly be reached by people living in liberty exercising their free will to pursue that virtue that cramming down from the top was actually likely to backfire in a lot of ways and then instead what you needed were a people was a people committed to virtuous living with the freedom to actually live out that virtuous lifestyle without virtue we collapsed John Adams says we have no government armed with a power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion avarice ambition revenge or gallantry would break the strongest chords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other well these foundations have now been ripped apart because both of these both of these poles reason and revelation liberty and virtue they they've been thrown out first we throw out biblical virtue so the goal of a lot of Enlightenment thinkers was to move beyond the Bible this was a self-defeating goal the basic workable principles of the Enlightenment were built on biblical principles there's this weird idea going around these days that enlightenment philosophy sort of just popped into existence out of nowhere in the 17th and 18th centuries and it's just not true at all I mean it is just not true the fact is that it was an outgrowth of religious theology that was 2,000 years long at that point it was an outgrowth of the rise of Protestantism it was an outgrowth of the Peace of Westphalia there's a long his human history is a continuum and there are a lot of people today the Steven Pinker's of the world he sort of suggests that the Enlightenment popped out of nowhere that was the good stuff just ditched all the religion and we're good to go the problem is that the foundations on which the Enlightenment are built things like human reason how can you how can you be a believer in human reason just as a concept if all you believe is that human beings are basically freewill lists missing freewill balls of meat wandering through the universe right that is the actual scientific materialist view the scientific materialist view the reason scientific view is that you have no free will you were just born into a situation that you don't know anything about you are a combination of your genetics in your environment you don't have the capacity to choose you think you do but you're being lied to by your own brain you are just a ball of meat wandering through the universe with no actual inherent value how could you possibly build a moral system on the basis of that how could you even say that it's your goal to reason on the day of that the notion of reason the notion of abstract reason doesn't exist in this universe if you're a scientific materialist as so many of the Atheist community purport to be then all reason is is just firing of neurons in a particular order well what makes certain firing of neurons better than other firing of neurons why should I reason with you instead of clubbing you over the head and taking your stuff it seems to me that that would actually be and has been throughout human history slightly more efficient than reason but by getting rid of God they thought they would free the world to be ensconced in reason but the problem is that even if you believe but let's it let's assume that reason still exists let's assume that reason exists in the absence of a divine power who gave us the spark of creative light that allows us to be reasonable and choose our own paths in the world let's so let's assume none of that is true let's assume that reason still exists anyway for some reason for some odd reason we can't explain reason still exists right this sort of the Sam Harris view and Sam and I have had this argument many times well the problem is that reason without the idea of individual human value created by the judeo-christian system reason without the idea of virtue leads you directly to two alternative paths one path is passionate utopianism a desire to remake the world in a model that you think is most reasonable as in in the 19th century this view is best summed up by a philosopher French philosopher named Auguste Comte who basically suggested that the government could remodel human beings by using communal mechanisms to do so and that we could simply retrain human beings well this of course ends in gulags and gas chambers and this philosophy that the community at large can reshape individual human beings because that's what rationality says we ought to do that takes you pretty quickly to okay whose rationality well my rationality not your rationality you're just wrong right now don't value you as a human being or at least I have no reason to do so see the thing is that a lot of these secular humanists who believe in individual human value they're still living off the fumes of judeo-christian religion they just refuse to recognize it the gas tank is empty the fumes are still there they're living off the fumes but now the gas tank is running out of fumes and so what you're seeing is passionate utopianism rising again with radical left groups in the United States suggesting we need collectivism trumping individual right you see this in Europe as well collectivism trumping individual rights you see it on the far right as well folks who believe that individual rights are passe the alt-right sort of suggests this in the United States you see this also on the far right in certain European countries the Society of the sort of quasi fascist groups this idea that the collective Trump's the individual that's because we have moved away from judeo-christian values and we thought reason could could stand in but reason can't stand in because it turns out that reason itself is based on certain core assumptions about what human beings are and those core assumptions can either be made out of nowhere or they come from Revelation the second possibility is opposed to passionate utopianism is nihilism once you get rid of virtue and Liberty you're left with basically nihilism right nothing means anything pleasure-seeking simple pleasure seeking my emotions mean everything and this in turn ends up in many of the same places as passionate utopianism because if in the end all that matters is you and your subjective beliefs well then why should you respect anybody else's rights this is why I get shut down on college campuses right I go there and people say I'm Mike Rowe aggressing them I'm hurting their feelings and therefore my hurting their feelings is the same thing as me physically hurting them because their feelings are paramount my rights are not paramount you saw some of this stuff with regard to Brett Kavanaugh and their this argument was made with judge Cavanaugh it was an astonishing argument frankly that Judge Cavanaugh in allegation was made against him there was no corroborate of evidence with regard to judge Cavanaugh now everybody in this audience everybody in the United States believes that if judge Cavanaugh indeed is a 17 year old boy through a 15 year old girl on a bed and tried to rape her this is a bad thing everyone agrees there is no dissent on this not only is it a bad thing I think the vast majority of people right and left agree that probably that I shouldn't be on the Supreme Court if that's what happened but you cannot dam a man to hell without any sort of collaborative evidence and in Jewish theology Satan is the accuser right even he has to merit marshal some evidence it needs to be some evidence that the guy did something bad well there is a certain type of column that started popping up in the wake of the allegations against judge Cavanaugh and the the weird column went something like this I'm a woman I was raped there for a Cavanaugh's guilty this was an argument those actually made over number Connie Chung did in the Washington Post most famously she said when I was a 20 year old woman I was sexually abused by my gynecologist and now I believe Ford I believe Christine blaze you Ford now question is what does that have to do with anything it has nothing to do with anything so a guy who is not Cavanaugh did something bad to you who are not Christine Blasi Ford and therefore Cavanaugh did something bad to Christine Blasi for like there's no logical progression from one to the other but because you believe that feelings are paramount it doesn't matter what the objective truth is the only thing that matters that you feel that Judge Cavanaugh should be punished you feel that he is guilty doesn't matter whether you have have any evidence the only thing that matters is how you feel about this stuff this is why you saw people screaming in two senators faces saying you're disrespecting my sexual assault if you vote for Cavanaugh in what way your sexual assault has nothing to do with Brett Kavanaugh even if Brett Kavanaugh were guilty of something that had nothing to do with you you weren't there you don't know anybody when when I saw Alyssa Milano and characters like that saying well they believe that that Brett Kavanaugh was guilty I thought well my gardener doesn't and he knows the same amount that you do about this particular case but this sort of nihilism is what replaces reason when reason is undermined because you actually don't have a really solid rational basis for reason itself so what do we need in order to bring the country back together well I think the first thing we need is more churches I think the first thing we need is more synagogues and I think we need churches and synagogues that are dedicated to the welfare of their members but more importantly even than the welfare of their members is a common goal in the service of eternal values and that means that as I've talked about at nauseam in my show and in my columns this kind of newfangled religion where we think we're going to draw young people in with bands and pizza okay we've been doing this a lot in the Jewish community the only the only growing segment of the Jewish community is the Orthodox community every other area of the Jewish community is declining there's a reason for that number one people who are not Orthodox don't have kids in the Jewish community the average Orthodox family has 4.1 children the average non Orthodox family is below replacement rates they have less than two children but beyond that it's also because when you go to my synagogue there's a reason to be there when I bring my kids to the synagogue it's important for them to be there because we are reading the Bible every single week and in in really Orthodox communities and if I had the time I'd be going you know every single day the reality is that that sort of commitment to a value system beyond your own is what draws people to church in the first place you can't replace that with fun and good times because guess what hate to break it to everybody church ain't that fun okay neither a synagogue I mean as much as people say this sort of stuff oh yeah I'm whoever you take if it were you take your girlfriend on dates they're right you might it's a good place to meet girls right it's a it's a it's a good place to meet girls synagogue or Church but then when you're when I'm like you're your fifth date when you have your kids when you have the babysitter come over you're like you know what let's have a good time honey let's go to church maybe you guys are holier than I am but that's not what I do with my wife what brings me back to synagogue time and time again is the fact that there is something that actually means something there and that's what's gonna bring the country together again that doesn't mean that we're theocrats it doesn't mean we're cramming down our values on anyone else it means that we are providing a rational basis for the values on which America was built this attempt to remove religion from America's foundations and remove those values from America's foundations is just foolhardy it doesn't work the Ten Commandments were the foundational loadstar for the United States the original seal of the United States was actually Adams wanted it to be an actual engraving of Moses leading the Jews out of out of Egypt and splitting the Red Sea that's actually what he wanted it to be there was discussion at the at the founding whether Hebrew should actually be included among the original languages of the United States the founders knew full-scale that the Bible mattered and they knew that these values mattered Alexis de Tocqueville talked about this is what makes America different than all of the countries of Europe it's that we have all these social ties we all care about each other we have the social fabric when something goes wrong we go to our friends and our family and we know those people because we go to the same institutions that they go to the the way that a society is supposed to work is family first and then church and then broader church and then finally state as the backstop for things that are bad that are happening in your life but as the government has gotten bigger and bigger and people have moved away from church in response the government continues to grow bigger and bigger because we figure we have no backstop except for the in itself the only way that we're going to get out of this rut the only way that we're going to solve an enormous number of problems both financial and I think moral is for us to return to those baseline values that illuminated the country in the first place and the valleys that illuminated the country were predicated on values far older than that so I'm really grateful to be able to speak to you guys tonight I'm really grateful to speak to a group of folks who understand the value of something deeper something meaningful something that didn't start a set of values that wasn't created last week by the Supreme Court a set of values that actually is rooted in tradition and history and yes human nature and gods understanding of human nature because without those values society will collapse in on itself but if we are able to rekindle those values then we can bring the United States back together once again thanks so much happy to take your questions [Applause] [Music] howdy I think it's great I think that a microphone is coming to you okay hey Ben how are you hey hey um so I guess my question is uh how do you remain optimistic in the face of what we're all being faced with as conservatives today I work at a liberal arts college on the west side of the state and a conservative liberal arts college at Christian College and the past few years I've been seeing a lot of a lot of rhetoric come up in fact a you know just walking past classrooms hearing the things that are being taught about inequity and and things of that nature Tim actually mentioned uh you know at the Harvard Law School we had all the students heading down you know to protest Cavanaugh something they had no evidence to you know to support any of their claims and seeing a lot of the you know a lot of the problems coming out of universities these days out of mid 20-somethings I'm part of the equation I you know I'm I'm hopeful that when they get into reality and get a job a lot of these students that they'll be able to you know get penalized I guess with the reality of life and then essentially come around to to understanding conservatism and sympathizing with with our argument but at the same time it's just really hard to stay optimistic well I think that there there's a couple of causes for optimism number one I think that our chief optimism and the optimism that I feel is when I'm walking through the school back there right I think the optimism should be with the seven-year-olds not with the 22 year olds because those are the kids that we actually have an opportunity to mold right now all those 22 year olds were one seven year olds and seems like a lot of their parents didn't do a very good job but with that said I think that a lot of the the 21 22 year olds what they're experiencing right now and this is this I do see is a great frustration with the state of politics in the country and this is where I'm optimistic there are a lot of 21 22 year-olds who are sick of the idea that all conversation has to be silenced who are appalled by the fact that the left actually believes that everybody who doesn't agree with them should shut up and they're they're sick of the bullying and what that leading to his a libertarian ish streak and a lot of young people now libertarian doesn't get you all the way to virtue but what it does do is it at least gets you away from government cram downs and then it's our job to fill that gap because while libertarianism does is it emphasizes the value of the individual away from the government and then it turns out that individuals actually do still want social bonds and those social bonds can be filled by family and communities so getting people away from the fake social bomb that government supposedly represents is the first step and then you can fill that gap with frankly love you can fill that gap with a gap with reaching out to people on an individual level and helping them I do put an enormous amount of sake in the building of social capital and there are very few institutions in the United States dedicated to building social capital religious institutions have a long history of doing so hello again and congratulations on your television show now I'm going somewhat deep in the weeds it's aside from what you talked about but I've got your cornered do you and when you started out with the Trump thing were you not I never Trump her and have you come around and are you in the cult now yeah I didn't vote for Trump and the reason that I didn't vote for Trump is because I had three serious concerns about about then candidate Trump one was that he would not govern conservatively because he'd been all over the place in terms of his positions over history and so I wasn't fully convinced that he was actually going to be a conservative that concern obviously has been massively alleviated he's governed incredibly conservatively to my great happiness and delight second concern was that he was going to soul suck the Republican Party my concern there was that he was going to do things that were bad and conservatives were going to follow him down that path it's been kind of half alleviated let me say I think that what's been clear to me is that people who are Republicans don't see President Trump as a thought leader as much as as a vessel for pushing certain values in certain and certain policies more than values right that he's going to give us a concert of court for example that's that's the thing you hear from a lot of Republicans I don't hear a lot about Republicans saying well his economic theory is really first-rate because he doesn't have one so it's or if he does have one it's got some serious flaws so that's been half alleviated the part where I think it has not been totally alleviated and this was a serious concern during the campaign it remains a serious concern today is when the president says stuff that is actively morally bad people on our side of the aisle should say that's an actively morally bad thing for him to say that doesn't mean I don't support him doesn't mean I don't want me to do well doesn't mean I won't vote for him but if you actually want to retain any shred of credibility with the people you're talking to especially your own moral credibility not his right the president can defend himself he's quite good at it as we've noticed or he likes punching things as I've said many times the president is a hammer in search of a nail right he's either when he hits it when he hits a nail it's great when he hits a baby it's not so great but but when it but it but people make a decision about you as a human being based on how you respond to the events that you see in your life so after for example the president was caught on tape saying vile things about women it was incumbent on even people who voted for him to say listen I'm gonna vote for him anyway because he's going up against Hillary Clinton that just that that's all game kind of hunt but that said that's a really gross thing to say nobody should act like that right that's actually you can you can do it both ways you can say what he said here is bad what I was afraid of is that if he was elected it was going to exacerbate the condition of people who are on my side of the aisle suddenly saying it's okay to do all sorts of bad things because I don't think it's okay to do bad things even if it's somebody who's on my side of the aisle but the third concern is still my deepest concern this one's still on the table and you know it's a forecast where the end of this answer is going I'm highly likely to vote for President Trump for reelection but with that said my third concern is still very much on the table and that third concern was that he was absolutely going to be toxic with a lot of growing demographic groups in the United States this is particularly true among women there's a really bad gender gap for president from particularly among women right now and that's because the president is the president he has not stopped being Donald Trump he had an opportunity after being elected to really kind of grow into the office and become a different human I'm not saying he's been ineffective I think he's been quite effective in a lot of ways but as a character he's still the same guy who he was ten years ago he's 71 years old right 72 years old he's not gonna he's not gonna be changing anytime soon I mean he's not gonna be putting on the collar so yeah so that said I'm in concern still that he's toxifying the Republican Party as a brand a lot of young folks which is why I think it's important for a lot of people who are not the president to call it out again that reinforces the idea that when the president says stuff that is bad it's very important especially for his supporters to say you know mr. president that's not good it's bad that you did that and the kind of you know soft tiptoeing around the issue that's happened with a lot of Republicans cuz they're very because the president happens to have a very thin skin and he gets offended easily and then he lashes out there are a lot of people who well I don't want to criticize him I'm afraid he's gonna lash out at me well that's why you sorta I mean when people say he's like King David okay King David number one repented and number two the Prophet Nathan was enjoined to yell at him when King David did something bad so it's not our job to say whether he's King David that's God's job to say whether he's King David it's our job to be Nathan right Nathan was on King David sides it's our job to be Nathan and say when he's done something wrong with all of that said am i more likely to vote for him now yeah of course because as I said I had three concerns two of them had one has been completely alleviated the second has been mostly alleviated the third is still on the table and also the Democrats have demonstrated in vote for Democrats anyway but they've demonstrated full-scale how insane they've gone and that is exacerbated the problem obviously so what I say is sorry so just final mo I was never Trump during the election meaning I would not vote for him because he did not earn my vote I never encouraged people not to vote for him I said I understand why you would vote for him to stop Hillary I can't do it all so I wasn't in a swing state you know I was in California so my vote doesn't matter really anyway but with that said I didn't vote for him as opposed to Roy Moore who I actively told people not to vote for right I told people not to vote for Roy Moore because Roy Moore was allegedly and in my belief practically molesting 14 year old girls I don't think that person should sit in the United States Senate no matter how much I agree with some of his values with that said you know the I have I've called myself since the day of the election sometimes Trump because once the president's the president then you are sometimes for the president you are sometimes against the president when he does good stuff I love it and I call it fair and when he does bad stuff I don't like it all right I coins on my show the notion of good Trump bad Trump we have a jingle we play it right good Trump yeah Trump which one will it be today and you just don't know so thank you again for being here I have a question when you argue or not argue but have discussions with liberals this is my sister she was a die-hard liberal for years how do you well and I was a conservative and we'd go back and forth and the thing that she always came down to was well then you don't have any you don't have a heart for poor people cuz you don't care about all these handouts and things like that and actually the only reason she's a conservative now is because she started listening to your show and quit arguments right so but but my point is how do you really have a do you have a strong concise like here you go when you when you do argue with someone like that when they come up from an emotional standpoint so I think that the the proper argument is that charity has to be applied in the way that it is most useful to the person who is receiving the charity so if we're talking about charity then you have to talk about the highest forms of charity so Maimonides is great Jewish philosopher said the highest form of charity is giving somebody a job or hiring somebody is the highest form of charity well in order to hire somebody I have to have the money to hire them so taxing me taking away my money and my ability to hire a person actually is not helping a lot of people right will you take my money away that's an opportunity cost for me to hire some people my company employs 55 people and my wife and I have a bunch of people who work in various auspices doing different jobs for us just as everybody does right we have different contractors that we use the way economics works is that voluntary contract allows me to employ somebody in a way that is going to allow them to grow as in both their work and also cultivate a skill set now there's a group of people who legitimately have no capacity to get a job now you're talking about folks who have mental illness or physical incapacity right then the question is where should the charity come from and my view has always been charity first starts with the family and then it moves out to the broader community and this is why place such heavy emphasis on the fact that religious people in the United States give enormous Lea more charity than non-religious people in the United States it's very easy to be generous with somebody else's money it's not quite as easy to be generous with your own money but it seems that the people who are the most generous with their own money in the United States are the people who believe in God and go to church regularly red states which are on average not as rich as blue states give more charity than blue states on a per capita basis on a per capita basis folks who are conservative give more charity than folks who are on the Left bill de blasio gave like 200 bucks to charity out of you know 180 or $200,000 even when I you know even at times and I've made that kind of money I was not giving $200 to charity I mean that's that's that's ridiculous so you know the fact that the the fact that folks on the Left believe that charity means putting their hand into somebody else's pocket to give the charity and then they call themselves charitable I find kind of insulting if you if we actually want to be a charitable society we should start with the idea that you're supposed to cultivate your own charitable sentence of giving and then you can talk about the guy next store and whether he is giving charity and if there's a situation in which a community is completely failing to take care of a group of people then you can talk about moving to the broader community but you start here and then you move out as opposed to the left which simply suggests that the broad community has a responsibility for this individual and then it turns out that you can't move in again right the community is not going to support something the federal government is already supporting hi Ben howdy so I would take a bet that I'm probably the only atheist in this room given that we have Lutheran's no hey we got one more we got two okay at the risk of by the way thank you for coming even though you're atheist so I appreciate it yeah at the risk of this turning into a Ben Shapiro destroys video on YouTube I'm gonna try and keep this contained from what I can tell you want to elevate the presence of church in general or a virtuous theistic presence in the United States and decrease the presence of the totalitarian state correct okay if that's the case can you please describe to me the difference that you see between the evils of an overarching state and the evils of an overarching theocracy sure theocratic presence well the use of force that's the that's the entire thing I don't think that church you should have the power to compel I don't think synagogues should have the power to compel I think that they have the power to appeal and if you want to voluntarily engage I'm encouraging people in church to voluntarily engage with others but I don't think that my synagogue should be able to go round people up and bring them into the synagogue first of all I think that it's counterproductive I think it drives people away from religion to actually do that I think people are driven by love to religion I think they're driven by force away from religion it's a feeling of repression and oppression that makes people drop away from religion in the first place you know that that's that's the key distinction I don't want anybody forced to do anything I just think that if as a society we don't have any sort of centralizing values then it's very easy for our atomized lives to spin us off into a sort of selfishness that doesn't actually it doesn't actually allow for the retention of the rights that even libertarians want because it turns out there's a backlash if you have a bunch of people who actively are acting in what they perceive are greedy fashion then the the society at large tends to call for more government intervention to rectify the problem every right has a duty attached to it good people it's kind of fascinating if you look at different societies around the world what you see is that people who have inherently community oriented and good values can actually do decently in a variety of economic system so people pointed for example the Nordic countries on the left and they say well the order countries do grade right the Nordic countries are pretty wealthy there there are a lot of holes with how the Nordic countries run their social welfare state and we can get into the vagaries of that but what they say is that these Nordic countries do really well right because they have very high levels of social capital those levels of social capital were built over the course of centuries people who have a certain common set of values and just throwing a bunch of people together without a common set of values is not likely to actually increase the social capital in particular in a particular area it's my deep belief that if that a lot of the core values that are necessary for a civilized society rely on people who go to church so let me make clear something else I don't think that every atheist is immoral I don't think that every religious person is moral I think there are a lot of immoral religious people and I think that a lot of atheists who live moral lives aside from going to church I just don't think that you can rationally sustain a rights-based virtue based system on the basis of a godless system even the Greeks thought this this is even Voltaire thought this right Voltaire fame is an atheist and he famously said you know I may be an atheist but I certainly hope that my housekeeper is not because they didn't want his housekeeper robbing em so you know I again I think that the great distinction comes down to you should be able to live however you like should we all do what you want it's a free country I believe in those rights but if you want the country to be better you should use those rights to promulgate virtue instead of promulgating advice and I think right now people are using the rights to promulgate vais instead of virtue and then that's extending into the vice of actually taking other people's stuff in trying to control other people's lives hey Ben I'm currently a student at University of Michigan and I was like you man yeah thanks and I was just wondering if there was one point that you think you could convey to like a college student who's on the other side of the aisle of like conservatism and kind of holding those values what would at one point I mean I think the one point that I would convey to people on the other side of the AO is actually a junction a negative injunction as a Jew I'm kind of negative injunctions I like that thou shalt nots a lot those are those are some of my favorites because it's a lot easier to tell people what not to do than to tell them what to do but if I were to convey something people on the left to be thou shalt not indict somebody else's character without any evidence because that is the that is the way the left likes are you folks on the Left like to say that you're a racist sexist big and homophobe without any evidence whatsoever and then suggest that if you counter them then this just proves that you are a racist sexist pig and homophobe and the proper answer to your racist sexist bigoted homophobe is an unprincipled four-letter word I can't say here right followed by you right is it because the because you don't actually get to impugn somebody's character first time cursings ever been applauded here but the but yeah but you don't get to impugn somebody else's character on the basis of political disagreement alone you actually have to show why that person is the thing that you say that they are once you take that baton out of the hands of folks on the left they have to sit down and have a rational conversation you would hope on the basis of competing ideas in fact all too often they walk away but that's their problem you didn't want to have a conversation with somebody who doesn't believe that in the first place hello mr. Shapiro I listened to your podcast regularly and waited it five stars in iTunes so keep up perfect thank you I know from listening to your podcast that you advocate for speaking on pro-life issues using secular arguments and not religious argument right are there any social issues that we should advocate using our judeo-christian beliefs so I think that value systems can be judeo-christian in origin but you have to make a secular argument that appeals to people beyond the Bible so when I say don't make a judeo-christian argument what I really mean is not don't make a judeo-christian argument I mean don't make because I think frankly that virtually every conversation that takes place in a judeo-christian society is rooted in those values this is the argument I've made to Sam Harris I said to Sam Harris full atheist very very vocal atheist I said to him Sam it's very weird you and I have 95% of the same values why do you think that is and Sam said well you know I got my values from Buddhism I study Buddhism I studied Eastern religion I said right but I have the same values I didn't study any of those things so why do we have the same values could it be it's because we grew up ten miles from each other in a judeo-christian country with a 3,000 year common history maybe it's that and so when I say that mate you should make a secular argument I'm not saying that that is completely separable from the judeo-christian history of these arguments these arguments can only be made in a society that still is operating off the fumes of the values that I'm talking about but I I really believe that it's a mistake to ever make an argument on the basis of biblical texts with people who don't believe in the Bible its alienating and it's not productive they don't believe what you're saying you may as well be quoting to them from Biff sports book from 1985 there's no it doesn't it doesn't mean anything you can't actually convince somebody by saying you know well the Bible says and they go I don't believe the Bible it's a book a myth okay well where does this conversation go from here except for down virtually every argument not virtually every argument that you make and a political context should have some sort of secular rationale now and maybe that you believe what you believe because of a religious rationale but when you make an argument to a third party that person has to be addressed on their own level right and this is you know something that I think is true of all human interaction you have to address people on their own level I don't talk to my four-and-a-half-year all the way that I talk to an audience I don't talk to an audience the same way that I talk to a family member an individual you have to address people how they want to be addressed my view of conversation and debate is that the person I'm talking to gets to pick the weapon so if we want to go out rapiers then it'll be it'll be classy and nice and run go at it with with meathooks and we can do that too but you're gonna have to but you get to choose the weapon and then and then we have a conversation on the level you want to have the conversation on I was concerned when I talked to these graduate from one of our public universities and we were talking politics and we were talking trump and he was a conservative which is abnormal in many college settings and indicated that during his time there that if he spoke out right regarding conservatism or Trump and the professor's would hear that it would impact their college grade you know that's a sad commentary that free speech certainly it's to the point when you are going to be degraded for what you believe in yeah well that's certainly true and it's a concern I always tell college students it's a question I get asked a lot by college students is what should I do if I'm in a class and a professor says something I think is dumb but I'm afraid I'm gonna be graded down what do I do and my answer is always you really do have to gauge the risk/reward ratio here you have to decide what's the cost and what's the in what's the benefit very often it's a benefit to just be silent get an A in the class repeat spit back at the professor what they want to hear get an A in the class go make a lot of money and then refuse an alumni donation and that's the that's like giving the power to a professor who's going to punish you for no reason to do that and hurrah and harm you seems to me counterproductive go talk to the other students outside of class I'm not a big fan of the the general political strategy of smacking your head against a brick wall repeatedly as can you talk to you you're talking about the fundamentals of American history and in the roots of that virtue it's counterintuitive today but our view of anthropology that we're a broken people that view undergirds the most Liberty can I talk about how because I think that's really an issue today because most people actually believe human beings are by nature good and we really just need to structure e structure things so that all things will work out right I mean the judeo-christian common belief that human beings are capable of sin and also are capable of goodness but they are not inherently perfect or perfectible this this idea does undergird liberty in a couple of different ways so number one it suggests the necessity for the inculcation of civilization and virtue that you actually have to have structures that are created to make people better but not necessarily governmental structures social structures that are geared toward making people better and teaching them right from wrong right this is where religious worldviews come in this is why I say that that religious worldview has to exist otherwise you can't have liberty and then the Liberty based idea comes in when you start discussing the facts that because people are not naturally perfect or perfectible you have to give them the ability to rise or fall because they're still they still have individual rights and they are made in the and the basis of God's image the idea of freewill is really the key I think to Liberty so the idea that you are you have the ability to choose this is it's fundamental that if your choice is therefore constrained then it's a violation of what you can do as a human being and that if your ultimate goal as a human being is to draw from a religious point of view is to draw closer to God the only way to draw closer to God is through an act of will through inactives whether you're talking about love or submission whether you're talking about obeying or learning it has to be something that you want to do otherwise being forced into it is not obtrude now it's also worth noting that Liberty as conceived in the Bible really only came to fruition partially just historically as a result of religious conflict so I think number one Protestantism actually bringing the bringing the Bible away from a hierarchy and toward the idea that you yourself have the capacity to interpret moves in the direction of individual liberty right Lutheranism does a heavy dose of that but beyond that the peace of westphalia creates the conditions that are necessary for Liberty to actually thrive historically before the Peace of Westphalia you have a bunch of actual religious regimes that are basically cramming down whatever religion is at the head and after Westphalia suddenly religious minorities are given rights because religious people suddenly realize okay we can either beat each other's brains in or we can let each other live according to our various dictates and that creates the foundation for liberty and but Liberty within a society that is still guided by common religious values see that's the great irony of the religious wars that you know destroyed Europe for centuries is that the difference is between the groups in those religious wars theologically is certainly a lot smaller than the differences between the groups in Europe and in the judeo-christian tradition and other religious groups for example that is just elsewhere other cultures that exist elsewhere and so you could have a thriving society without cramming down a version of Protestantism or a version of Catholicism or version of any religion because they still did have this common thread that that could be held together by a belief in God in certain fundamental principles well how do you because of the mob mentality and the mob mentality is like so like I read that yesterday where the the lady from Colbert Report says well at least we've ruined like Brett Cavanaugh's life right that type of stuff 90% of the people I interact with online are conservative the 10% are the only ones that you hear from really because of the fear if you speak out potentially like CNN speaks about it and then all of a sudden it goes viral and like no one goes to your business right or they're calling your place of employment is there a way to get out like conservative views to put out a platform that you think is important to put out without having to worry about just like the ramifications I mean without having to worry the answer now unfortunately is no that's not the country we live in that we learn it's a scary time for business owners particularly but for anybody really because people can just start digging through everything you've ever tweeted or everything you've ever said on Facebook find something they don't like and then launch a boycott against you the next day it makes for a very very ugly country and I think that either we're gonna learn that we either we're gonna have to have our own social peace of westphalia or this is just going to continue right either at a certain point we're gonna say you get to say what you want to say and I'm still gonna chop at your business and as long as you make a good table and you're a carpenter then we're good and I don't really care what you have to say about Trump's tax policy until we get to that point then it's going to get uglier and uglier and it may have to get out later before people actually go weapons off before before they say okay I'm gonna back away from the table now we're not gonna play this game anymore yeah we I was head of an organization called truth revoltin we actually did this right after the left started boycotting Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin we actually initiated boycotts against people at MSNBC not because we like boycott tactics but simply to say and we said this openly we don't like boycott tactics we're using them because you guys have to learn that this can cut the other way and this is not a country you want to be a part of so if you actually would like a better country you're gonna have to back off a little bit and let people have their own opinions on matters also capitalism tends to take care of a lot of these things I mean the the left is deeply worried all the time oh well what if there's a discriminatory business and it decides that it's not going to cater at a particular group well then they will lose money in all likelihood because this is a very free-market country in terms of what you are able to buy and sell so it's it's but it is a scary it listen it's scary it keeps me up at night right I have kids it keeps me up at night will somebody find something that I don't even remember I said back when I was 16 years old and then come after me and the answer is yes they will right they will this is it's it's it's very difficult to to live comfortably right now in in the world of politics and I fear that that's that's one area where I'm deeply pessimistic I think it's gonna get uglier not not better anytime soon on that point been Hillary Clinton three hours ago said on CNN it's time for the left to stop being civil and take the gloves off now her and her husband are going on a tour you know about it next year yeah I mean I know they're touring around it's right cause something like an evening with the evenings with Bill and Hillary and I was just wondering how much they had to pay bill to spend the evening with Hillary he hasn't done it in years well my question is this if they think they've been civil and they're taking the gloves off what is our response and how do we I mean I mean our response where do we go I mean well first of all I think most Americans don't like this stuff I think most Americans really are not ready for a civil war and the people on the left you think they are ready for a civil war seem to forget that everybody in Texas has the guns so it's it's it's a very very bad idea I mean it's it's just it's it's really it's quite foolish um as far as Hillary Clinton what I like what I like about Hillary Clinton I admire about Hillary Clinton is that she's so robotic about everything it really is amazing like if somebody who's not big on emotion I sort of admired that about Hillary she's sort of like the the original Terminator she is she like underneath the exo underneath the skin is some sort of weird exoskeleton it's it's bizarre but what I mean by that is that there are people who are crazy in the Democratic Party who like Maxine Waters who actually believes this stuff like mob rule let's go get people and then there's Hillary who thinks that she's sitting there and she's like I will channel the rage of my base by saying this and in Machiavellian fashion I will say that mob rule ought to apply and then she does it it's the least convincing thing ever and because that's just who Hillary Clinton is but this is what the left once the base of the base of the Democratic Party believes that they haven't fought back hard enough and I as you say I don't know what strategy they are talking about employing I have a feeling all they really mean is we're gonna get so mad that when he our vote out that's really what they mean in the end but the way that it comes out is we are not going to stop people from you know confronting people in places of business or chasing Brian Kilmeade down the street in New York or going into a restaurant with Ted Cruz's wife and trying to drive him out of the restaurant it's funny I've been asked on Fox News they asked me whether I ever had that problem whether people have actually you know tried to run me out of restaurants and I said well that's the good news about keeping kosher those are my people so I've known every time I go to eat is my friends but but that is not but unfortunately that's really what this is going to become is that people who aren't right-wing eat at right-wing restaurants people who are left-wing you eat at left-wing restaurants and never the twain shall meet these divisions they're the social fabric has really been torn and then Democrats are tearing it a lot further I wish that if President Trump had a different personality he would actually have the ability to to rectify some of this he would if you were if you were just a if you were more easygoing fellow than the President of the United States really has an opportunity here because the left is acting so unhinged and insane that he has the capacity to say listen I'm not bad guy I'm not doing that I want to we're all Americans we're all brothers and sisters and for them to do that is really gross and off-putting and disgusting but the president as we say is not that type so I fear that we are we are in a cycle to the bottom here and again I don't think that this is getting better anytime soon I've been is there any chance that you'll run for the presidency in the future so to be honest I used to think about it a lot more I've stopped thinking about it quite so much because two reasons so reason number one I have two kids under five and it seems like an awful lifestyle and it really does not being present but the campaigning seems really truly awful being away from my kids that much like it's this is a hard week for me cuz I'm having three speeches in a week and I really miss my kids a lot and I want to go home and see my kids so doing that for months on end sounds really garbage but the the other reason that you know I'm less likely to run them before is because I try to be a decent human being and I think that we're trying to drive every decent human being out of politics right now by misconstruing everything they say deliberately to destroy them and it's really unpleasant I've been targeted by this several times and I lose sleep every time because if you're a good person your first response to criticism is maybe that's true right that's always your first response to criticism somebody says something bad about you go oh my god maybe that's real maybe that maybe I did do that thing and it keeps you up at night because you want to be better than you are if you're trying to improve yourself constantly well being a candidate means that you are getting nothing but that and the vast majority of it is dishonest so it's really not good for your health that said is there a possibility that at some point in the future I could see doing something like that yes but the conditions would have to be right and I'd have to feel like the country was ready to rally around a certain amount of decency as opposed to merely just hurling crap at each other and listen I can I'm good at hurling crap like I have a good arm at least for crap but that's it but I also would like to I'd like to be if we're gonna have a campaign of that sort I'd like to have a campaign in which I wouldn't have to feel bad about about calling for a certain level of civility and and so you know hopefully we'll get to the point where being for running for office outweighs the work that I have to do outside the office that's the real answer I have a lot of listeners I have a lot of folks I affect particularly young people and running for the presidents he's actually a step down from what I do I have an enormous number of listeners thank God and that means that speaking to those people every day is more important to me than giving a stump speech somewhere then not a huge number of people are listening to yeah

Channel: Christopher Thoma

Views: 102,207

Rating: 4.8368645 out of 5

Keywords: ben shapiro, timothy goeglein, christopher i. thoma, our savior lutheran church

Id: KAh9OkMQ-Kw

Length: 61min 13sec (3673 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018