Engage CA: Ben Shapiro’s Q&A Session

so i know you're in favor of the legalization of marijuana based on like your past yeah decriminalization yeah but um what is your opinions on like any regulations we should impose on it so obviously i think you need age regulations uh i think you have to ensure that the weird thing about decriminalization of marijuana is that this free price is so cheap that decriminalizing it to the point where it's still not beneficial to buy it illegally is is a little bit difficult uh the reason i'm for decriminalization of marijuana by the way is not because i like marijuana i think people who smoke it are losers uh and it smells terrible and you're wasting your brain cells the reason that the reason that i'm in favor of decriminalization is because the government is terrible at everything and the and whatever levels of criminalization have taken place have done nothing to prevent the access to marijuana for young people they've just done nothing i mean when i was in junior high in public school walter reed middle school people were selling it on the playground uh so that's not so it's you know um i i think that criminal treating it like cigarettes is probably the best way to do it you know a heavy tax and uh and decriminalization to the point where if you're above a certain age you can use it like alcohol or cigarettes makes the sense to me thank you all right thank you next question how do we stop the media with what they're doing dividing us they're dividing us greatly how could we exchange something to make it different what can we do well i mean i think the first thing you can do is stop watching cnn and msnbc i don't i i figured i figured from your question i was assuming that um but i mean the the good news is that i think that the the age of a dominant left media is basically over the fragmentation of the media is is one of the reasons i'm hopeful the fragmentation of the media has taken place like our website which didn't exist three years ago now gets 140 million pages a month so this is so and we're not unique in that area like there are a lot of places that are getting more viewership also i think more long-form engagement is happening too and one of the problems that i have with cable tv as in general is that you have to make an argument in two minutes flat or three minutes flat which encourages you to make the broadest possible version of the argument and also to straw man the arguments uh yeah we're we're all better off watching you know hour-long exchanges than than we are watching sort of the cable news cycle uh and right now it seems like the the polarization that's happening on cable news is largely driving a lot of the hatred because the easiest way but the easiest shortcut in politics to victory is to attack the character the people you're talking about and it's something i've been trying to work on myself because it's so hard not to just call people stupid but it's but but with that said uh yeah there's a there's a jewish principle called don the cuffs close which is to suggest that you have to assume the best of intentions on the part of people uh as general rule that doesn't happen too much uh in cable news but i think the threat of the mainstream media is waning i think president trump has demonstrated that's one thing president trump has demonstrated full scale uh you know this is what i've always said about president trump is that president trump is a hammer in search of a nail sometimes he gets a nail i mean sometimes it's a nail sometimes it's a baby but when he hits it but when he when he hits a nail it's deeply satisfying and when he and when he's hitting the media for being dishonest it's obvious that they are not only being dishonest in how they cover some stories but that they are dishonest about their central reason for being they say that they're there to objectively cover the truth and they are not which is why there's a poll just last week showing that well 58 percent of americans didn't trust president trump to tell the truth 64 of americans thought that the media were more polarizing than trump which is an amazing statistic so yeah i think the media are on their way out i think they got a problem hi ben i had a question regarding the current state of the republican party back in august matt walsh you know contributor to you wrote that the greatest betrayal of the republican party was the fully funded planned parenthood and their obvious spending bill we have a republican house a senate and a president and he still signed that bill yep and one of their main pledges was that they were going to defund planned parenthood and now our party is complicit in funding the largest provider of abortions so i'd like to get your comment on that yeah i mean i think that the real question for president trump was was he willing to actually veto because the fact is that this one came down to the senate there's such a slim margin in the senate and you have people like susan collins and lisa murkowski obviously uh who were going to vote against any budget that withdrew supposedly but in my view is it worth trying to hold their feet to the fire you bet there's no there is no reason that the house ever should have passed a bill that included funding for planned parenthood and if the senate wished to pass its own version of the bill then the house simply should have said we refuse to take it up if we have to shut down the government in order to defund planned parenthood then shut down the government uh over the last few years uh we've had i think about what five million people i think leave california to go to places like oregon nevada uh arizona including myself actually uh do you think that the massive migration of like middle class people who moved out of the state do you think that also had some has something to do with a lot of the policies that have been passed over the last few of course yeah there's no question that's the case the people who are middle class upper middle class if you're very wealthy in the state of california it's still possible to survive in the state of california particularly if you're not really doing it a lot through income right if you're doing it through a lot of passive income then it's possible to still live here and it's a beautiful place to live like you're not going to see people who are exorbitantly wealthy moving from malibu out to dallas it's human in dallas but it's and if you're very poor then there are a lot of social benefits to stay in california but we do have an extraordinarily bifurcated state the changing demographics of the state of california do obviously have a massive impact and i think that's less true in terms of racial demographics than economic demographics i think that bifurcation has created a bunch of very wild left rich people and a bunch of poor people who are looking at the rich people and saying okay give us a hand here and that's and that's been a serious problem for sure hi um so i know the migrant caravan is a really big issue right now and i just wanted to know what how do you think that the u.s should respond do you think that it should be like how trump is saying how we should once they come we should greet them with military or do you believe in a more peaceful approach so first of all so i will say and i don't know you know this is not popular necessarily in a lot of conservative circles these days i think the the quote unquote threat of the migrant caravan has been wildly exaggerated what i mean by that is not that illegal immigration is not a threat i spent half the speech talking about illegal immigration what i mean is that there was a migrant caravan last year by the time it reached the border it was like 300 people they went to a port of entry about 100 of them ended up being able to be granted asylum and 200 of them were deported okay the idea that there are 10 000 people who are arriving armed with guns and rocks and they're just going to try to break through the border i haven't seen the evidence of that and if that evidence were to occur then i think that the kind of troop search that president trump is talking about at the border then you might think maybe that's that's worthwhile right i mean this this troop surge is legitimately the size of the last troop surge in afghanistan uh to meet what will probably be a couple of thousand people who arrive at points of entry now i've been in favor of the wall i was in favor of a physical border a hardened barrier between the united states and mexico before president trump was i will when he no longer is right i mean i think that that that that is a necessity and the same way that israel has a border uh so it's it makes perfect sense to me to have that border but this notion that is being played up that this is a crisis the migrant caravan itself is a crisis i think that that's being played up for political purposes now what president trump has done that smart is he's trolled the left into responding in the stupidest possible way so what the left has said like really this is this is one of his areas of genius president trump will say something i don't think that it's advertent i don't think he's doing it on purpose but he's really good at it he says something he says something that there's like a center core of truth to it but it's wrapped up in this bundle of manure and what and and then the left responds to the bundle of manure and in the process they throw out the central truth so trump says stuff like the migrant caravan is a crisis we have to send people to the border now if people show up with rocks we should shoot them right i mean he says these sorts of things and then the left goes what this guy's a racist he's a ra and everybody who agrees with him is a racist and illegal immigration is not a problem at all there is no problem with illegal immigration why are we worried about our southern border at all anybody who is worried about our southern border is a racist so now if you're a voter you have a choice you can either go with the guy who says illegal immigration is a crisis or you can go with the people who say that illegal immigration not only is not a crisis it's not a problem at all and anybody who believes that it is a problem is a racist and so you end up with these two positions that are both like if democrats had a brain in their head what they would say is listen illegal immigration is a problem here are some sane ways of handling illegal immigration there's no reason to exaggerate the problem of this migration we should have people on the border to stop it people should go to ports of entry we have ways of handling this but exaggerating it is obviously a ploy for political purposes democrats won't do that because they hate trump so much that anything he does they just like themselves on fire so it's hey hey ben uh big big fan i know you're for defunding planned parenthood what part just the abortion part uh well if you defend the abortion part then the entire organization collapsed well hold on wait a minute wait wait wait wait hold on what is the vast majority of money that they make is based on performance performances so you're against welfare uh against wic against food stamps right we don't want to give any money to those people right well what i'm in favor of is local societal help for folks who are in trouble i don't believe in broad-based federal programs that create bad incentive structures okay so so let me let me let me say it this way so somebody okay last statement so somebody could go to plan i'd be for rather paying than for food stamps or welfare or wic which i don't want to pay for anyways okay uh you're against my tax dollars our tax dollars going for free condoms and birth control to say that anybody's not going to have sex until marriage that that's an ignorant statement people are going to have sex regardless so could you give them free birth control and condoms and our tax dollars pay for that all right we're going to okay so let's let's answer that so my my general rule is if you don't want me in your bedroom then let me stay out of your bedroom meaning that i've been told that it's none of my business what you do in your bedroom and i'm totally cool with that i don't want to be in there man that's that's wild you know but but it's but that also means that i'm not going to subsidize your sex life if you and frankly i am bewildered i'm just bewildered by the argument that it is difficult to obtain birth control in this country that's an insane contention it's an insane contention i mean have these people been to a cvs i i also will say just on a moral basis on a moral basis i really don't like the argument ah people are gonna have sex anyway yeah people are gonna do a lot of stuff anyway doesn't mean i have to subsidize it like i was you know as as um as the man who was in all likelihood the most prominent and open virgin in america until marriage uh like i like really this is you know it's it's not even a laugh line it was a point of pride for me it's a moral because i believe that it i believe it's a moral thing like because i believe that marriage was designed to contain sex like this was this is what marriage was designed to do and separating marriage from sex has led to such significant ramifications for the society in terms of single motherhood in terms of the demeaning of women in terms of the rise of pornography in terms of the destruction of relationships between men and women it's been absolutely terrible so i'm so i don't i was 24 when i was gone when i got married which means i was a virgin until i was 24. my wife was a virgin until she got married that is a good thing and the fact that and just because popular culture has decided to mock people who i think try to make good moral decisions about their sex life popular culture is full of crap oh hey what's up ben my name is joel piggybacking on that mom and dad taught you that my wife and i proud virgins my brother and his wife proud virgins so i'm good with that i'm proud of it uh this question stems actually from a debate we had last week with california professional firefighters union president polls show that 70 percent of firemen and policemen are conservative and they're republican but yet we give our votes constantly to the democratic party we throw our names out for this crappy gas tax for the you know the dialysis center just a bunch of nonsense that obviously unions have a bad look at but as a cow as a fireman as a policeman we again have been giving our vote out what can we do what can i do to bridge that gap of those 70 percent of conservatives and win that vote how can we bridge the gap with the republicans and go hey i know there's a bad rap with unions but what can we do in order to change that vote and change the demographic i mean the the fact is that i mean obviously you're right that the money that is being spent by all of these unions uh is going toward democrats because there's a corrupt bargain between the unions and the legislators in the state of california and the corrupt bargain is that if we spend a lot of money getting you guys elected you will then sign pension rich contracts that do not pay out over time simply because the money's not there i mean they're lying about listen here's the reality they're lying to the police they're lying to firefighters when they say that this money is in the pension funds they are lying to you it is nonsense they're saying that stuff is accruing at like eight percent a year okay if i could get eight percent a year on my money i'd put my money in there like the calper and this is true for virtually every public union in in the state of california which is why what you're seeing in cities like stockton is that the first people who are getting nailed are the police and the firefighters right this is this is what's happening all over the state of california so listen i've been long in favor of of right to work states i think that getting rid of a corrupt system by which the state takes wages out of the pockets of professionals and then gives them to unions to be spent on the election of those legislators again that is corrupt and terrible and the only way that's going to stop is if people are able to actually you know form voluntary associations without the imprimatur of the state if you want to negotiate with your boss that's fine but if you want to negotiate with the state of california on the basis of legislation that is promulgated that's a that's a real problem that's a real problem the unions are public sector unions are a threat and i know that it's become unpopular even in conservative circles to talk about public sector unions for cops and firefighters because we love cops and firefighters but the fact is that the logic is no different than it is for any other public sector employee and if we're not willing to say that then that's what we're gonna get we're gonna get a lot of money that is spent by you know unions that don't even represent their own constituents politically now there can be regulations that are put in place that prevent the the use of those monies for politics themselves uh which would be another way of doing this if you don't want to actually just get rid of the unions then what you do is you say they're not allowed to spend this money on politicking they can only spend this money on services for their own members hi i just wanted to ask you if there was ever a specific point in your life where uh you just got really into politics and what should young people like me do to start a career in politics okay so so i honestly can't remember a time when i wasn't into politics i was always very into history the first chapter book i remember reading was i think i was four and a half and i was reading like a chapter bio of benjamin franklin so i was always into this stuff um it's uh yeah i i like i found a paper that i wrote when i was 12 about the impeachment of bill clinton so at 12 even at 12 i was in favor by the way um but i i think that to you know the way to get involved professionally in politics there are a couple of different paths right if you want to be involved in electoral politics then getting an internship with a congress person uh going to work for a think tank like the heritage foundation is great if you want to be sort of in the commentary what i always say is that you have to you have to have a comparative advantage where are you an expert that nobody else is an expert pick a field get really good at it and suddenly you're offering facts that nobody else has because the truth is that uh you know in the in the clean version opinions are like armpits uh everyone has them but that's it but uh but but people start listening to your opinion if you actually have facts at your disposal that nobody else has and so learning a lot reading incessantly is the best way to get into this and then when you get old enough when you go to college uh and you are at college what i've said to every college student is if you is what one of my mentors andrew breitbart told me which is if you have a cell phone you're now a reporter right you're in a you're in an area where you can report on things that are of relevance to a huge swath of the public and you should be reporting on that if you can get away with it um but you know learning and reading incessantly like i put on my podcast i recommend basically a book a day or a book every couple of days uh and i am people kept asking me to post a reading list i'm going to have to but you should read economics in one lesson by henry haslet to give yourself a basic understanding of economics basic economics by thomas soules another one you should read uh uh probably a people a a history of the united states by paul johnson which is a really good thick history of the united states you should read the federalist papers like there's certain foundational documents that are worth reading and getting to know hey bang big fan um first i want to thank you for being you um well you're you're awesome dude well thank you um i really have a choice in the matter thank you it's a blessing um i'm i'm assuming that you've read tolstoy's the kingdom of god is within you i know actually no oh jeez i don't know sorry i didn't i didn't mean to destroy yourself a lot of other tolstoy but go ahead um he posits um basically a radical teaching of um christ turned the other cheek which is like no violence in any way whatsoever and i was she's not enough this is no it's fine i i can get your premise that's it yeah um i was wondering if you agreed with that and also how you would rectify that with the second amendment so this is one of the areas where i'm real fortunate to be a jew um [Applause] so so the reality is that you know my understanding and this is this is where i'll actually ask for a hand but tell me if my if my understanding of this is correct my understanding of turn the other cheek is not that if somebody is violent to you that your job is to be pacifist in the face of violence it's that you're supposed to is that in seoul you're supposed to be humble enough to understand a rebuke the new testament and the old testament support the second amendment the turning wait wait the turning of the other cheek was when you're personally insulted versus attacked maligned somebody breaking into your home the bible says new testament says that if you do not provide for your family you are worse than an infidel and that also means self-defense so i have to say i'm really liking this format i can like tag out for a christian that's great it's like macho man randy savage coming in from the top rope right there generation z is probably more conservative than baby boomers how are we supposed to convince our peers that a uh a life full of responsibility and uh judeo-christian values is going to be more beneficial to our souls in the long run than engaging in immediate pleasures so i think that that's something we have to be it's a great question and this is the only question that really matters right um i think that the the key is that kids have to be taught from a very young age that responsibility falls on them and that that's a good thing you know it's really interesting when you bring up young kids right now i have two kids so i can say this kids like rules and they like responsibility um every kid when they're when they're three four or five years old they want to be an adult right now that we're adults this is one of the big problems we have in our country is that all the adults now want to be kids but all the but kids actually want responsibility they want to be given rules they want the idea that they have been granted the capacity to shape the world around them it's empowering to them kids want to be given the feeling that their life is an adventure when you you a kid like small kids you them when you give them everything you them when you tell them that everything is going to be provided for them without work and i think that the human soul resonates to that i i said this the other day on my podcast i was talking about the fact that america is a significantly less mobile society than we were 30 years ago and i think it's a serious problem i think that it used to be actually you'll see a preview so tomorrow um we air this uh sunday special that i did with tucker carlson uh and and i like tucker but i have some pretty significant disagreements with tucker uh and tucker is uh i will say that tucker you know calls himself sort of a populist on economics he's a lot closer to bernie sanders than he is to me on a lot of these issues uh and you'll see like when you watch the sunday special it's pretty fascinating he pretty much and he he'll admit this he'll say this uh and one of the things that he says is he says you know why should it be that people who are in towns where they're losing jobs you're asking them to leave the the gravestone of their father and their grandfather and move out to north dakota and get a fracking job and i said to him right because god told abraham leave the house of your fathers and go to a land that i will show you right all you are guaranteed in this life is adventure and that's a wonderful thing to be guaranteed right that's what god guaranteed you when you were born god said to you i'm going to put you in a place where you don't know what's coming and you don't know what's coming next and all you have is the capacity to make choices that make your life better all you have is the ability to go out and shape your future and that's true we we are when i say we are privileged i don't think we're privileged because we're rich in the united states i mean we are privileged because we have the capacity to shape that adventure we have the capacity to make those choices in non-free societies you don't have any of those choices those choices are not there and when you say to a young person go out and make your own choices and that's really when i say facts don't care about your feelings that's really what i mean because what i mean is that reality exists you can either embrace it and you can grapple with it right you can be you can be jacob wrestling with the angels meaning wrestling with fate you can be you can be jacob wrestling with reality and you can overcome right you can that's what you can do and this is a common theme throughout the bible it's also a common theme throughout the history of the enlightenment western civilization right the the the the verse in genesis where god talks to cain right he says you have an evil inclination but you can overcome it right team shall you can overcome it right that's a unique idea and it's an important idea and i think that young people resonate to that because young people do want to change the world people who are 17 18 years old don't want to be told that their future is going to be reliant on a universal basic income where they're going to sit there and somebody's going to send them a check in the mail and their entire life is going to consist of them sitting in a darkened room looking at a screen playing video games what they actually want to be told is they can change the world and one of the dangers in a free society is that 17 18 years olds who are not you know given a purpose when they think about changing the world they think okay bernie you know single-payer healthcare get involved in politics what usually what we should be saying to them is no we mean when we say change the world is build something go out and build something build a family build a fundamental building block of our civilization that's what's going to make you happy hi ben it is very nice to have you it is my unenviable task to say we have time for one more question i uh go ahead it's it's okay okay two more two more two more questions i'm so sorry i wish we had more time but please go ahead we have time for two more thank you for coming and my question is how should the republican party reach out to uh latino in hispanic borders considering that a great majority of us are actually uh conservatives i'm one of the few latinas in my community that are actually republican and when i reach out to my community i'm labeled a racist and a traitor so how do you how how should the republican party reach out to a community that is actually a very big market for the ideology that the republican party stands for and um a follow-up question today if it's [Applause] yeah i'll sign that for you um if the uh as far as the first question uh you know i spoke at the california republican party convention in 2012 2011 2012 somewhere in there and one of the things that i said at the podium is that as many of us as possible should work on learning spanish this is not to say that folks who who don't speak spanish shouldn't learn english they obviously should and so we can speak the same language but the language of conservatism is not relegated to english the language of ideas spans all languages so the first thing we can do is actually communicate in a language that folks speak in so that would be helpful now the second thing that we can do is as i said before when we see racism when we see things that are that are racially tinged we should forcibly call them out and separate off from them and that's important to do because otherwise people it lends credence to the lie that democrats like to promulgate that folks on the right are racist uh the third thing that we have to do is we actually have to talk about what are the central priorities so i've seen some conflicting polls about the hispanic community that are kind of interesting so more socially conservative but also more in favor of government services than than some of the than uh some other immigrant communities in the united states and so we sort of have to recognize that as a fundamental truth but i really believe that for every community what has to be reinforced is that in a free society you're either going to be dependent on private industry or you're going to be dependent on government and this is where in a state like california it's actually deeply imperative that we reach out and we go into particularly impoverished communities of every race and what we do is we make clear opportunities for them from the private sector so for example i think that we should be going in and and paying people's bus tickets and first months rent to go get a job in the area where they can get a job i think that we should be i think that major corporations should be going into areas and saying to young students listen you get straight a's we'll pay for your college and then you come work for us for three years right there are programs that exist like this for some major corporations now all of this would be would be changing the math a little bit but the first thing you have to do is you have to forcibly fight back on the idea that you're a racist so i mean honestly my response when somebody says that i'm a racist is you're a jackass pardon the language um and the reason that i and the reason that i say that the reason that i say that is because you cannot grant them the the premise that is even rational to call you racist right you have to say it makes you a bad person to call me a racist without evidence once we take that off the table we can talk policy but if you're going to make a character attack on me i'm not going to sit here and take that and i'm not interested in having a conversation with you amen all right one more question final question of the evening either ben appreciate you allowing me to ask my question um ultimately something i've been struggling with is i'm a very strong proponent like you of the pro-life viewpoint and a big reason that is is because i uh think that's god's job and not ours to determine the intrinsic value of a life uh because of that i've recently struggled with the idea of the death penalty how have you balanced those contradictions so um number one i think that babies are innocent people who kill people are not um that's that's that's really the the central contention of death penalty i think the death penalty exists for a couple of reasons on a purely secular level so you know without quoting the bible and you know if you shed blood by man shall your blood be shed and all that um the the secular rationales for the death penalty are are twofold one is the supposed deterrence effect i actually think that that one is less important than the second one which is that there is a certain amount of retributive justice that is necessary for a society to function and if you do not have you see this in a lot of societies that don't have rule of law it's fair to say that in a rule of law society like the united states the death penalty is a little bit less important than it would be in other societies but you particularly see this in societies where there isn't a solid rule of law where if one if a member of one group kills a member of another group and there is no death penalty and there's no good jail system for example then a member of the second group will then go and kill somebody as a member of the first group and this is how you get tribal warfare uh and this is why the idea of putting people to death for committing murder was originally proposed you know on a secular level by societies was you commit a murder the state has it the state has an interest in killing you because we can't have this lead off a cycle of revenge that you see i mean forget about in less developed society you see this in gang warfare on a routine basis right i mean this is basically half the crime in the united states so that exists on a secular level as far as you know the morality i i really don't think the two are in any way similar i think that if if you kill if if you rape and kill a child you should die uh if you are an innocent child in the womb you should not it's pretty pretty simple logic there as far as the efficacy of the death penalty in the united states i think there's serious questions to be asked whether the death penalty is properly applied in the united states uh in my opinion it's not applied consistently or enough uh if you're going to actually apply you have to apply it you can't do this routine where people stay on death row for 40 years and then and even then it's unevenly applied i think the best case can be made for abolition of the death penalty is not a moral case it's in it's a government sucks at everything case because i'm always warm to that case because the government sucks at everything okay well thank you all so much i really appreciate your time have a wonderful week

Channel: Real Life with Jack Hibbs

Views: 1,860,160

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Keywords: Ben shapiro, shapiro, daily wire, the daily wire, Trump, Donald Trump, Democrats, Republicans, politics, political, ben shapiro destroys, left-wing, right-wing, the ben shapiro show, election, vote, midterms, 2020 prediction, senate, house of representatives, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles

Id: JTpY7MbuWvk

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 08 2018