Chapo Trap House - 306 - 2 Cities, 1 Cup (4/14/19)

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

We review Ben Shapiro's book "The Right Side of History". Tickets for our Cornell show on 4/26: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/union-days-2019-presents-chapo-trap-house-live-at-cornell-tickets-60348589255 Come see our May 1 Trivia Night at Housing Works in NYC: https://chapomaydaytrivia.splashthat.com/ Dates, venues and tickets for our European tour will be posted soon at: http://www.chapotraphouse.com/tour/

What are you looking at? Huh? Me? Yeah. I'm trying to find this fucking quote from Steve Bannon, where he talks about, like, what Western heritage is. Right. Like, he defines it, and he defines it by three cities.

I know one of them is Jerusalem, and I'm trying to think of what the other two are. I think so. It's like Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, or something, or it's Jerusalem, Athens, D.C., of course. But I can't find the goddamn quote, because I wanted to compare it, because it's basically exactly the thesis of fucking Shapiro's book. No, it's Jerusalem, Athens, and Chicago, baby. Chicago. Atlanta.

Jerusalem. It's actually Tehran. Tehran, Indiana. I'm going to say, I'm going to say Athens, Jerusalem, and D.C., I think that's what it is, and that's exactly what it is. Oh, D.C. Oh. D.C. is literally never produced.

No. D.C. is not a thing. The Jews created it, like religion is this product of a Judeo-Christian process, which culminates in a value system that is durable and leads to social flourishing. Simultaneous to that is a revolution in human reason that starts in Athens and gives man governance over his passions and allows him to negotiate with others in the form of politics. Those things were brought together and perfected with the American Revolution. That's the theory that Shapiro puts forward, and that's his definition of Western civilization,

and that is basically exactly what Steve Bannon says. It's the exact same thing. It's the same idealist miasma. This book, I think, is Shapiro's attempt to rebrand. Oh, yeah. After leaving Breitbart, essentially, for being bullied, he said it was out of defense of Michelle Fields. He was doing it.

He was trying to act like he was- He's a woman protector. Yeah, he was a woman protector or whatever, all five foot, four of them. And I think it was actually pretty obvious what was happening is that he said this is not like Andrew Breitbart's legacy. And what he basically meant is that he thought that because Breitbart sucked enough wasp cock that they let him in the country club, that he was going to be the new in-house Jew.

And then when Bannon came in and was just like, yeah, we don't like you anymore. He harkened back to some more traditional right wing texts. A little father-coch lit action. Some protocols were followed. So he suddenly saw which way the wind was blowing, but also people were more interested in Steve Bannon because he didn't speak in platitudes. And he wore four shirts at the same time. He was hot.

He was hot. That's why people wanted to fuck him. People looked at this stud getting off the bus, and they saw his rippling midsection in seven layers of LaCaugh shirts, his barber jacket shimmering both from just the aura of Steve Bannon and the Coke sweat pouring out. No, they saw it. They saw that they saw this absolute stud whose midsection looked like those bell cheeses. If you let a baby chew them and spit them out, the torso of those need to fuck on this

guy intellectually. I want to give him a sexy blow job. Oh my God. Thank you. Thank you. That's what this book is. No, but I'm trying to find a new a new way in. The reason I said Coughlin, though, is because is because the reason Bannon supplanted Shapiro

is because he harked back to that old time religion of right wing populism during the Depression, which is basically what we've been in since 2008, even though nobody wants to admit it. And that's the conditions that are shaping like what people want. And so he's there with that Coughlin style, you know, right wing national where Shapiro, he is a Sun sign patriot, his his really his Buckley esque ideology is an ideology of plenty. It's an ideology where where the bellies are full and you can kind of have an intellectual approach to politics.

When things get skint, when your kids start dropping like flies from fentanyl overdoses, you know, the floored voice of a of a whiskey drunk Irishman telling you about the American, you know, a snap at the back by the cultural elite and, you know, the the hearty virtue of the the lumped American, you know, white person, there's going to be a lot more receptive to that. And he's just trying to like do it over again. It's like, dude, this is not your time. But Bannon, who is like, we'll go ahead and say not very smart, I think still better read

than Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro has like four Bill Bennett books about American history. It's the same thing. It's completely the whole book is like a it's like a a survey of Western thought, which I've said before, I'm like, I'm fine with canon, like you want to talk about dead white men like that's fine, especially because like those are the ideas that did for better or worse shape the world. That's true.

You need to know about him. You know how it happened. Exactly. But he clearly did not do the reading. Oh, God. It's no idea. It's the most surface asked Jonah Goldberg. Hey, if anybody knows anything about the founding fathers, slip me a line, you know, I'd like

to use your research for myself. He was like, I don't know a lot about this stuff either because like it's boring and like I'm cool. But like, I mean, like literally when I hear the word like teleology, I like black out and like hear the baby elephant song. But like when he gets to the Marx part, the first thing he starts talking about is like Marx's belief in human nature. Like he's just, he has no idea what any of these people said.

Yeah. This is a, it's like a. It's not a thing. A bad like like freshman like that's the whole first thing that it's not a thing. This is like a first semester freshman year, like intro to like, you know, Western civilization and thought and it's written at that level or probably, okay. So just to formally introduce the show and what we're talking about today. This is Choppo.

We're here and I wanted to take a dip into young master Ben Shapino's latest masterpiece. I am going to warn you, it is not as uproariously funny as his attempt at writing a novel. Really tedious. This is really tedious and he is again, incredibly impressed with like, you know, what he thinks of in himself is this huge breadth of knowledge about Western civilization. He's a dumber Steve Bannon. He's got less coke. Yeah.

He's on, he's on like. You need to go to do that. Monster energy training. Yeah. Yeah. Steve Bannon, Steve Bannon does funny things like when he was like, uh, it was like the first week of Trump's presidency and they were like, doesn't the entire national security council just fucking hate each other?

Aren't you guys just getting nothing done and everyone hates the shit out of each other and it's just like a constant backstabbing and, uh, he's a messy bitch. Yeah, you're just getting pushed out by people have been in government and haven't just been writing blogs for 10 years and Steve Bannon was like, well, you know, it's like, uh, it's like Dostoyevsky says, all families are different, double fucked it up. No, he's so much better. He's so much better than Shapiro because if you hung out and this is why I think journalists love Bannon so much and why he was more magnetic just because if you're stuck in a room with

both of these guys, one of them by the end of it is like, I want to kill myself. Only one of them is going to talk to you about how you should buy a minor league baseball team together. Yeah. Yeah. Bannon like, I feel like I wonder if Bannon is the kind of Coke user I am where he just gets really supportive. Yeah, I bet he is.

Oh my God. Yeah. You should write that play. Gear, gear. You're doing such a good job at Netherlands, dude. We are doing so great. We should take a rock climbing class. Like right now.

Right now. Gear, your hair is amazing. I love you. I love you. That's why there are so many like good, terrible, far right art projects is Steve Bannon just hung out with enough guys and he's like, yeah, you should totally write a play where Claudius comes back to life in modern day LA and shows up these gang bangers with classical knowledge or whatever the fuck he's into.

Ben Shapiro has some funny stuff like he's had a bunch of things where he's like, here's it. My favorite tweet from Ben Shapiro is the one where he goes, um, the fact that people listen to rap music instead of Mozart proves that many people are stupid, but it's just like, do you want to hang out with that guy? No, I don't want to hang out with either of them, but I feel like you hire chance of fun with Bannon. So the title of Ben Shapiro makes you feel pretty.

The title of Ben Shapiro's new book is called The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. And this is like the newest entry in a line of these boilerplate fucking conservative dad books about like, like you said, this like, I don't know, high school level intro to western civilization, of which the point is like, there's a reason America is the greatest country in the world. And it's because of God and rational thought. It's literally one of those Twitter accounts that just has classical Greek statuary.

Like he's that he's pivoting into that kind of right winger. That's the new, that's the new skin they're putting on racism because it's not palatable to be about. It's literally just bit him in the ass. I don't know how he didn't see it coming just from a self-preservational kind of point of view. It's like when a schlafly like, you know, SmackDown, Equal Rights Amendment, and then she really thought she was going to get a cabinet position.

And like Gloria Steinem, who I think is a goof and I have a lot of problems with, which she's like, she's a feds to Loki, but she was like, poor Phyllis, Tom Derwey right out of a job. Okay, so, and then the subhead here and the flap copy just says, America has a God shaped hole in its heart, argues New York Times bestselling author, Ben Shapiro, and we shouldn't fill it with politics and hate. We've got a big ass hole and we need to stuff it with God, not politics and hate. Can you please God my naegle?

America is gaping right now. I just want to say like, the reason I wanted to talk about this and look at his book this week is like, again, like the backdrop to this is basically the pogrom that he is beginning to try to inspire both against Ilan Omar, Muslims of any kind in this country, and immigrants of any kind. Yep. So he's trying to say that like, oh, we've become so divided and hateful, but like, here's, let's look at it.

Why? And I think it is interesting. Like the book is, like I said, dog shit and garbaggio, incredibly tedious, but I think I said the pivot and like the what he's attempting to pull off here I think does speak to a certain kind of right wing politics that is trying to be in vogue now because I mean, famously Ben Shapiro. Again, he's another one of these very anti-Trump guys who again, strangely have sort of come around on that.

No. You know what it is? I played the Democrats for not being a reasonable opposition. You went too far to the left. I did not read the whole book. I farmed out a few of these chapters. I read the introduction and first chapter, which I think basically tell you everything you need to know.

But I'd like to, you know, join me and us now in going through some of this book. And I think, I think like it will become apparent what he's trying to do here. So the very first line of the book is, this book is about two mysteries. The first mystery, why are things so good? The second mystery, why are we blowing it? Damn, why am I so good? So Matt, like you said, like his politics is the conservatism of a time of plenty. And this is essentially what he's setting up in his introduction is that like this

Panglossian view of, you know, America as like, hey, everything is so great. People have TVs and cars and like, you know, for the most part, you know, food is plentifully available. And like, but why are we so damn depressed? He also provides, by the way, extremely faulty information on infant maternal mortality rates. Yeah, I'll get into that. So he goes, in 1900, some 10% of all infants died before reaching their first birthday in the United States.

In other countries, the number was far higher. Approximately one in every 100 mothers could expect a giant childbirth. And he's going like, oh, using infant mortality rate as an example of like it's dropped dramatically and like as you did in like the 19th century or whatever. But the thing is like America still our infant mortality rate is dog shit compared to like other first world countries. It's dog shit compared to Cuba. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Cuba kicks our ass. Because we live in an era in which the vast majority of the American population lives in climate controlled spaces with plenty of food, a car, and at least one television. And there's no way any of that will ever end. We can speak with each other across thousands of miles, instantaneous, instantaneously, find and collate information with a touch of a few keys, send money seamlessly, worrying around the globe.

On the information superhighway. We buy products manufactured in dozens of different places for cents on the dollars without leaving our homes. It's like a 50s education. Yeah. And he's going like, like, yeah, exactly. It's a film strip. I'm Troy McClure.

Look at America's vast agricultural yields. It's fields of barley. Weep. Millet. And then he goes on to say, there are no restrictions barring particular races or genders for particular jobs. There are no governmental rules designed to privilege one particular biological or religious in group at the expense of any other out group.

What's a biological group? Oh, we know what he means. But I like to say, like, you know, everything's so good in America because, you know, we have these freedoms that, like, there are no laws barring the practice of religion or certain people from holding certain kind of jobs. Unlike what me, Ben Shapiro, has been trying to accomplish in my entire political career, either at the National Review or Breitbart, is setting up precisely those religious tests for employment or holding office.

I mean, there is a good chunk of the GOP base right now that literally thinks that there's like a law that can be enforced that's like, if you're a Muslim, like you can't hold office in America. Yeah, no. There's some fucking copy pasta boomer meme going around about how there's some law on the books from the 50s that could be invoked to just kick Ilan Omar out of Congress and then maybe deported now do you activate the bank 1954 alien laws. I spent a lot of time researching the law and during the space race there, it was called

the Moon Act and we could not have we could not have any persons or individual style humans who worship the moon as it were and muslimically they worship the Quran, which is a lunar object. The Quran was cast down by the demon god Muhammad from lunar scenarios to tactically ascertain a Kaba style cube here on earth that connects with Muhammad and Allah, the moon, the moon prince as it were. And Ilan Omar, she will pray to this moon god every day and due to the stipulations of the 1953 Moon Act, she will be rejected and ejected back to her lunar home. Felix, as you're well aware, one of the one of the first films the silent one of the first

major silent films is about our war on the muslimic moon god. The French were very ahead of ahead of the times, always had a problem with the spirit of Charles Martel was alive in that rocket that crashed into Allah's lunar muslimic eye. So he could not see all the infidels that one day, but of course he repaired it using Islamic magic. So this is like I want to point out one of the way like the we were aware of the Ben Shapiro style when he's writing fiction, which is to just reuse cliches.

Oh, God. The most bears of man everywhere way possible and then like describe the ghetto style chill kid wearing a Bart Simpson t-shirt over Simpson t-shirt is my ass buddy over Simpson t-shirt over over Simpson t-shirt. He looked at it. I have a Duffman t-shirt. I have desert storm bar. Of course.

I have never. I have never seen a Homer t-shirt ever. I collect bootleg Barts and I don't own. It's not a thing, dude. He looked at his beeper was up the Budweiser commercial. Remember that it said. So that's his style of writing fiction is his style of writing a what is like supposed to be a very serious nonfiction book that is about the big ideas of Western culture.

What he does is like, he'll say, he'll say something like, OK, here, conspiracies have replaced reason and subjective perceptions have replaced objective observation. Facts have been buried to make way for our feelings, a society of essential oil, a society of essential oils and self-esteem replace the size society of logic. That is his attempt to be like, those are for the God shaped hole. You need oil. You got to lube up that whole essential oils like that's his attempt to like craft like a like a like an interesting sentence or idea.

And then what like he'll end a paragraph like that. And then what he does is every time over and over again, spends the next page or so just dryly citing statistics in the most boring way. He's like to prove my point. What I'll just said, did you know just 43% of voters had a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton and 38% of voters had a favorable opinion. And then literally for another page in July 2007, Pew Research found 47% of just reciting statistics like this, like patting it out like anything a fucking poll numbers excuse.

Yeah, exactly. This is the way like, like, if you're a bad writer in college, this is how you pad out. And I remember by the way, like moving to New York and being like very sort of intimidated by everyone and how much they had read and my friend, Jen Pan, God lover, even the best advice ever, because she went to read and she was like, Amber, the one thing you need to go into this knowing everyone's lying about having done the reading. So if you read just a little bit, you will have read more than all of the people that went to these Ivy League schools.

And he is that Harvard guy that lies about doing the reading. He's literally, he's again, this is a high school students like term paper trick. No. And also, how are you going to hang any argument on unaggregated poll results? Like these are literally individual polls of like and not even of like binary choices of like sentiment. Yeah. Approval.

Yeah. You're just filling things out. It's like, this looks real 80 percent of Americans said America is more divided today than ever. Says who ever? I don't know. Well, he's there. There are citations.

Yeah. Right. But like one poll is never anything other than a transient snapshot. And again, this is all polls and holes with Ben Shapiro. And like I said, all these sightings of Gallup polls goes on for two pages and then he gets back to like the point he's trying to make, which he says, brutal division has infused every aspect of our social fabric. We can't watch a football game together without debating the merits of protesting during the

national anthem. We literally can't. Or watch a television show without falling into debates over, falling into debates over representation of women or go to church without arguing over our vote. We fight harder and more viciously. We fight harder and more viciously over smaller and smaller matters. The more frivolous the topic, the harsher the battles. What in the world happened?

And then he goes, there are some trendy answers. Don't blame our current political and social disintegration on heightened economic divides. And now he dismisses that right off the bat by saying, they say too many Americans feel left behind by the new globalized economy and that either mild protectionism or redistributionism will heal those bills. They argue that the 1% have outpaced the 99% that urbanites have outpaced rural Americans, that white collar jobs have outplaced blue collar jobs. And then he says, income mobility hasn't changed significantly in the United States since

the 1970s. Yeah. You fucking asshole. That's what it all went to shit. Since the 1970s, the wages of the American workers have been totally stagnant in four decades. Flatline for 40. And there's been an accompanying 40 years of increased efficiency.

Yeah. No huge upsets. That's insane. And Matt, you'll like this. The next paragraph he says. Productivity. Exactly. Productivity has risen as wages have remained stagnant for four decades.

Theft. And Matt, you'll love this. He goes, the Great Depression didn't tear us apart the way we're torn apart today. And our economy has indeed grown steadily since 2009. Maybe one of the reasons it didn't tear us apart is because of great fucking new deal. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Because of, you know, like WPA or yeah, exactly because we address the fucking thing instead of just letting the canker just grow unattended fucking gangrene is set in. And I think it's because we filled our hole. No, we emptied our hole. Everyone in the Tennessee Valley got their holes filled up real good. Without compensation. It wasn't fair. And then he talks about.

My family's still mad about that. Yeah. He talks about race, blah, blah, blah. And by talking about race, he spends about two pages just block quoting Tanahisa Coates. He wrote this at 3 a.m. right before it was due. Oh yeah, totally. And he goes, in truth, we're more racially equal than ever before in our history. More equal than any other society in human history.

Go off, Ken. He goes on with the stats in 1958. Just 4% of Americans approved of black, white intermarriage in 2003. That statistic was 87%. That's still a lot of people who want to prove of interracial relationship. 87% of proof. I know, but that's still a lot who don't. And then, you know, he, he thought he says like, it can't possibly be race because we've

solved those racial problems. I mean, like, I think he would find it more convenient to say that it was race though, because like. No, because he's not going to fight the race war. He's determined to not actually say the loud, the quiet part loud. He's going to keep it neutral. And then like that, that's, this is all efforted. That's why he's been superseded by the, by the real, you know, a STEM winding white populace

because they're willing to do that and he will not cross the Rubicon, which means him having to make up all this bullshit. Like you have to have. He won't cross the Rubicon now, but like we all know, like he's had numerous comments about like Trayvon Martin would be alive today if he wasn't a thug. He gets as close as he can to the edge, but he's determined that he's not going to cross it. For now, he could honestly just decide.

It would age him. And his whole thing is that he was like a Wunderkind. Yeah. He's like, he still thinks of himself as a 35 year old child prodigy. Oh, no, totally. Little violin boy. And then he goes, okay. A third popular argument suggests our national disintegration suggests technology is the

culprit. Social media we hear is the bargaining of more than a, of more than a, of people said that why don't they call it a dumb phone? And he goes on to dismiss that as well. And he goes, finally, there's the most basic argument of all. For whatever reason, human nature has kicked back in. We're naturally tribal, naturally possessive, naturally angry. For a while we suppressed those instincts.

We called it the Enlightenment. Jonah Goldberg in his masterful suicide of the West calls that overthrow of human instinct, the miracle. Yeah. You know, that's always good. Your theory should always depend on a literal miracle that you even call that. It's always a good sign that you've got a really persuasive model that saves us from like an ultimately hostile human nature that we're mean, hateful.

Yeah. So that you turn human history into just this fucking fairy tale. I mean, it's the, it's the opposite of dialectics. It's the opposite of materialism. It just says this is a totally just a fairy tale battle between good and evil. You know what it is. It's teleology. Yeah.

And it's just nothing but Deus Ex Machina after Deus Ex Machina. It's just you're showing it. You're circling the remainder and saying, look, I have not solved this fucking equation and you're just basically daring somebody to point it out. He says, this book argues that Western civilization, including our, This is the best in civilization. This book argues that Western civilization, including our modern notions of values and reason and science was built on deep foundations.

And this book argues that we're tossing away what's best about our civilization because we've forgotten that those foundations even exist. So where did this book come from? It came from my sense, widely reflected, I think, that we're tearing each other apart. Lisa, that realization hit me on a precise date, February 25th, 2016. Late in 2015, I'd started a speaking tour on college campuses. Oh God, of course. Of course.

Of course. We realized this when people were mean to him on college, the entire thesis of this book. They're mean to me on college campuses, mommy was inspired by people being mean to him on college campuses. Of course it was. And he goes, oh, I'm so tired. I gave a speech to students on campus, viewed a half million times, and he includes his

viewing stats on YouTube, viewed a half million times online within a week. Did you see his author bio? What does it, what does it say? It literally ends with, it is one of one of the most requested campus speakers in the country. Oh God. And he said, I posited that all people of good heart want to fight racism, but that vague charges of institutional racism and white privilege obscured individual evil and

slandered the country more broadly. I attended the speech without security. Everything went well despite an attempt to pull the fire alarm and students lined up for broad questions and answer based sessions. Really just, everything went great. Someone tried to pull the fire alarm. Well here he goes, just three months later came the Root Awakening. I was scheduled to give a speech to the Young Americas Foundation group at California State

University at Los Angeles. Two weeks in advance of the speech, we began hearing rumblings about protests. The week before the speech, the president of the university announced the event had been canceled outright. I refused to accede to that clear breach of the First Amendment rights. My taxpayer dollars had gone to the California State University system, and I announced that I would show up anyway. My business partner, Jeremy Boring, I'm not kidding, that's Jeremy Boring, insisted I bring

the security team, but I was pretty skeptical. After all, I'd never needed security for any event, yet God is my bodyguard, fuck that shit. I lift four pounds, that's my fucking security. How the fuck you miss a whole hundred shots? Yeah. And he goes, after all, this wasn't Fallujah, this was a major college campus in the middle of my home city.

Yeah, we all know there's nothing dangerous that ever happens on college campuses. Just to be safe, Jeremy hired security anyway. Thank God I listened. On the day of the schedule event, our security team began hearing rumors that violence was in the offering. An hour before the event, the president of the university announced that he would back down and the police would protect the speech. As we approached the campus, we could see helicopters swirling overhead.

Then he just goes on about hundreds of student protesters had filled the hallway outside the auditorium. They had blocked off all the entrances. A few rioters were physically assaulting students who wanted to enter. The police set up a backdoor route, but could not only sneak students in two at a time. I put my ear to the auditorium door. It sounded like a zombie apocalypse outside. Literally more likely to die in a random college campus school shooting than a protestant.

You're more likely to injure yourself slipping in the cafeteria. You can say, yes, there is violence that befalls campuses. It tends to be from like weird psychopaths that read too much bright part and bring a gun. You are minimizing this. One of these hooligans held Ben at arm's length while Ben futilely tried to strike him. Held his head. Held his head back.

Yes. Swinging his arms. Yes. He was flailing his little fists. Can we just get rid of colleges? Yes. Yes. Yes.

I'm so sick. Not free college. Abolish college. Oh, God. Oh, I feel like a damn just burst. That's the solution to this. I've been saying this for two years. We're getting nothing out of that.

The one thing those Maoist and Lashinois were correct about, they just didn't quite understand why. No. Every point of college is just, it's just credentialism. It's about reproducing the class. It's just laundering privilege. Every one of these skills that we need can be accomplished otherwise than this absurd institution.

Get the fuck rid of it. It is a daycare. Oh, it is a daycare. It's a, it is a propaganda mill. It's just, it's a, it's an ideological, it's just an ideology factory. It sucks. It produces Ben Shapiro's. It creates class traders is what it does.

It manufactures a million things in your head to want to turn class solidarity into alienation and the privilege of the wealthy. The ruling class like immediately finds representatives from the people it's suppressing and puts them into little positions and that's the entire, that's how the representation argument like still serves to reproduce capital. Just abolish college. Come on, Bernie. What's the college?

Well, I mean, Schools out motherfuckers. I mean, like so schools been closed forever. So like all like the thing that's funding college, you know, taxes in some cases and in other cases it's like, you know, like Bob Iger will send his kids there and so they can do what? So they can become influencers or work for his company. They can do that without college and then the, and then the other people are going to

jail because she's got to get into college and she now just takes pictures of her fucking tummy tea on Instagram. First of all, college has is stared Lori Loughlin, who let's, here's, here's the things about Lori Loughlin. She's pretty and she's nice and she was ensnared by this scam that has been going on for hundreds of years known as college. She just got caught. That was her.

Yeah. And now like all we hear with college is, you know, Ben Shapino tried to talk there and people threw a coconut at him or whatever. I don't care. I don't care. I don't care about anything. Nothing good has come out of the student movement since civil rights. Yeah.

And there's nothing that couldn't, there's no, and there are advantages and bringing people together stuff, but I feel like they are outweighed by the disadvantages. Well, specifically as campuses have become completely isolated from the larger communities, it's entirely, it's like, well, we're going to keep you in a tiny little vacuum sealed room. We're doing politics and it's like, no, you're renovating the country. Exactly. Like you bring people together, but just to end up sterilizing their activism by keeping

it in that facing inward, totally inward facing and non-threatening milieu. Well, Felix, you say like, you don't care if someone throws a coconut Ben Shapiro said, I don't care. I think they should all do it. I think like there should be no speakers because it's just a scam for the speaker. They're just going to go there and say shit. They say in a YouTube video for a quarter of a million dollars. So I think like all the, like all the right wing students and all the left wing students,

they should just have, they just like put on armor and joust each other. All of them. So all of them. You get your night and you're both on one side and your vote and you're all rooting for your night. And that's, you know, there should be a referee, you know, you to settle it, you settle it with the, with the, oh God, the Greek week contest at the end of revenge on the nerds where they have to like do the Belch and that will decide and they had to do the pageant

and that will decide who gets to invite speakers for the next year. Yes. Noam Chomsky or Ben Shapiro. Yes. That's how you do it. Clap your hands. Everybody. Everybody clap your hands.

Chris, edit in the, the music they do in front of the, it's a great song. Clap your hands. Everybody. And everybody clap your hands. We lambda, lambda, lambda and, oh make a move and we've come here on stage tonight to do a show for you. So like you say, Felix, you say you don't care if someone throws a coconut at Ben Shapiro, but I would submit this, you know, in response to that after the speech is over, I wanted

to go out and mingle with the protesters at which point my security team and the police pulled me backstage. If you go outside, one of the officers warned me, we can protect you from the first guy who throws a punch and also the second guy, but not the third guy. Here's the thing, Mr. Shapiro, I cannot count that high. I am not, I am not blessed Hanukkah Lee to count the three. I've never reached number three. I don't speak Rosh Hashanah, Mr. Shapiro, I'm afraid that when he Honda throws his heart

duking at you, we'll be able to block the first of the second strikes, but the third one will be beyond our grasp. I mean, like this is, this is proof enough to get rid of college. Yeah. He can't even, they're over, over two punches thrown. Yep. That's enough. What Ben is saying in the introduction of this book is that like his entire motivation

for writing this incredibly tedious book that's been written a million times before is when he finally realized we're losing what made Western civilization great, but as he calls him, the violent rioters that like made fun of him at college. The urban thugs. Yeah. The hip hop thugs. Here's, here's my favorite part though, he goes, during the election cycle, I was highly critical of both candidates.

As a conservative, I'd been a lifelong critic of Hillary Clinton, but I was also highly critical of Donald Trump. Thanks to my criticisms of Trump and thanks to my very public break with Breitbart News and Outlet, I believe to become a propaganda tool for the Trump campaign, I quickly found my self-targeted by a new breed of radical. In late March, the exerble Milo Yiannopoulos, pen d'historia at Breitbart, openly praising the alt-right, including odes to racist cretins like Richard Spencer. I'm sorry, like the difference in my mind between Richard Spencer and Ben Shapiro is

nil. In the school. Ben likes, uh, Jews and Richard Spencer doesn't know that's it. Well, actually, no, I would argue that's, but Richard Spencer likes Jews too. Well, he likes them. Those are in Israel. No, but that's his thing is that they're the only real split in the right. The only real split in the right is what do you do with the Jews?

One side of the right says Jews are fine. They're like white people as long as they have their own country and they should be there. The other side says no, they are a pathogen. They are bacteriological and they will destroy any society from within unless they're extirpated. That's the only real divide. I, I gotta say, I disagree. Only because I think their, their audience share is completely different.

So Ben Shapiro is trying to get college Republican nerds, like the, the, the Republicans that don't scare him. And Richard Spencer was trying to get like these downwardly mobile lumpens. And that didn't work because they quickly realized that he is also a fancy lad. And a college Republican nerd. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. A college Republican nerd that like got a haircut or whatever.

So it's all about who they are trying to sort of triangulate their audience to. And yeah, I think they're aiming for different segments of the population, but their personality and beliefs are, I would need a jeweler's loop to tell, tell the difference. So he goes, uh, egging on his alt-right followers, cheering on their jolly trolary, Milo sent me a picture of a black baby on the day of my son's birth. That may the point being that I was a cuck. He is a cuck. That's his whole thing.

No, that's, that's, that's being a cuck is the degree to which you won't cross the fucking line. And he won't do it. He's defined his whole thing by not doing it. So he is the definitive cuck. So here's where he gets into, um, uh, he's reaching back into history to give you a, uh, a history of thought. And now, okay, when I start reading these sections, when I start reading these sections

at home, if you have, uh, some sort of alcohol available to you, or maybe like a vape pen, just a joint or something, I want you to do a shot, take a hit, uh, use your intoxicant of choice. Every time you hear the phrase Jerusalem and Athens. Okay. Like I said, very popular cities also for Steve Bannon. Let's go. No difference.

We believe freedom is built upon the twin notions that God created every human in his image and that human beings are capable of investigating and exploring God's world. These notions were born in Jerusalem, Jerusalem and Athens, respectively. This is such bad writing. Those twin notions, those diamonds of spiritual genius, fuck off, built our civilization and built us as individuals, diamonds of the cheap rich. Here he goes. If you believe that life is more than a materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance, you are a product

of Jerusalem and Athens shot. If you believe that the government has no right to intrude upon the exercise of your individual will and that you are bound by moral duty to pursue virtue, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that human beings are capable of bettering our world through the use of our reason and are bound by a higher purpose to do so, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. Next paragraph, literally first sentence, Jerusalem and Athens built science.

I am not opposed to the idea of discussing Western canon, again, because how it's shaped the world. I like it. We talked about Moby Dick last week. Yeah, totally. But the idea that virtue is a, he literally said virtue is a Western concept. That's literally psychotic. That's actually psychotic.

The thing is, all right, take your own life, think about how complicated it is to you. Think about trying to explain a week in your decision making to a friend of yours or what happened in your life. It would be hard for you to even understand it. You fucking with me. I don't know why I do what I do. Exactly. So think about how much harder it is to understand the incredible web and complexity of human

history, the tapestry of events that made up our lives and why we're here. So when you think of how hard that is, I think you should keep that in mind anytime somebody wants to give you an explanation for how that world works with something like, well, once there were two enchanted cities and the king lived there and he was very wise. This is the most simplistic fairy tale and it explicitly sells it to you as a fairy tale. And here's the thing. Like, like the classical world of like, you know, Plato and Aristotle, like, you know,

they did contribute like, and then when the Roman Empire was christened, you know, made into Christendom, basically, like, like the philosophy of them like underscored what would later go on to be like, you know, Augustine and et cetera, et cetera. But like he's the Jerusalem and Athens thing what they're doing here is he keeps coming back to the phrase Judeo-Christian values that made up the thing we all love. Again, cuck move to cuck move. The Jewish neocons are not cucks. Like they like have found a way to like be Jewish and a Republican in a way that does

not cuck them. If you are a buckly-esque Jew, you are the biggest cuck. You are literally the biggest cuck. He's trying to be a wasp. He's trying to be a wasp. He's trying to be a wasp. He spends the entire fourth chapter just fawning over American Protestants. Yep.

Oh, God. He needs to watch a gentleman's agreement. Like dude, you know, Gregory Peckett. He literally says like the shortcomings of Judaism and Catholicism to some degree are that they relied on structure, and rather than just faith, rather than just the idea of just, you know, religious ecstasy hitting you in the face, he picks the literal worst parts. Yeah.

But he said that that's the thing that made it spread faster. And the thing is, well, that's not, that doesn't tell you it's better. Yeah. It's viral. Exactly. Viral spread. Syphilis spreads really fast. Like that doesn't mean you get good just because it was more effective at spreading the pathogen

of Christianity. But the point I want to make is he uses Jerusalem and Athens over and over again because he wants to harp on this. The Judeo-Christian, which as we've mentioned before on the show, is an idea that was invented out of whole cloth, pretty much in the 1980s, to just do a patch on the software update of evangelical Christians so that they could like, they could be like, oh, we love Israel. State of Israel. They're like, oh, yeah.

Now, oh, we're the heirs to the Judeo-Christian heritage. And the funny part is now that's, that's, they don't need that anymore because now they're fully on board with what we need them there for the rapture. We forget. We need them there for the end of the world. There were like serious Catholic anti-Semites in like, up is like, kind of into the early 90s. Oh yeah.

Westbrook-Tegler. It was just fine. We have to tone that down, like, but they've moved the Overton window back and he's really shocked by it when it wasn't that long ago when you could just be an open anti-Semite. So here you guys, you guys, Jerusalem and Athens built science. That's one sentence. The twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law reasoning built human rights. They built prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty, which again, Hereto-Ford did not exist

in anywhere on the planet. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the communists, lifted billions from poverty and gave billions spiritual purpose. Okay. I'm going to go through those, the sort of foggy, like the mystification that's going on here with history where he's like, it's all this unbroken chain leading to right now our most perfect of all worlds, which is based on Greek natural law. I'm sorry.

All of that classic fifth century Athens shit that we all love and so much, they love the hell out of slavery. That's why they had all the free time to fucking be, you know, thinking about change and shit. Just think about bullshit. Yeah. But also, like, we literally regressed from that anyway into Western society, into we innovated slavery and to chattel slavery, which is literally worse than the slavery. And it was by refining it that we were able to supercharge capitalism.

Yeah. And just accelerate through to developing the nation. Capitalism is the nitro booster in the engine of, or I mean, slavery is the nitro booster in the engine of capitalism. It catalyzed it. It pushed in so much raw material and liquefy the markets to such a degree that it made capital accumulation so much faster and it exacerbated technological innovation. It was the fuel in the fucking rocket sled of capitalism, slavery, drew made it possible

Jerusalem and Athens drink where the foundations of the Magna Carta and the treaty of West failure. I love they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Santa the Treaty of West failure. It gets my dick so hard. I love it. Abraham for the treaty of wind failure, but what are you going to do Abraham? No.

West wind failure. West. Yeah. Win. Win. Not fail. Win. Well, this is where wins treaty now you guys got you guys got to see how the sausage

get made. Yeah. Sometimes you have a problem. Yeah. Okay. Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation. This is a three-token episode, by the way, Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham jail just everything you barely remember from junior high history.

So in the previous sentence, he all in the previous paragraph, he said Jerusalem and Athens defeated the Nazis. In the next sentence, he said in the next paragraph, he says civilizations that rejected Jerusalem and Athens shot marks beat the beat and the tension between them have collapsed into dust. The USSR rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law substituting the values of collective, the collective and a new utopian vision of social justice. And they starved and slaughtered tens of millions of human beings.

And like I said, also defeated the Nazis in World War II. The Nazis. I don't understand. Like he comes to these great things. He does mention marks. He completely doesn't understand marks at all. But if you're going to say, if you're going to attribute the wins of societies created by thinkers, then marks beat the Nazis.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. He got those turnip farmers to get their shit together. Oh, they got their shit together. We are in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring moral subjectivism and the rule of passion. The funny thing about Greek natural law is that like natural law is what's always cited

by like weirdo Catholic reactionaries like, is there a justification for why sodomy is like always sin and wrong? Ironically. You know who also invented sodomy? Athens. They love it. They love that shit. Their natural law did not.

Their natural law was a towel's optional. I think their natural law said that it was okay as long as you just held their thighs together. Oh, right. Yeah. You had to footage them. You couldn't go in. Yeah.

Interesting. See? It doesn't have anything about that. That was coined by the Greek philosopher Susophist. Which is thinking this very small example, how much is lost in his retelling of these things and how much simplifies into a cartoon, the personal relationship to reality. And we are watching our civilization collapse into age-old tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism.

Make no mistake. We are still living off the prosperity of the world built by, what are those two cities again? Jerusalem and Athens. See, this is perfect in that it totally exemplifies how it's a fairytale. Because given the way he describes the miracle of Athens and Jerusalem, that should be uninterrupted glory and improvement until the end time. It should be an unbroken string of development.

It's the perfect, it's the best system therefore it's going to persist. Why did we abandon it? Exactly. And the answer is evil wizards. And it is, it's just totally idealistic horseshit about evil wizard named Marx cast a spell and this other evil wizard named Martin Luther came down. And that those people bewitched people's minds into going back to their awful human ways.

And now we live under Toronto in Gainesville. It's tragic. It's been terrible for society. As you said about the wizards, the vast majority of this book is him taking his reader who again, like Ben Shapiro as dumb as he is, I will give him credit for knowing how stupid his fans are. Yeah. The respect he has for his fans is summed up in the fact that he sells him caffeine pills

for $70 a bottle. If anybody is hawking survival seeds or or or miracle brain products to you, that means they don't give a shit about your life. In fact, they're betting on you being a dumb ass because they wouldn't sell any. So what Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro's fans are either like the most bullied kids in their schools or like college sophomores who are all named Dylan who like like drink to to Natty Shandy's and are like, last night was savage and just watch like Ben Shapiro owning trans people cringe comp.

No, but man, he said like, like that the magical cities gave us the winning formula that was winning for eternity. That went into the rock and then like, and then the evil wizards like turned us away from it. The vast majority of this book, which thank dear Christ, I'm not going to read to you on the show, the vast majority of like the middle chapters of the entire book is him going through and giving you this high school freshman history of the Enlightenment and its major thinkers and telling you which ones were good and which ones are bad.

Yeah. And he's like, John Locke, good, Rousseau, bad. And the reason they're good again, his readers like they just want the footnotes. And the reason that one is good and the other is bad is one is liberal, the other is a conservative. But no, but what is a liberal conservative based entirely on subjective definitions of what liberal and conservative means in 21st century America? So is a historical, just absolute contempt for any kind of historical context for anything. Everything is evaluated from 21st century, just superficial conservative array.

Like that's it. You know, oh, yeah. Yeah. It's awful. The ties that bind us together are fraying. Those ties were forged through fire and water reason and prayer. Game of Thrones, baby. Tonight.

I'm so fucking psyched. Gambo's gonna get that thrown, baby. He's Gambo thrown for a reason. Forged through fire and water. Forged through fire and water. Reason and prayer. Again, he's a terrible writer. Just awful.

The tension between Jerusalem and Athens, Drake, is real by removing the tension by abandoning either Jerusalem or Athens, Drake, collapses the bridge built between the two. So we say there's Jerusalem and Athens, but their intention and what Western civilization did was build the bridge, but now the bridge is rickety and it's like, this is like dialectics if you have a head injury, because that is a dialectical reasoning that he is doing, but it's totally ideal. It's totally idealistic. It doesn't bear any relationship to material conditions.

Now there are two cities in the world. So you got South Bend, that's where Notre Dame is, and you got Des Moines. Now my brother lives in South Bend and we haven't, we haven't talked in a while, but in Des Moines, there's a Culver's that's open until 12, but they're very far away. And when the interstate is crowded, that's when things get rough. This is just like, this is just a boring guy talking about geography. This is just a boring confused guy. This sucks man.

This is nothing. This is absolutely nothing. He can't even really make up his mind about anything like he has like these semi positive but conflicted views of like the way Christianity developed and its role in society. He doesn't, he's, he wrote a book so that dumb people can feel smart because they can refer to Hume. Yeah, absolutely. How many, as Hobbs would say.

How many pages do you stretch out of this? Oh man. It's not that long. It's not that long. He stretched the page. No, he's not, he's not going to give you a toll. He took that all and he stretched it. I wouldn't be surprised if it's less than 300 pages.

It's 288 pages. I do it. That's still, that's still a, that's still a no. Amazing. It's long for what he has. It's long for what he has but in terms of his pretensions, it's hilarious because that's a booklet. Well, there are wide margins.

That's a booklet for dollars. He widened the margins. That's the thing to read on the crapper. Also. And then you come out going, ah, now that was, that was quite a locky and dump I took. Sorry. What, like just two quick points I want to make. Like he says that line and it's on the jacket copy to his book, civilizations that rejected

Jerusalem and Athens have collapsed into dust. Again, where does China or India fit into this equation? Yeah. China had a pretty good run, even by his own metrics and like forget the, you know, communist revolution in high school. Yeah. But like, you know, China is existed almost as there's no, these things are, what he's done is he's taken all the good things that people like and said, these are, these are

exemplified by a cast of characters who are embody their good qualities. All the bad things are embodied in these people who are a cast of characters who embody their bad qualities. And then they just have, it's like, it's really, really recreating Olympian fucking mythology because now they're fighting on Mount Olympus for the soul of humanity. See, I thought it was more like the animatronic Hall of Presidents. Also that, you know, it's all, you always have to have an array of names here a little. Yeah.

And they kind of like move mechanically and you come out of being like, was that educational? Yeah. And then you come Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher for the greatest number of people. Yeah. And that's, that's what that's what this is in book. I haven't, I don't know if he references Bentham in this book or where he falls on him, but I'm going to guess he's against Bentham. No, no, no, no, no, no.

I think he like puts it in the same paragraph with like Thomas Aquinas or something. Like it's just, it's just, he's just name dropping, name dropping. Like your worst friend who was like, yeah, yesterday I was talking to my friend Natasha Leon. It's like your worst fucking friend. The utilitarianism is like one of their bet noirs in his, that's one of the evil spirits as he's utilitarian. So, and like the second point I want to make, aside from the fact that he glosses over like,

you know, bath swaths of human history that don't conform to the Jerusalem Athens theorem. All this ghost stuff, all these spirits he's invoking, I'm feeling like Sterner right now. Point, the other thing is like, he keeps saying that like, you know, we're, we're so, like the enlightenment as in the masterful genius words of Jonah fucking Goldberg was this like miracle where like, just the key turn, oh, like we will no longer be tribalistic and governed by our like baser. The sound of the square root of this, Sassley's triangle is equal to the freedom of the remaining

sides. It should, I'm sure as it will not come as any great shock to any of you listening to this show. Ben Shapiro is intensely driven by tribalistic loyalties and racial hatred. I mean, we all know his famous comment that Arabs, Jews build things where Arabs enjoy living in sewage. They enjoy living in sewage. They enjoy living in sewage.

They enjoy living in sewage. They love it. They're not human beings. Search any of his comments on any of the teenage black kids murdered by the police and you will see some fairly obvious and based tribalism beginning to express itself. You know, I would say a product of maybe unenlightened, unenlightened thinking. Yeah, but that's because the bad, the bad guys in his teleology are others. Racial others, religious others, cultural others that like are outside of his perfect

little world or trying to undermine it. For people on the left, like the things fucking up places are the actual people who benefit from the way things are. Those are the bad guys. Those are the nemesis. That's the cause of the problem. That's the person that you have to deal with is the person who's material benefit is things staying as bad as they are and getting worse.

And that's the difference between the left and right in terms of how you view like what the cause of social decay and problems are. And we say, no, it's the people benefiting from it, not the people in most cases who have the least amount of actual power in the society. Those are the people who you think are most responsible for its decline. So I'm not going to do all of chapter one, but this is the one I read and it's called the pursuit of happiness and it's all about what makes people happy and his answer to that question is moral purpose that is decided by a belief in God, the Judeo-Christian God

specifically. Getting your whole field makes you happy. You got to fill the hole daily. So and he goes, chapter one begins, are you happy? It's a question my wife asked me one day a few years ago, probably because I was as per usual skulking around like a miserable little cunt with a dumb look on my face. We were going through a stressful period. My wife is a doctor and she was working for hours.

Our youngest child Gabriel, that's like a Ashley Schaefer and fucking he spouted out Gabriel. My boy Gabriel. He walked in on me in my lap. I said, you watch boy. Our youngest child Gabriel was waking up at all hours of the night. Our eldest Leah was going through a stretch in which he'd burst into tears at the tiniest provocation. Are you sure that wasn't your wife, Ben?

Yeah, seriously. And work was trying to. My business partners and I were working to get our website, The Daily Wire, functioning at top level, read into that, get some bizarre like dark money billionaire to underwrite or blogging and emailing so that, you know, I can cash a fat check. Yeah. After my hard, my tough weekend in a hot tub with Sheldon Adelson. Oh, God.

No, I'm just imagining that. Felix, do you like thinking about that? Oh, man. I'm imagining, you know, how like soup gets a skin on the top. Oh, yeah. I was thinking about how there's got to be. I'm imagining this thing. It's Sheldon Adelson.

So it's like a giant hot tub, but they're sort of like like a like a like a ramp slash water slide that they like they pull up his little motor screw that's sort of like. Like a lobster. Like a turkey. Just like slides. And like a lobster, the air escaping from his foals make a screaming noise. Yes. Oh God.

He looks like Soydberg without a shell. I mean, I'm not even going to say, you know, because that's the dream is to share the hot tub with Sheldon Adelson. Oh, God. I just want to lick the residue out of the hot tub after the drain it. Another connection here. Steve Bannon, well-known hot tub pimp. He dissolved the body in a hot tub and a rental property.

He did a Walter White on someone's rental property. There's no other explanation. Allegedly. He fucked it up, though. Like everything instead of being like, I'm Heisenberg, he was like, I am Dr. Asperger. So he goes on to talk a lot about the pursuit of happiness and the phrase, the pursuit of happiness, as we know, he's like, ah, we say it's the pursuit of happiness. People think government can give you happiness through healthcare or a basic, basic standard

of living. But you would be wrong. The thing I want to point out again in this chapter and how utterly lazy and ahistorical he is in this vocation that like, you know, progress cannot exist without virtue and virtue cannot exist without our inherent moral reasoning, which cannot exist without the Judeo-Christian, the God of Abraham, right? He glosses over entirely in like sucking off the founding fathers for creating the perfect document and perfect system of government, that they were by and large deists who rejected

Orthodox Christianity explicitly. He talks about, he goes on and on about Jefferson. He's like, this is why Jefferson knew we weren't guaranteed happiness. But again, Mitch says nothing about Jefferson literally was so full of himself that he did his own remix to the Bible. He did. He cut out the miracles. He cut out the miracles of the Bible.

And it was just the moral teachings of Jesus of Nazareth is what he called it. Get all that hogwash out of there. That is an elbow. That is definitely a pimp move. You gotta admit it. And this is literally the equivalent of like translating the Bible into Klingon or it's like that guy who made the return of the last Jedi without any women that's the modern equivalent.

And so this one highlighted. This is like a subhead to the chapter. Happiness is moral purpose. Pleasure can be gained from a variety of activities, golf, your home, pleasure can be to gain from a variety of activities. And that's not. Golf, fishing, playing with your children's sex. I would reverse the order.

I love that. Look at his brain. Like there are here are the five things that can make you happy. Golf. I'm sorry. If golf makes you happy, your brain is number one on the list. You're a psycho. Fishing.

Oh my God. He's never been fishing. He's never been fishing. He would be the fucking bait. First of all, only go is fish. We know this. It's law. I've caught a fish.

I'm one for one. And all my go is to though. We know. Yeah. I literally have a 100% success rate for fishing. I've never gone fishing. It's like your slot machine system. You're like, I got a system for this.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. The slot machine system, that's strategy and race, action times, mathematics. Whereas the fishing that's just all luck and bullshit. No one's good at fishing. You're just lucky. You can be good at slots though. Okay. So sex is at the bottom of his list.

Yeah, not not quite as fun as golf. Yeah, that is good. Just hook in an angle. Oh, I got it. I got a trout today. And he goes, amoral activities can bring us pleasure. That temporary high, like golf, that feeling of forgetting our cares. Yeah.

Golf is also deeply amoral. I mean, think about the water that it takes to fucking use it. Not even a moral. It's criminal. It's a criminal waste of land. Golf is like resources. If we can do for a two for one, that's, that's the grand compromise. Conservatives want to get rid of college, you know, as do I.

Yes. We have to get rid of golf. Golf and golf. If we get rid of golf and college. Grand bargain. That's yeah. We might have like 30% of our like economic and class problem solved if we got rid of both of those.

There might be like three more generations of humanity. Yeah, we can honestly stretch it out a little bit further. This is the new bargain. Jerusalem and Athens. That's over. Now we're making the grand bargain. You know, Berkeley and Orlando, Florida. Yep.

Yeah. Golf and college. Done with them. Crap. No more of either that bullshit. I don't see why rich people can't just play with tech decks, play video games, have sex with their friends. The coolest thing Shava's ever did was take over the fucking golf courses.

Yeah, that was definitely. That was dope. The amoral activities can go as per that temporary high. He's talking about chewing and getting off that lounge, the feeling of forgetting our cares. However, that pleasure is never enough. Everything happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind, which presumably he means watching Prager you videos or actually, if he's being honest, watching

my YouTube videos, me, Ben Shapiro. Watch me. Oh, how does people? How does Ben Shapiro? Like do I do this? Is it just like when he plays violin with his dad? Yeah. Literally, what do you mean?

That's because he goes around the country just grimly triggering the lips. Is that a fulfilled? Yeah, he just means like that's not a happy person. Also, he like operates a website while his wife is a doctor, which he brings up a lot, but I think with some shame. All he does is like your inner fucking garden. If you didn't have all this hole to fill with all this bullshit, all he does are all he does is yeah, go to like whatever California, like go to Pomona or whatever and like find

some like 19 year old who's on like three different types of benzodiazepines who can like barely make it through the question while like 12 daily wire cameras are on her and just demolish her with logic. Just absolutely demolish her. That sucks, dude. You're not cultivating shit. You cultivate my ass, dude. You're finding the weakest people who are literally going to see you to be triggered.

You're just abusing people. You're abusing fragile people. It's like it's intellectual bumfights. Yeah. It's so yeah, it's literally just the guy who took a month worth of karate classes. Yeah. Everyone in his hometown. Yeah.

It sucks. Stop it. So he goes out. Oh, God. We'll be about Danny McBride triggering libs and college campuses like a grifter style like a like a Ben guy. Oh, my God. That's pretty good.

So, yeah, except it would probably have to be played by Walton Goggins instead of David. He could be a competing different guy in the scene. That's actually a good idea. And then they become friends. Of course. So he goes on to talk about like how the Bible's vision of happiness is we just surprised you didn't know that God wants you to be happy, but that doesn't mean just chewing or having sex or doing anything fun.

God mentions nothing about chewing. And he goes, if this that's where you're wrong, Amber, if you read the Bible closely, there are many coded references. He goes, if all this sounds like a more restrictive version of happiness than we're used to, that's because it is. This isn't rolling around in the mud at Woodstock, nor is the oldest young man in the world making a Woodstock reference. These are presumably college students reading this.

You can't even say what's that 99 like a child prodigy just means you're stunted at an age that you were surrounded by your your your uncle, like your aunt sitting around smoking going, oh, my God, look at him. Their references are your like Ben is like Ben is like in his brain. He's like 70 years old because he says like at Woodstock, he could have just said like a weekend at Coachella on Mali or something, but he goes, nor is it a nice golf game after a rough week of work. These are like the two poles in his mind.

These are like the freak down hippies, man, rolling around in the wood, the mud and Woodstock. And then he's like the square upright businessman goes plays a golf after a hard week in the office. Oh, fuck, that's so true. It's like when he closes his eyes, heaven is like an enzyme commercial and hell is yeah, it's like the footage from Martin Scorsese's Woodstock. Do not eat the brown acid. Whoa, man.

But he's telling you, you know, he's mature enough to tell you, hey, golf guy, hey, wavy gravy. These things may feel good, but that's actually not real important happiness and moral meaning in your life. He's just his attempt to turn the chair around and sit in it wrong way. Yeah. He just trips over his. Have you ever heard of a guy named JC Judeo Christian?

Yeah, you may think it's cool to, you know, golf for 30 years and collapse of cardiac arrest on the green while all your friends named Harold look at your body and a golf cart runs over your head. That may be cool to you or it may be cool. It may be cool. It may be cool to smoke seven bowls out of a bong and inject acid while the monkeys are playing. You know, it's actually cool to find the nearest 19 year old who's already crying and destroy

them. Oh my God. So guys, happy. That is a good point. They are already crying or even says that he finds the crying one. I've watched those shooting, crying fish in apparel. I've watched those videos, like the band Shapiro, most savage moment videos. And like literally all, they're already like shaky.

Like they come up to the mic and they're like, Shapiro, yeah, like, come on, man. Again, like I just got triggered by Arby's conversion approaches you to own you or debate you. Like it's not difficult to say, like, fuck you little man and just ruffle his hair or just be like, oh, look at the little fella. This is a rhetorical technique. Oh, is that okay? Is that a microphone?

Oh, look at you. Is it a rhetorical technique that I heard of, you know, from Buckley that is just called giving someone a wedgie that you could literally, you could get away with it. What would he do? Oh, you could. What would he do? You could you could fucking hang him on a door knob. Yeah.

You'd be dangling. Yeah. Kick it his little feet. Kick it his little feet in the air. Kick it at the clouds. So he says, you know, happiness is not, it's not a golf game and it's not Woodstock. It's the pursuit of purpose in our lives. If we have lived with moral purpose, even death becomes less painful.

Here's one of my favorite parts. When Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer knew that his death was imminent, he, I'm just, I'm sorry. I'm just smiling a little to myself, thinking back on the moment, the moment in which his conscious brain knew that his own death was imminent. Wait, hold on a second. Let me just say. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. I just, he's just, this is like an insult to Victor Frankel. Oh yeah. He name checks Victor Frankel. This is such an assault on Victor Frankel. Like the guy who was a fucking, who like lived through the Holocaust and just basically invented this amazing new way of thinking and wrote this seminal work and just bench appeared

as like, yeah, I go to college campuses and find people with a badly dyed hair and argue with them. I'm the same as you. Like it just, very, it's just very, it's hurtful to me. More than anything, you'll love to see it. Well, I do love to see it. He wrote a letter in anticipation of his passing. Here's what that great sold man wrote, I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas

through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking. I leave this life with no regrets. Wow. One regret. One regret. One regret. One regret. Don't dive in that.

Don't dive in the pool. I mean, he has to regret that. See, I was going to say like, if Charles Krauthammer did indeed leave a moral life, he would be leaving life wracked with unbearable guilt about the millions of people he helped kill in the insane wars that he started for moral and just reasons. You heard him though. No regrets. No regrets.

In his dog shit. Dr. Davros. Dr. Who style villain. Yeah. No, he was, he's the closest thing in the op-ed where we had to Dr. fucking strange love. I mean, he was just this perverse figure of you worship death like a lot of these guys. Felix, you brought up Victor Frankel literally the next page as Austrian psychiatrist. Victor Frankel wrote in his stirring memoir about surviving the Holocaust man search for

meaning. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose and therefore no point in carrying on. Victor Frankel would just euthanize you. Frankel speaking. He talked to you and you told, you're like, yeah, uh, golf is one way to live your life. Another way to live your life is to play violin with your dad. Frankel would just like, he would just like, throw his brow and look at his notes and just

write, you know, euthanize immediately. He's not getting better. He's never finding purpose. Sometimes death is kinder. Yeah. He's got a fucking, he's got, he's got a chapter about like the meaning of life and then there's a guy who wrote a book literally man search for meaning. I mean, he's just running up the flag.

It's just, I'm just giving you the signifiers. What would you expect in a chapter about that man search for meaning? He's everything is like, everything is sort of Chekhov's gun with Shapiro, but it's Chekhov's book. Yes. Yes. That's it. You will always make the most obvious fucking book drop.

He's like, he's like an AdSense algorithm. Yeah. I see you're interested in meaning. Well, another book I've read or another book I know of. No, absolutely. It's like it's every, every, it's cliche. It's a cliche list. Ben Shapiro, Reed Nausgaard, 2019.

No, that would be something. I feel like I'm Reed Nausgaard. He's rocks. He's the man. I like this section. He says, even the most ardent atheists have conservatively conceded that much. Voltaire famously stated, I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because I believe it, I believe it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and

cuckolded less often. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. I think a very funny quote by Voltaire. Yeah. But again, Ben Shapiro is bringing back to the cuckolding thing. Yeah. It's the second time he's brought that up. Yeah.

He keeps coming back around. Without belief in our innate individual value, we collapse into animals incapable of seeking moral purpose, even though we feel the need for it beating in our chest. Again, I just want to underscore again, Ben Shapiro has literally written an article, not just a tweet saying, collateral damage and civilian casualties in Iraq and of Arabs. Like, it doesn't matter to me. I think it's okay. No, you don't think about it at all.

I was like, I've made the moral judgment in mind that like their lives are literally, he said that their lives aren't worth the same as even a single American soldier. He said that. Now that's, that's some fucking mean. That's just moral math. That's the moral meaning right there. He goes into it. Talk about, because there's another line that like, all of the American founders were self-help

specialists. Wait a minute. They sure as held it to help them self-pick the fucking cotton. Yeah. Well, they're, and he says Washington spent his formative years copying out rules for civility. And he mentions Ben. You know, those two things have to do with each other.

And he goes, wait, Benjamin Franklin was a notorious devotee of self-betterment. He actually created a calendar of virtues seeking to wipe out his tendency toward wrongdoing. Another thing Ben Franklin was a notorious devotee of French widows and divorces. Of course. You know, my man gotten it. Prostitutes and meetings of the Hellfire Susat Club. You know that? Yeah.

He went to him and like John of the initial whatever his name and we're like having weird orgies underneath the church when he lived in London. He was a fucking perv. Everyone in charge has always done that. Yes, of course. They just have, you know, mislocated the, you know, the, the centrality of all the good things these guys did in his mind can all be defined by their essential virtues. Everything bad they did is just oops, a mistake or something.

Oh yeah. It's an aberration and not the actual reflection of the pick which one counts. He gets to pick which part, which aspect of their character and their behavior counts. I would love to have an origin in the 18th century. Oh God. Amazing. I bet the smells. Oh, the waffling smell.

Oh, man. I would love to get led. Of course it's set. I would love to get led poisoning from my maiden's makeup. Yes. Oh yeah. That would be so good. I love wearing a condom made out of a lobster's shell.

You're all moving all those smegma covered lacy collars. Oh baby. A lacy collar right around you. Oh, we love to think about it. We love to think about it. By the way, not lobsters. Way gross. French women and prostitutes would use citrus rinds as diaphragms, which actually kind

of work because the acid would burn your pussy with citrus. I imagine it hurts as well. It can't feel good. No. The past sucks so bad. We're not pinker people here, but like the past definitely sucks. Oh, it was so bad. The olden times were bad.

Okay, so here's the synthesis though. They put orange peels in their cooters. So Dan Quinn realized the orange peel. Speaking of playing the violin. You realize that the orange peel had nothing to do with eating pussy. That eating pussy had to do with music, the violin. The orange peel could help in smoking weed and could help them beat nine hits off of one bowl and potentially win the weed smoking Olympics.

Playing violin with my dad taught me how to eat pussy. Dan Quinn is Jerusalem and Athens. Yes, he's 100%. He's built the bridge. Yeah. I could write. Dan Quinn is Baltimore. Well, Dan Quinn Sacramento.

He's the most Sacramento man. He's the most NorCal man. I think everyone in Northern California, they just wake up in their cars and start recording into their phones. That's how, if you're married and you want your wife to go to the grocery store on the way home from work, you just, your phone's on your dashboard and you're like, all right, listen up, you fucking pussy. I've been told you.

That is essentially one of the reasons I find myself physically repulsed by Ben Shapiro's or any of these videos or owning a liberal or owning a homeless person with logic or whatever is because I like YouTube videos where people get called out and owned, but like, Dan Quinn, that's the real shit where he calls out Crazy Joe or the woman knocking on the door. I'm busy. It was the Starbucks. Starbucks bathroom.

Yeah. I admit YouTube used to be something awful happened where YouTube used to be just people like in their bathroom mirrors being like, and another thing for all you fucking pussies out there. Yeah. I've had sex. Like that went away and it just became like Prager you. And just algorithm.

It sucked. It became like produced versions of that. Ben Shapiro could never be as compelling as Timonius X. The thing is like, like I've been reading, I've been reading you, you guys this and you listen to this book. Like again, I cannot be stressed enough. Ben Shapiro is routinely talked about as a leading intellectual figure on the right. The cool kids philosopher as the New York Times described him.

His writing is dog shit and it is written by a stupid person for stupid people. He cannot craft a compelling sentence or paragraph to save his life. No. The parts where he actually is describing his like, you know, thesis or like the statements he's laying out are such childish nonsense that like it is like a freshman in college paper that we get to see. And the worst part is that it's a stupid person talking down to you. That's what it is.

Yeah. He still has contacts. He's condescending to you in the pros while being a fucking dullard, which is the worst possible combination. People with an undue sense of intellectual confidence, just the best people. Here's another line that I really like that will speak to his abilities as a writer. Our society was built on on recognition of these four elements. Fire.

Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.

Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Water. Fire. Fire. Fire.

Fire. Fire. Fire. horribly far from and which we have a responsibility personally and morally and collectively to fucking pursue and that we could actually just find purpose in doing that or making or me or like you know allowing the planet to be inhabitable for fucking years. There's another fucking purpose. That's a good one. Like are you gonna tell me that a guy on a fucking sinking battleship trying to

get guys into the lifeboats that that guy doesn't have meaning in that moment? He's got more meaning than he ever will again in his life. Okay, I hear that's where we are. I hear what you're saying but like look can I counter that with but what about Jerusalem and Athens? I would like to speak on those two cities for a moment if I would. Jerusalem is gonna be a fucking lazy river if we don't do something. So those are the four elements but this is the thing I highlighted that I really like. Our society was built on the recognition of these four elements the fusion of Athens and Jerusalem tempered by the wit and

wisdom of the founding fathers like they're fucking like a Dave Barry book or something. They're potent quotables of Ben Franklin. Ben Shapiro's in Ben Shapiro's mind the founding fathers changed human history by writing fan fiction about Jerusalem and Athens. This guy's literally like a fucking muppet in a kitchen going well you take a pitch of freedom and a dash of Judeo Christianity and it comes out America. It's just like the same thing is like yeah you know previously I had always wondered what it'd been like if Link and Donkey Kong knew each other. This is Kingdom Hearts shit. This is Kingdom Hearts for Western Civilization. Yeah you know what that actually is kind of

it's like it's a giant game you get to play where it's just like Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle together. It's like the end of Bill of Ted where they're all on stage. No this was a terrible book. I didn't enjoy the parts that I had to read. I started to glaze over after a while and I don't want to read anything about this again. I'm reading Nowscarred nothing but that from now on. How can Nowscarred write books that are like literally 500 times longer and just totally moving a refrigerator with your father-in-law and they're great. They're totally gripping like the part. Nowscarred wrote like a hundred pages about like about when he

was dating a girl he didn't really like when he was 15 and it was a million times more interesting than any of this. All right I'm just gonna close out the first chapter he says here the history of the West is built on interplay between these two pillars divine meaning and reason and I also the two cities that we mentioned. What were they again? Sid Paul in Minneapolis and there are actually bridges connecting them but they're in a bad state of disrepair and we must invest in infrastructure. We do believe that Sumali sty ISIS has been pouring citrus acid on the bridge to weaken it over of course the three

decades. So he says we receive our notions of divine meaning from a three millennia old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews. We receive our notions of reason from a 2,500 year old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks in rejecting those lineages like and for so who's really talk about like just the idea that the things are defined by these trajectories only and that no other culture has presented any versions of them and also it has nothing to do with material reality. What's moving in his mind? He's a Hegelian this man. This man is a filthy Hegelian. You got us turned it over like Marx did. You got to

get to where the thing moving is the actual material reality. This is all just ghosts. This is just haunting. So you guys in rejecting those lineages and again like I'd like any sort of indication that America or the Western civilization has just rejected ancient Greek history or the Old Testament. I mean they're rejecting everything in the face of capitalism absorbing everything into a matrix of price and again cost-benefit. I want you guys to talk about killing God. That did a hell of a lot to do. We started out our conversation talking about how Ben Shapiro is like, it's left Breitbart because they're like

oh they're anti-Semitic and like this is the new like sort of you know racist right-wing populism that I can't fully sign on to even though I basically kind of agree with it. Here's how he ends the chapter. In rejecting those lineages, in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of cutting ourselves off from our own roots, we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering. We have become rootless cosmopolitan wandering Jews and we must make our way back to our roots. Holy shit. No I'm one of the good ones. Yeah this kind of shit that's the most anti-Semitic thing I've ever heard. You can't get more

cucked than a fucking anti-Semitic Jew. He's trying to suck up to anti-Semitic stuff. Holy shit that's astounding. I know we've we've gone along with this one and probably driven definitely driven you guys crazy by reading this. Yeah we've lost our minds. I so say you know Matt, any other things you read? The one that always takes my eye is when is the potted history of America going from you know of reconciling the Constitution with slavery and Indian destruction and how you make the founders these you know paragons of human virtue when they were doing all this horrible stuff and of course it's like just classic wig

history which is the literal opposite of the dialectical materialism where it's all just ideas and everything getting better over time and just pulled magically along. Okay so ladies and gentlemen that is Ben Shapino. Those are the two cities that make the one city. We built this city on rock and roll. Yeah it's rock and roll. So but before we leave you today we have some some exciting tour dates and things to plug. So starting with we will be doing a show Friday April 26th at Cornell University for their Union Days 2019 closing out there so it's like a week-long event about you know unions and labor. We were

doing a show at Cornell University on Friday April 26th. Can't wait to check out the gorgeous. Oh so many gorgeous. We tickets are available. We will put the link to that in the show description. As we mentioned before shortly there after that May 1st we will be doing a fundraiser show. Very excited about this. A night of choppo pub quiz. Yes. At housing works in Brooklyn on May 1st again links for that will be. We will all be writing categories and Felix I know things are probably gonna change between now and then but do you could you give anybody an example of where your head is at maybe where they might get your

questions from. I just wake up every day I'm like I'm gonna get nutty with it today. So if you want to get nice you want to get nutty you want to learn about whatever I care about that day. It might be the romance of the three kingdoms. It might be it might be new wave cinema. I may get really into tears for fears I've already done that one but I don't know I don't know. Look a philosopher named Ben Shapina once said that pleasure is not found in the golf course or in the opium den. In the boardroom or the discotheca. It's found just jumping from interest to interest every week until you no longer have to be alone with

your own thoughts. Yeah that is the whole goal. So whatever one I land on then that's what you're getting. Good luck folks. Okay. You won't get a single one pussies you fucking suck. Don't worry I'm just trying to fire them up for whatever category I pick. Alright and then finally to plug and probably most excitingly amazing we are going on tour overseas our first ever European tour beginning June 1st in Berlin and from there we will be doing shows and like we will have the actual dates but it begins June 1st in Berlin but we will be doing shows in London Manchester Glasgow and Dublin Ireland closing out

the tour on June 9th I think you guys are all going to get so many awesome flawless accents for me. So if you are a chopper you're going to offend that we're going to get it run out of a chopper fan from the European Union and by that I mean England. Yeah. England is the head of the year here. I'm hearing the third negotiations to get the new headquarters. That's what they're talking about. Yeah. So we are going to the European Union. I expect there will still be a European Union by then maybe probably but again if you're a chopper fan in Berlin England Scotland and of course my favorite the motherland Ireland

Dublin Ireland we are coming and if you were a chopper fan I know actually we have looked at the statistics on this we have an enormously for such a small country enormously outsized percentage of fans in Ireland. No idea. So if you're an if you're in Ireland if you're a chopper fan and you're like oh like come to Belfast or whatever get on a fucking train that lasts like an hour away. You have no excuse to not be at this fucking show. You fucking mix. So guys we will see you in Germany the global headquarter of comedy. Wait for us to kill by just seeing the toughest room like the only here the sound we hear is

their collective nodding at a good joke. All right. I'm breaking on my new bit special for Germany. It's about a man who unsuccessfully peels a banana. The funniest shit they've ever seen. We're gonna see you in London the head of the EU as we've said capital of the EU. We will see you in Scotland made famous by HBO's Game of Thrones. We will see you in Ireland or as we call it Israel too. Let's go. We're going EU style baby. Yeah no we're coming to the European Union our European tour the all the official dates venues tickets will be available at choppotraphouse.com. I think it's starting tomorrow but maybe a day later very

shortly choppotraphouse.com slash tour. Yep. Be on the lookout there for dates and tickets. Yep. A headline here Europe. We're coming to you. Yeah we're coming in Europe. We're doing it. So and that does it for us this week. Bye bye.