All right, let's get started everybody. Good evening everyone and welcome to Boston University. Thank you for joining us here in person or virtually on the on live stream. My name is Nick Dean. I'm the current vice president of YAF here at Boston University. Our YAF chapter may only be in its second year of existence, but we want you to continue following us on this conservative journey. You can do that by following us on Facebook at Boston University, excuse me, YAF at Boston University on Facebook and YAF underscore BU on Instagram and Twitter. So, YAF National's mission here is to fight for free speech, individual rights, and limited government in a strong national defense at college campuses throughout the nation. And we want to do that through honest, intellectual, and productive dialogue in the political sphere. I have only three rules to announce. First, no flash photography. Second, if you disagree with anything during the lecture, please wait until the Q&A session after Ben has finished speaking to voice your opinions. And third, if you do disrupt the event, you will be asked to leave. So I'd now like to welcome the president of YAF at BU, Diana Soriano, without whom this event would not be possible. Diana. Thank you for that Nick. Thank you so much for coming everyone. On behalf of Young Americans for Freedom at Boston University, I'm excited to welcome you all and the thousands of people who are also joining us online through YAAF's YouTube page and Facebook for tonight's lecture that was generously sponsored by Fred Allen. In addition to Fred Allen, we want to thank Young America's Foundation, the University, and BU Police for making this event possible. So we have a very special guest here tonight if you weren't aware So I discovered Ben Shapiro a couple years ago, and he honestly completely turned my life around when I was devoid of faith and a sense of responsibility I Someone speaking to me at a hundred words a minute telling me to take responsibility for my choices Grab the reins of my own life approach life more logically was just what I needed Ben's rational and principled view of life changes your mind in a way that eventually changes your heart and makes you a better person. I can guarantee you that others here have had a similar experience, or that some of you who are just being introduced to him, you will have the same experience as well. So a student organization that was founded in response to the announcement of this event, BU Students Against Hate Speech. Imagine creating a club about something that doesn't even exist. So, so they posted that, quote, the topic of Shapiro's scheduled talk, America wasn't built on slavery, it was built on freedom, is an example of Shapiro's white supremacy and bigotry. So somehow before hearing the lecture, they already know what he's going to say. Last week at Stanford, Ben dedicated his whole speech discussing the evils of white nationalism. And you know what? Leftists still chanted for him to leave while he was in the middle of saying this. Sometimes this ignorance is not even their fault because they were literally taught their entire lives by the media, their teachers, and their professors that their opinions are facts. There are some leftists, though, who are terrified of liberals and centrists to come to the lecture and find out that Ben is actually a fantastic person and that they actually really like him. So tonight, we are breaking the one-sided dialogue on campus in an unprecedented way, and there's no better person for this task than our guest. Ben Shapiro is the editor-in-chief of dailywire.com, host of The Ben Shapiro Show, the top conservative podcast in the nation, and syndicated radio show host, heard on more than 150 stations nationwide, including eight of the top ten markets. Ben is the author of eight books, including his number one New York Times bestseller, The Right Side of History, How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. Ben is also a nationally syndicated columnist since the age of 17, subtle brag, and a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm honored to introduce Mr. Ben Shapiro. Thank you. Thanks so much. Well, thank you so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank you. That's an amazing crowd. Well, first off, thank you so much to Fred R. Allen and Young America's Foundation for having me. Thanks to Nick and Diana for really doing amazing work in organizing this along with the rest of YAF. Thanks to Boston University for ensuring that this event could happen despite a change.org petition that people signed. I know it's very intimidating. And BU's an amazing school, illustrious alumni, including MLK Jr., of course, and the very, very, very fresh and very face AOC. To be fair, it sounds like your econ department could use some work. Actually, my mom graduated from BU. So both my parents, I'm actually a Celtics fan because my parents came to Boston for college. I was like, thanks also to really, I'm serious about this, to the protesters who showed up outside demonstrating again that the lecture that I'm giving is almost pointless because if America had been built on slavery, not freedom, you wouldn't have literally hundreds of protesters outside exercising that first amendment freedom and good for them. Really good for them because I've been at so many colleges where it is so cold outside and people proclaim that they are going to come and protest and create a fuss. We went to university of Connecticut and they were expecting hundreds of protesters and one person showed up. And then we went to University of Minnesota. We had 120 police officers and four protesters showed up. And here we have 80 police officers. And first of all, thank you to law enforcement for ensuring we can have a great event tonight. But here we have some 80 police officers and apparently about 100 protesters showed up outside in, what, 20 degree weather? I mean, that is Boston Strong right there. Good for them. That is the courage of your convictions. More credit, more power to them. Now. A few no thanks. No thanks to the leftists who sought to have this lecture canceled out of apparent fear of my wretched evil. No thanks particularly to somebody named Anu Sauni. I apologize if I'm screwing up the name. Class of 2020, co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America at BU, and part of BU Students Against Hate Speech, who wrote that BU should ban me in order to protect its students. From me. Look at me. Saying things. According to Soundy, I am an alt-right talking head, which comes as a kind of shock to the actual alt-right, which not only despises me, but made me its top online target in 2016, and ideological leaders of whom have reportedly decided to target this speech, among others, across the country. According to Soundy, I promote openly fascist ideas, which is pretty hilarious, frankly, coming from a person who leads a group devoted to total government control of the economic system, as well as a group dedicated to labeling those she disagrees with hateful and therefore banning them. And it's not just sound. According to the BU Students Against Hate Speech, I am a, quote, racist, homophobic hate monger whose remarks serve to incite people to commit hate crimes, which is really weird, since according to racist, homophobic hate mongers, I'm a cuck liberal. And when it comes to inciting violence, it seems like labeling me a hate monger might be a little bit more inciting than me saying that America is based on freedom. Shout out also to Black BU, a group of black students at Boston University who are protesting this speech. They also wanted the speech canceled, by the way. They issued a public letter declaring themselves, quote, abandoned, triggered, frustrated, disheartened, devalued, infuriated, overwhelmed, ignored, embarrassed of BU. And then they ran out of words in the thesaurus. They said, this is how our peers, the young Americans for freedom and those who condone their actions have made us feel. Facts don't care about feelings, but we look beyond the facts. Yeah, I noticed that. We look beyond the facts to the faces and fake smiles that greet us day in and out on this campus. Okay, note. Just because. someone disagrees with you does not make their smile fake, doesn't mean they are being mean to you, and if my speech title alone, just the title, not even the contents of the speech, which you may have noticed, like I don't have a time machine, I'm giving it, I'm about to give it, I haven't given it yet. Okay so all you know is the title. If just the title of the speech makes you feel abandoned, triggered, frustrated, disheartened, devalued, infuriated, overwhelmed, ignored, and embarrassed, see your doctor after four hours. Quick shout out to those who also drew Hitler mustaches on my posters, by the way. Oh, it's okay. And thank you for coming as well. I hope you enjoyed your experience. By the way, that's good news for a few people in the standby line. Quick shout out to people who are drawing Hitler mustaches on my poster, by the way. Two problems there. First, I'm an Orthodox Jew. Second, I've been trying to grow facial hair for years, and it's just not working. Okay, now to the actual topic of this speech, America wasn't built on slavery, it was built on freedom. Now the reason for this speech is that we are actually in the midst of a great internal conflict in the United States about the very nature of the country. The conflict surrounds a very simple question, are we a nation? Are we not? On the one side lie many Americans, mostly conservatives, who argue that we are indubitably a nation, unified by history, by culture, by language. The most contentious part of this statement is not the part about culture or language. We all basically agree that we should speak the same language. I'm not even talking about Spanish versus English. I mean that we should be able to understand each other when we have a conversation. Or culture, in which we sort of understand that we share a culture, we watch the same TV shows, and we experience the same sports, and we have all of these cultural totems. The most contentious part of the statement is that we're unified by our history. Now the traditional... view of American history goes something like this. America was built on eternally good and true principles springing from both the Judeo-Christian ethic and English culture rooted in natural law. Those principles were denied in practice by many of the same people who promoted them in theory. But those theories were valid and they remain valid today. The story of America, therefore, is really a story of the broadening application of those principles, the perfection of our union, the fulfillment of the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. That's the traditional story. of what America is. Now, that view certainly does not deny, nor should it deny, the evils and horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, or the savage brutality of the dispossession of Native Americans. But this view does recognize a simple truth. The state of the world historically has been replete with evil and horror and brutality, and America, unlike other nations, has fought over time to wipe them away at home and abroad. In this view, the story of America doesn't begin in 1776, but 1776 does represent the breaking point with the past. The statement of our cherished principles. The story of America is the story of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Then, there's the alternative view of American history. This view suggests that America is not, in fact, a true nation. America is instead an agglomeration of competing interests, forced together by circumstance and by fate, damned to interminable struggle. America is a story of exploitation and greed, of patriarchy and abuse, of hierarchy and manipulation. is an unending litany of horrors punctuated by brief respites, always sliding back into the damnable bacterial soup from once we sprang. Racism, as Barack Obama suggested, is in America's DNA. In 2015, the president elected by 69.5 million Americans in 2008 explained, quote, the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow discrimination is in almost every institution of our lives. You know, that casts a long shadow and that's still part of our DNA that's passed on. We're not cured of it. Racism, we are not cured of it, clearly. Now, Obama's mantle was picked up this year. By the Democrats'second favorite fake minority, Beto O'Rourke, a man who has not been dinged for cultural appropriation over his name, but happens to be whiter than any person in America not named Elizabeth Warren. Sorry. Beto, cribbing from the New York Times 1619 project in his quixotic quest for relevance, suggested that America was founded on racism and slavery. He said, quote, racism in America is endemic, brah. It is foundational. We can mark the creation of this country not at the 4th of July, 1776, but August 20th, 1619, when the first kidnapped American was brought to this country against his will and in bondage as a slave and built the greatness and success and wealth that neither he nor he. his descendants would be able to fully participate in and enjoy. Now, lest you think that Beto's perspective on America is retrospective, Beto brought it up to date in late October. America, he said, is still racist at its foundation, at its core, and throughout the system. And then, of course, he became completely irrelevant. Now he's off eating dirt in New Mexico or something. By the way, it should be noted that Beto said all of this while calling for Americans to elect him, a white man, a very privileged white man, to the highest office in the land. White privilege, shaking my damn head. So, which is it? Which values more represent America, the America to which we all belong? racism and slavery and Jim Crow, or the freedoms posited in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Because both of these things are part of our history, undoubtedly, but the question is which is more defining of the country, of our history, and in which we live. Obviously and undeniably, again, slavery is the darkest part of American history. It was unforgivable, horrific, brutal, vicious, unthinkable. But is it the root of American history, or did it represent a sinful, deeply sinful straying from founding principles rectified over time? Was America founded and built on freedom or on slavery? To examine this question, we have to start at the founding. To support the notion that America was built on slavery, advocates of the revisionist school of historical thought about the country point out that many of America's founding fathers were slaveholders, that the Declaration of Independence didn't abolish slavery, and thus its high-handed declarations of natural rights and equality among men were a mirage, and that the Constitution expressly permitted slavery. Let's take each of these arguments in turn. First, it's undeniable, of course, that many of America's founding fathers were slaveholders. You have to begin with the fact that at the time of the founding, Britain had not outlawed slaveholding or the slave trade in its colonies, and would not do so until the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and would not outlaw slavery among its charter companies until 1843. Slavery was legal in Great Britain proper. legally until 1807. That means that slavery was widespread across the planet and that the United States was no exception. According to Henry Louis Gates, over the period 1525 to 1866, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World in the transatlantic slave trade. endured the unthinkably horrible Middle Passage. Many died in transport of disease, starvation, or suicide. Of those 12.5 million human beings, approximately 10.7 million arrived in the New World. How many of those landed in North America directly? About 388,000. This is not to excuse a single kidnapping, enslavement, or sale of a human being. Each one of these was a crime against man and against God, and we all agree on this. It is to point out that the United States was certainly not unique at the time of the founding in allowing slaveholding. It was common across the planet, including in Western countries. With that said, where did the Founders actually stand on the question of slavery? Well, 41 of the 56 Founding Fathers who signed the Declaration of Independence did hold slaves, but the Founding Fathers, including many people who did hold slaves, were well aware that slavery was a moral abomination. This was the conflict at the heart of the American Founding. John Adams, from Boston, stated, my opinion against it has always been known. Never in my life did I own a slave. He stated that, quote, every measure of prudence therefore ought to be assumed, for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States. Samuel Adams said, Benjamin Franklin became the head of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society after at one point in his young life owning slaves, and stated, quote, that mankind are all formed by the same almighty being, alike objects of his care, and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness the Christian religion teaches us to believe, and the political creed of Americans fully coincides with the position. We earnestly entreat your serious attention. attention to the subject of slavery, that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage and who are groaning in servile subjection. John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, stated, quote, that men should pray and fight for their own freedom and yet keep others in slavery is certainly acting a very inconsistent as well as unjust and perhaps impious part. Jay and Alexander Hamilton were among the men who created the New York Manumission Society in 1787 for the freeing of slaves. Governor Morris, one of the founding fathers, said slavery was a, quote, nefarious institution and described, quote, the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed. Benjamin Rush, another founding father, domestic slavery is repugnant to the principles of Christianity. It is rebellion against the authority of a common father. It is a practical denial of the extent and efficacy of the death of a common savior. It is a usurpation of the prerogative of the great sovereign of the universe who has solemnly claimed an exclusive property in the souls of men. George Washington stated, I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery. slavery. It is no wonder that Pennsylvania and Massachusetts moved to abolish slavery in 1780, Connecticut and Rhode Island in 1784, Vermont in 1786, New Hampshire in 1792, New York in 1799, New Jersey in 1804. Many of the founding fathers released their own slaves as well, including George Washington, John Dickinson, Caesar Rodney, John Randolph, and others. Thomas Jefferson is most often cited on the score because he was indeed a massive hypocrite on slavery, but he was well aware of his own hypocrisy. Jefferson wrote that slavery destroyed the more roles of the people as well as their industry. In fact, Jefferson suggested that slavery would bring disaster upon the nation, quote, Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Whether considering numbers, nature, and natural means alone, a revolution of the wheel of fortune in exchange of situations among possible events, that it may become probable by supernatural interference, the Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. In 1778, Jefferson actually, very early in his career, even introduced a bill to ban importation of slaves into Virginia, hoping for slavery's, quote, final eradication. This conflict carried forward into the Declaration of Independence. The original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a clause written by Thomas Jefferson ripping into the British Empire for supposedly imposing slavery on the colonies. The original clause suggested, quote, he, this would be King George III. has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. It was, of course, southern colonists who decided that they were not going to sign on to a Declaration of Independence that included such language. The Declaration of Independence and its credo that all men are created equal was not meant to exclude slaves philosophically. It was meant to encompass everyone, which is why it was so easy for the Declaration of Independence to be extended to include everybody. You didn't have to change any of the language. This is why ex-slave and second founding father, yes, he should be on our currency, Frederick Douglass, described the great principles contained by the Declaration of Independence. Douglass stated, quote, the signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give fame to a great age. They believed in. order, but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was settled that was not right. With them, justice, liberty, and humanity were final, not slavery and oppression. Douglas's great cry for freedom arose from his invocation of exactly those founding principles. He said, quote, principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence extended to us that was the question that he sought to have answered and that was a question that wouldn't be answered obviously until the Civil War okay how about the Constitution of the United States the argument is made that the Constitution of the United States is a slavery document well the founding fathers actually believed that they had placed slavery on the road to extinction even before the Constitution was written the Northwest Ordinance signed by George Washington in 1787 banned slavery in new territories those territories would later become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. There were approximately, at the time of the founding, 60,000 free black Americans living in the United States. The Constitution of the United States banned importation of slaves beyond 1808. The infamous Three-Fifths Clause, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of congressional apportionment, was designed to prevent increased slaveholding power. That's what it was designed to do. It was not meant to deride black Americans. It was meant to stop slaveholding states from having additional power in the Congress of the United States. Because... You counted slaves fully that would have boosted southern representation in Congress without increasing the number of actual voting citizens. The Constitution of the United States makes no overt reference to slavery, avoiding enshrining slavery in federal law. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, wrote that it would be wrong to place in the Constitution any admission of the idea that there could be, quote, property in men. All of this is why Frederick Douglass was correct to call the Constitution of the United States a glorious liberty document. He thundered, read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? Is it in the temple? It is neither. As Lincoln noted in his 1860 Cooper Union speech, 22 of the 39 framers of the Constitution voted on the Northwest Ordinance. 20 voted in favor of the legislation. One of the other framers, George Washington, was the president who signed it. In 1794, the founders prohibited export of slaves, the selling of American slaves abroad. In 1798, they prohibited importation of slaves into the Mississippi Territory. In 1807, Congress effectuated the ban on importation of slaves codified in the Constitution a year before they were even legally allowed to do so, so that on the date of 1808, laid forth in the Constitution, importation of slaves into the United States would be banned. Okay, now we move on to the Civil War. None of this ended the cruelties of slavery, obviously. Despite the best efforts of many of the founders, slavery continued to explode in numbers in the United States. That was largely due to the invention of the cotton gin, which suddenly made intensive agriculture in southern states a worthwhile pursuit economically. economically. By the time of the Civil War, some four million slaves were held in the United States, held by just under 400,000 slaveholders, according to the United States Census in 1860. Southern advocates began to argue the morality of slavery, particularly John C. Calhoun, who was a vicious white supremacist and did serve. as Vice President of the United States, and they started to insist that the federal government enshrine slavery for all time, force free states to return escaped slaves, and allow for the expansion of slavery into new territories. But here's the thing. The story of America is not a story of unending tolerance for slavery. slavery. Far from it. The intransigent backwardness of slaveholding states led to the bloodiest war in the history of America, with over 600,000 human beings dead. Hundreds of thousands of men marched into battle, singing the battle hymn of the Republic. And the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic say, as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free. The purpose of the Civil War was quite clear. The original lyrics, by the way, were even more militant. They censored around John Brown, who was an abolitionist militant who led a raid at Harper's Ferry, tried to lead a slave. slave uprising of black Americans at Harper's Ferry. The original lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, it was called John Brown's Body. And the original lyrics said, John Brown's body lies a mold run in the grave. His soul is marching on. Now, it's true that Abraham Lincoln didn't originally stand in favor of emancipation. mandate as elected was to effectuate union not to free the slaves but it was obvious what his agenda was which is exactly why the south tried to secede right he'd said all of this in his house divided speech in 1858 quote i believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become a like lawful in all of the states old as well as new north as well as south And it was obvious which side of that ledger Lincoln came down on. As president, therefore, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He rammed through the Republican Congress the 13th Amendment barring slavery. Weeks later, he was assassinated. In 1866, the House of Representatives passes the 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal protection of the laws. The 15th Amendment guaranteeing black Americans the right to vote passes Congress in 1869. And so slavery ends in the United States. And due process and equal protection of the laws is guaranteed, at least legally, to those who have been held in cruel bondage. Freedom triumphed. at least on paper. But freedom didn't, of course, fully triumph because in the aftermath of the Civil War, after so-called radical Republicans pressed for federal protection of black Americans, the effort collapsed. Southern states reinstituted brutal racist laws. The KKK became a massive force in the South, enforcing its racist evil with the rope and the gun. Schemes of segregation and Jim Crow became the norm in old Confederate states. Sharecropping replaced slavery. Legalized terrorism against black Americans was commonplace, and the federal government did nearly nothing. Black Americans pressed on. heroically fighting for the freedoms that they had been promised in the Declaration of Independence and then promised again by Lincoln and the radical Republicans. They fought for their freedom, day in and day out, the right to live free of legally mandated discrimination, their right to rise economically, their right to prosper in liberty. And of course they met amazing, tremendous resistance from awful human beings like Woodrow Wilson, a person who actually showed the birth of a nation, the pro-KKDW Griffith film, he showed it at the White House. to FDR, who signed into law the deeply flawed GI Bill that would deny effective benefits to black Americans, particularly in the South. Redlining was common practice. Educational opportunities were barred to black Americans, and yet still black Americans rose. The black poverty rate fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% by 1960, with Jim Crow in place, which is an unbelievable accomplishment. It's an amazing accomplishment. The black middle class grew, and then came the Civil Rights Movement, the most important victory for freedom over slavery since the end of the Civil War. Martin Luther King Jr., of course, of this university, led the charge, citing the founders and America's original ideals. On August 12, 1963, King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, perfectly fitting, and intoned the timeless words, words that still shock us, with truth and vision. He said, when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life. liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. With the end of the civil rights era came the end of legal discrimination in the United States. Freedom once again triumphed over slavery. Now that didn't mean that racism ended. Racism is never going to die. There will always be racists. But the centralizing principle of American history and American life gained unprecedented strength. Freedom continued to overcome tyranny. So, now let us ask, is the story of America slavery, or is it freedom? And let's ask a slightly different question. If America was founded on slavery, why then is America today so free? Why is Black BU outside protesting this event, free to speak their minds, attending one of the best universities in the country, except for the econ department, if slavery is the defining feature of the American experience? To make the case that slavery defines America, those on the political left have to make the case that slavery and Jim Crow have effectively infected all of America's institutions. So first, the left makes the case that the American economy was, quote unquote, built on slavery, and that therefore, all who live in America's prosperous economy ought to pay the descendants of slaves reparations. Now, reparations at the time of slavery's end would have been fully justified and fully desirable. It should have happened, obviously. But there is no way to make the moral case that the grandson of a Lithuanian immigrant ought to pay the great, great, great, great granddaughter of a freed slave. So instead, the left makes the claim that the American economy relied on slavery to its benefit, and that even those who didn't benefit from slavery indirectly benefited from slavery. But there's only one problem with this claim. It doesn't make sense. Slavery was, of course, a very important part of the American economy, but it was also the most backward part of the American economy. Free labor is more economically efficient than slave labor. There's a reason that Alexis de Tocqueville, touring the United States in 1835, described the South as a society, quote, gone to sleep. In fact... The growth of the southern economy remains slow all the way from basically the beginning of the republic through the Jim Crow period because during slavery it was slow because it was all agricultural and because it wasn't using free alienation of labor. And then it was slow because of Jim Crow. And then after Jim Crow, suddenly the southern economy starts to boom and you start to see a net migration back into the south after the end of Jim Crow. During Jim Crow, black citizens are fleeing to the north and bringing with them the intensive human capital that they bring with them. They make Detroit rich, for example. Instead... After the end of Jim Crow, people started moving back to the South. So the idea that Jim Crow made places richer, made the American economy richer, or that slavery made the American economy richer is obviously untrue. If slavery had been an economic winner, dude, don't worry, there's Q&A. If you want to be the first person in the Q&A. If you want to be the first person in the Q&A, it can be you. Okay. Okay. Perfectly, perfectly welcome, perfectly welcome to ask a question. If slavery had been an economic winner, the South wouldn't have been roundly defeated by the industrialized North. The end of slavery meant a drop in agricultural capital in the United States and a massive uptick in industrial and housing capital, as well as in other domestic capital, according to far left economist Thomas Piketty. Our labor stocks soared, our capital stocks soared in the aftermath of the Civil War. Dude, like, really, you can ask a question, I promise. I promise. You can be the first person to ask a question. You can... Your free speech is during the Q&A, dude. I mean, like... Well, nobody hired you to come up here and talk, so if you want to convince somebody to hire you to talk... This experience that slavery is not particularly economically beneficial is not shocking. As Scott Sumner of the Library of Economics and Liberty points out, Brazil didn't abolish slavery until the 1880s and did worse than America. It also did worse than countries to the south of Brazil. Slavery still exists on the planet, by the way. predominantly in poor countries. Free alienation of labor drives prosperity, which is why free market countries are by far the most prosperous. So no, the American economy wasn't based on slavery any more than it was, quote, based on the horse and buggy. That doesn't diminish the evil of slavery, but is the economic... is economic illiteracy to suggest that America's economy is rooted in slavery. We are a highly industrialized economy, we have been for more than a century, and even when we were an agricultural economy, slavery was an economic drain on everyone other than slaveholders themselves. This means that the authors of the New York Times 1619 Project are forced into the unenviable position of blaming slavery for America's prosperous system of free market capitalism, which requires a hell of a trick, since free market capitalism is precisely the opposite of forced labor. So we end up with the absurd spectacle. of Matthew Desmond suggesting that the quote-unquote brutality of American capitalism is modeled in slavery. Okay, I've honestly, I've offered the opportunity for this gentleman to be first in the Q&A line, and now he's actually just disrupting the ability of everybody else to hear the speech. Honestly, I have a three-year-old who disrupts this way. Okay, this is your last chance. We're going to count to three. And so, according to the 1619 Project, you've got Matthew Desmond suggesting that the brutality of American capitalism is modeled in slavery. How does he make this case? He idiotically argues that, quote, when an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes, or when a mid-level manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they're repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave labor camps. Because now, apparently, accounting is racist. Proponents of the view that slavery is the root of economic inequality also make this argument, that slavery is the root of economic inequality between black Americans and white Americans. And there is clearly and undoubtedly truth to the idea that economic history impacts economic present. Obviously, history always affects the present. Such history can mostly be seen in statistics like the wealth gap, which of course measures accrual of wealth over the course of decades. And so, naturally, redlining in 1960, racist policy in 1960, can have effects on inheritance in 1980, which have effects on wealth ownership in 2019. Of course, that's true. But the continuation of income disparity among races in the United States is today overwhelmingly not the result of racism, Jim Crow, or slavery. Income mobility and disparity is a statistic that should worry us. Honestly, I'm more than happy to have this person ask a question, but this is now the fourth time that we've been interrupted during the speech. Sir, if you can't at least sit down and be respectful to the other, what, 1,500 people in the room, then get up and leave. I'm simply not going to continue this nonsense until this person leaves, frankly. I can't. I'm sorry. I can't continue. This is so. I appreciate it. Honestly. That's too bad because I, you heard it. I offered multiple times for him to ask the very first question. I'm more than happy to talk about the points. I'm not more than happy to have someone disrupt a speech for 1500 other people because he can't keep his mouth shut so long as the speech continues. Okay, so back to income disparity. Income mobility and disparity is the statistic that should worry us more than the wealth gap because it's very difficult to alleviate historic wealth gaps. It is much easier to alleviate economic disparity. And such disparities are due in the main to individual decision-making. That's why Asians... now out-earn whites in the United States by a wide margin. It's why Hispanic Americans are moving up in the income distribution across generations, while black Americans unfortunately are not, according to researchers from Stanford, Harvard, and the Census Bureau. The study actually found that growing up in a high-income family provides no insulation. from these disparities. Black children born to parents in the top income quintile are almost as likely to fall to the bottom quintile as they are to remain in the top quintile. So something else is going on beyond simple wealth disparity carrying over to future generations, and that's a tragedy, and that's something that we have to figure out. Furthermore, the same study found that the black-white income gap was driven entirely by differences in men's, not women's, income. So if the idea is that black people are earning differently than white people because of racism, then why is there no income disparity gap between black women and white women as soon as you adjust... for the income level of the homes in which they grew up. It only applies to black men, which is very weird. Black women actually earn slightly more than white women, conditional on parents'income. The study actually found little or no gap in wage rates or hours of work between black women and white women. It is also worth noting that income gaps between black and white Canadians and in the United Kingdom largely mirror income gaps between black and white Americans. So what exactly are the factors that lead to lower income mobility? Individual factors. Unfortunately, the black male dropout rate in schools is 8% versus 4.9%. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, while the rate of blackmail imprisonment has dropped dramatically over the past 15 years, Still, 2,613 black males per 100,000 black males were in prison as of 2015, compared with 457 white males in prison per 100,000 white males in 2015. Despite the best attempts of people on the left to try and suggest that police forces all over the country are just randomly imprisoning vast swaths of black men, the data simply do not support this contention because crime reports tend to match crime arrest statistics. This brings us to the accusation that slavery lies at the root of the criminal justice system. Now, again, the criminal justice system was indeed biased against black Americans, with law enforcement agencies acting as agents of segregation or racism. Again, undeniable. This is history. But that does not explain why black... black crime is so high today or why the black murder rate for example doubled between 1960 and 1980 right when jim crow ended the black murder rate went up dramatically for the next 15 years as civil rights were fully effectuated in fact it continued to go up all the way until 1994 effectively Slavery and Jim Crow have an impact on the development of black crime rates historically? Undoubtedly. But are teens in Chicago killing each other at rapid rates today because of slavery in the main? Or because they are individuals who are killing one another in Chicago today? The answer is obviously the latter. But the New York Times tells us that every single problem in America can be laid at the feet of slavery because America was based in slavery. According to Kevin Cruz in the New York Times, traffic patterns in Atlanta are based on slavery. I don't know how he explains traffic in Boston. Janine Interlandi blames slavery for lack of universal health care. In the United States. Every single problem in America is apparently based on slavery. American freedom never enters the conversation. Now listen, slavery has been a feature of societies across time and place. Freedom is what makes America unique, not slavery. Freedom is what makes America unique. We are a country based on freedom, not on slavery. Now again, history always carries forward. History's problems do manifest in today's problems. But those who are determined to see America's story as a continuing story of oppression, those determined to paint America's history. As an eternal story of brutality and slavery, rather than as a struggle toward freedom and equal rights in consonance with the original founding principles of the country, suggests that slavery remains the defining feature of American life. Remains. Not was. Remains. To do this, they have to lie outright about the nature of America today. And so here is the truth about America today. America is not only the least racist it has ever been, according to statistics, it is one of the least racist multiracial countries on the planet. According to the Washington Post, a new Swedish survey found that people from the UK and its Anglo-former colonies were most likely to embrace a racially diverse neighbor. That means the UK, America, Canada, and Australia. Other European countries, the great Europeans, they aren't nearly as tolerant. And none of those countries has ever elected a black man twice with over 65 million votes each time to serve as the leader of those countries. And that is fairly good evidence that a very, very large proportion of Americans are not only not racist, they are actively anti-racist. Because it turns out that a huge percentage of people who didn't vote for Barack Obama... didn't refrain from voting for him because of his race either, which means that a huge, huge, huge percentage of Americans were fine with a black man as president. Just some Americans didn't like that particular black man as president. Many of the same people who didn't vote for Barack Obama for president would willingly vote for Tim Scott for president, would willingly vote for Condoleezza Rice for president or Colin Powell for president. Obviously, this is true. Here's another truth. America is not only the most prosperous country on the planet. Its black citizens are among the most prosperous black citizens on the planet. It is not a denial. of any of the myriad and inconceivable evils the black Americans have historically experienced to acknowledge this simple fact. Here is the truth. America is not only the freest country in the world, that freedom has expanded, not contracted over time. And those who suggest that America is based on slavery and cruelty are seeking to curb those freedoms. And that brings us back, finally, to Black BU. According to Black BU, the very presence of this lecture at BU's campus, quote, reminds us that we are not one BU, that BU is not designed for us, and this BU does not belong to us, just as our bodies and our minds do not. and have not belonged to us since our rights as human beings were stripped away in the wake of slavery. This is a lie. It is an abject lie. BU is indeed designed for you. That is why you are here. Your rights as human beings are fully intact. Those of your ancestors were not. Stop conflating the past with the present or the tremendous, unforgivable evil done to your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents with your experiences today in America. They are not the same. Yes. History matters, and history has lasting impact, but to suggest that your, quote, bodies and minds do not belong to you is fantastical, absurd nonsense of the highest order. They do. That's why you're here, and thank God and America's highest ideals for that. Black BU suggests that this speech was going to deny the evils of slavery. Did it? Black BU suggests that my speech denies the, quote, systematic degradation of black bodies, the generational trauma, natal alienation, and social death that has marked and affected black communities in the U.S. in 1619, the birth of slavery on U.S. soil, as we know, and consequentially the birth of America. Again, nonsense. I simply deny that such evils have not been vitiated over time at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Yes, of course, the lives of black American heroes, but the lives of white American heroes as well. The story of America is a story of a nation cleansing itself of evil in vindication of the better angels of our nature. Black BU concludes their letter. America was, in fact, built on slavery, on the backs of black people plagued with pain, sorrow, and disregard. So this brings us to ask those who condone this event and title, whose freedom? Here's the answer. Your freedom. Yours. American slavery was an evil institution. Jim Crow was an evil institution. Fully evil. Full stop. But you are here because of freedom, not slavery. You are speaking today because of freedom, not slavery. You are American because of freedom, not slavery. Your letter is a reflection of the foundations laid in 1776, not the foundations laid in 1619. To fail to acknowledge this basic truth is to advocate for the destruction of the only America to which we all belong. A few months ago on my radio show, I had the opportunity to interview a man named Harry Stewart. Harry Stewart is one of the last living Red Tails, the Tuskegee Airmen, the black American heroes who flew during World War II. He told a story. On April 1st, 1945, Stuart flew a mission over Austria. As flak burst around him, he looked down and he saw the fighter planes of three of his fellow pilots on fire. One smoking heavily, limped back toward Allied lines. A second crashed in a burst of flame. A third crashed, but the pilot ejected. Later, Stuart would find out that the pilot, a man named Walter Manning, was lynched by a crowd of Austrians egged on by SS troops. Stuart is now 95 years old. I asked him, Why would he fight for a country in the midst of segregation and Jim Crow? And it's a damned good question. Why would you fight for a country in which you yourself are alienated from your rights? What made America worth fighting for? And here's what Stewart said. He said, quote, I guess the Constitution of the United States. You read that and it's an absolutely beautiful document, but it wasn't being followed to the full extent. Since World War II, we have gotten closer to the ideal principles of that document. That is what America is based on. Men like Stuart, men like George Washington and Frederick Douglass, like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. All of them fighting for the freedom the founders set forth at the very beginning. The same principles that Harry Stuart fought for, the principles of freedom, belong to all of us, black and white. Thank you so much. Happy to take your question. Now, as always, As always, I have a rule. If you disagree with anything on this or any other topic, you always go to the front of the line. That's the rule. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now moving on to the Q&A portion of the evening. Everyone, please form a single file line behind me. Everyone who tries to cross from the front will be sent to the back of the line. Everybody gets one question per person. I will give you specific instructions to stand on this pink X right next to me. I will hold the microphone for you. Please do not take it away from me. It's all I have. As Ben states, leftist questions will be sent automatically to the front of the line. We encourage all disagreement. No, you're a human being. I just deny that if you're a man who says you're a woman, you're a woman. Who, who, I'm, I'm unaware of any, I'm, again, unaware of any erasure. I'm literally talking to you right now. You're a human being standing in front of me and I'm talking to you. No, it's, it's, it's as simple as that. You're a human being. I mean, if you want to identify something else, I'm sorry, you can't do that either. All right, as we left off, we're continuing with the Q&A portion of the evening. As Ben stated, those who disagree will be sent to the front of the line. First question. Hi. So in 2016, you tweeted out a list of 20 people that. you called alt-right or alt-right friendly. It included Ron Paul, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and even Donald Trump. Recently you gave a speech at Stanford about Nick Fuentes, who you called an alt-right lead influencer. My question is this. It seems like conservatives like you, like Charlie Kirk, like Dan Crenshaw feel threatened by America first conservatives and America first ideas. Is this why you're smearing them as alt right, racist, homophobic and all these other things instead of actually addressing their ideas and debating them? So, first of all, I'm happy to address any ideas. I'm not happy to debate somebody who has joked about murdering me. That's that's fantastic. As far as as far as some of the other as far as some of the other. People who are mentioned, obviously when I say alt-right or alt-right adjacent, you'd have to date the tweet. So back in 2016, the fact of the matter is that people like Ron Paul, who has a long history of extremism, if you go back and you read the Ron Paul letters, there's a fair bit of anti-Semitism and racism in them. If you look at Donald Trump, who I said overtly in 2016, flirted with the alt-right because he did in April and May of 2016. That was a dated tweet. If you're going to date the tweet to 2016, you actually have to date the tweet to 2016, not to yesterday, because things change. Donald Trump, thank God, has forced it. expelled many of the people who are already Jason like Steve Bannon from his administration which is a very very good thing as far as as far as the idea that you know I'm somehow refusing to debate lower levels of immigration that is obviously untrue you can go watch an hour-long interview that I did with the aforementioned Ann Coulter back before 2016 about a book she did on immigration it's all about lowering levels of immigration if we're talking about tariffs happy to have that conversation I had with Tucker Carlson if you're talking about more isolationist foreign policy I've had that conversation with many, many people. I said this in my speech at Stanford, which people are willfully ignoring. I'm not arguing that people who hold those views are quote-unquote alt-right. The alt-right is a very specific viewpoint that sees the problem in America as a problem of demographics, that suggests that white nationalism is the answer to that problem, that suggests that the problem with immigration is not a problem of culture or assimilation. The problem in America is a problem of what race the people are who are coming into the country. That is not... a point of view that is even within the realm of sort of the paleo con viewpoint, that is a point of view that is actively alt-right. So the alt-right does have a definition, and I tried to be as specific about that definition as possible at Stanford University. If you want to ask about it, that's fine. Well, first of all, Nick Fuentes is not a white nationalist. He's an America first conservative. He literally has a show every night called America first. You've called Pat Buchanan an anti-Semite and racist for 15 years. Pat Buchanan is a legend of conservatism. You need to stop smearing people who want to reduce immigration and criticize Israel as anti-Semitic and racist and just accept that they disagree with you and they simply want to put America first. Well, there are plenty of people who disagree with me and who are critical of Israel and are not anti-Semitic. There are plenty of people who disagree with me on all the aforementioned issues. I've mentioned some of their names, and that is perfectly fine. If you want to discuss Nick Fuentes specifically, I suggest, again, you go back and you look at his videos about why six million Jews or what was it, one million Jews could not have been burned in the ovens at Auschwitz or Treblinka. I suggest that you go back and you look at videos of him, actual videos of him doing things like playing Grand Theft Auto, running over an Orthodox Jew, cackling maniacally, and then talk. about how he just killed Ben Shapiro. I refer you to a video last week in which Nick Fuentes pulls out a switchblade and starts randomly jabbing it in the air while talking about me. No, I don't think he's a mainstream conservative. And I think that it is a sin for people to conflate mainstream conservatism with that kind of garbage. Thanks. I gave you a couple of questions. I gave you a couple of questions. There are other people on the line. Hey man, my name is Rolf. I'm a huge fan. First of all, I wanted to say to that guy, Nick Fuentes went to the Unite the Right rally where they said, Jews will not replace us. He called to kill all globalists, so he's definitely not a mainstream... I mean, come on. He called Matt Walsh, who works for me, a Shabbos Koi race traitor. Right. He's retarded. I watched a bunch of his videos when I heard about him. He's evil. He's evil. Okay, so I'm a big fan because I was recently struggling with the idea of free will and I was hoping that you could explain it. If you had free will, you could create choices, meaning if your choices weren't influenced by outside causes, then essentially you would be creating effects without causes, right? Which would be impossible. So it would break the laws of causality. So how do you explain free will, and do you think it's theoretically impossible to prove free will exists scientifically? I think it would be nearly impossible to prove that free will exists scientifically. I think that it's something that you have to take experientially and out of faith. Because again, science assumes that there is a cause for every effect. And again, free will assumes that there are causes with no effect. It's why the biblical idea and the traditional religious and kind of natural law philosophy. human beings, that human beings were made in the image of God, and because human beings were made with the image of God, that actively meant the ability to create X and I hello, essentially, and make decisions X and I hello. So is that possible to prove? I don't think that that's possible to prove. I also think that any system built on the idea of lack of free will is bound to collapse in on itself and is completely unworkable as a matter of human action. This is a debate I've had with Sam Harris multiple times, including on my podcast and on his podcast as well. I find it fascinating, but sure, I'm happy to admit that if your is that every cause must have an effect and that every effect must have had a cause, then the idea of you being able to choose freely, in other words, in any given situation, you could choose A or you could choose B, then it's very difficult to substantiate on the basis of just that first premise that you mentioned. Sorry, there's a huge line of questioners. Well, abstinence comes up. i'm sorry i say it every speech now because everybody says that every speech it's never going to stop being funny it's just it's not hey ben thank you for coming uh i just wanted to know what do you think about the way we choose our senators do you think the senators should be chosen by the state legislatures and what are some ways that we can restore the power of the states choosing trueshing the federal government so yeah i'm an opponent of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which suggested direct election of senators. The reason being that the entire goal of the Senate originally was that senators would be answerable to their states. The entire Senate is set up as an institution to grant more power to states in contravention to the House of Representatives, which is directly elected. by district and is supposed to not really represent the states themselves. The idea was that state power would be projected up through the Senate by having the state legislatures pick their own senators. They could recall the senators too, right, originally. So you'd send a senator, you didn't like him, you'd recall him by the state legislature. I think that that was a much better system. Right now it's very weird that the same population that elects Congress people also elects senators, right? There's no indirect election of senators. So I think that would be, you know, I think it's a good idea to get rid of the 17th Amendment. It's never going to happen, obviously, but I'm very much in favor of it. as far as restoring the balance between the federal government and the state government, that starts by minimizing the power of the federal government in our lives, and that's something I think we're all trying to fight for each and every day in the conservative movement. So Ben, you were of course a man of minute stature. You came from more than what? 5'4", 137 pounds? In a system without government providing services like security, confidentiality, police, I could easily visualize a scenario in which you're literally being eaten by larger men as a paladin between courses. So now... when clearly in any reality you would rely heavily on direct or indirect third-party physical protection of your life and property. And that happens to be the one government service, the only one that you're vocal in supporting as an absolute necessity. The government resists solely to, quote your words here, protect you from other people. You've said government should provide security and conflict resolution, and that's it. Unstated is just how you arrived at this government should provide formulation. One that necessarily includes you forcing some else's labor and forcing some else to pay for it. The fact is there are many people who do just fine in a stateless society, be capable of protecting themselves without government security. And so the thing is, here you are, a rather petite individual, clearly leeching off the government program of law and order, saying others will be forced to pay for your life and your property. So my question to you, Ben, is given that tiny fellows like you benefit from this coarse payment, yet you condemn the needs of others to do it for your own, somehow encroaching on your freedoms. Just how is it not? the height of hypocrisy, and where your entire philosophy of limiting government falls apart. It's not, in truth, only limited to what Ben Shapiro personally needs for himself. So listen, I enjoy Ben Shapiro's short and petite joke as much as any other person. But a couple of quick things. First of all, just as a matter of... In fact, I should explain that I do expend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on my own personal security. So if the idea is that I'm leeching off the government, no, I am definitely paying for my own personal security. If the idea is that when it comes to policing, the idea of police is that police is a public good. The description of a public good in economics is a good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable, meaning a good that cannot be denied to anybody who is within its purview and also cannot be excluded for anybody who is within its purview. The fact is that when it comes to leeching... If you were to consider a public good by the amount of what I pay in and what I get out, in terms of taxes, I pay in vastly more than many people who benefit from the services of the police department. But the point of having a police department is the police department is supposed to protect the community, meaning that they shouldn't be picking and choosing the houses on my street that they protect because that has bleed over effects and externalities, including the safety level on my street. So no, I do not think that it is me disproportionately drawing from the system to suggest that there'll be public policing. I think that that's a, it's a creative argument. It's a new one. I'll give you that. And, and. I'll try to work out more if that's what you're asking me to do. I'll try to create a scene it up, bro. Okay, next. I'm sorry, we have literally like 50 people in this line. hi ben uh thanks for a great speech so as a conservative i think that if we're going to win the war of ideas we need to adopt some more nuanced views of some issues that are important to people instead of being dismissive which i think we are sometimes for example i agree that white privilege which you call a myth is not this all-in encompassing legal barrier to progress for minorities. However, we all have unconscious biases based on things like race, age, and gender. So if there's a tendency to prefer white over black in some area, like deciding between job candidates, then wouldn't that be an example of not legal but de facto white privilege. And if that's the case, then don't we all need to check our many privileges by being more aware of the good things that we have, which we ourselves do not earn? And don't we also need to check our biases by trying to do better at judging each person individually and not by their group identity? Well, I mean, I wouldn't call that white privilege. I'd just call that trying to be a good person. I think the problem with the term white privilege is the unspoken assumption, which is that if you are white, you have somehow benefited massively by dint of your skin color in the United States. And that is a proposition that on the individual level, I absolutely deny. I think there are a lot of white people who do not have that. not benefit from the fact that they are white in the United States. I think there are legal policies in place like affirmative action that affirmatively actually cut against white people in the United States when they don't exist in the same way with regard to legal discrimination, like legally enforced discrimination against other groups. When it comes to the idea that we should all treat each other as individuals and we should obviously examine our own internal biases, of course I agree with that. I mean, I thought that used to just be called decency. The problem with weaponizing the term white privilege is, again, the suggestion that if you are a white person and you've been successful, the reason that you've been successful is due to this unspoken privilege and bias inside our institutions. Again, that's too vague to do anything about. I've said this a thousand times, really, almost in every speech, that if you want to point out to me a case where somebody is being a racist so I can get on the same side as you and then fight alongside you against that racism, that's fine. But if you want to go ghost hunting against things like white privilege, I can't, it doesn't have a specific enough definition or an action plan for me to do anything about it. So there's really nothing I can do about it until you cite for me the exact instance of something going wrong. And then we can fight about it together. Specificity is actually the friend to action. Vagary is the enemy of action. And it feels like in today's politics, vagary is what people cite because that allows them to be angry at other people without actually recommending an action that's useful. Hi Ben, my name is Macken. So, over the past few years, I've heard you repeatedly predict that in a hundred years, all of us are going to be looked back upon as barbarians, and I'm quoting you, barbarians, for eating animals. eating meat. I said it's a possibility, yeah. You've predicted it on three separate occasions. I said probably, and I think that's probably true, yeah. Okay, so you stand by that statement. Okay, great. And yet you've never suggested that you would take any action on this topic. You've never suggested that you... are going to go vegan or even vegetarian. I know. And so my question for you is this. How can you make a career off of preaching personal responsibility while failing to take responsibility for your words on this topic? So one of the contingencies that would make it an absolute brutality in 100 years is that there's actual sources of animal-like protein that are produced without the use of animals. And that is progressing pretty quickly, right? I mean, you're actually seeing animal protein being produced without the killing of animals. I think that's going to make things a lot easier for people. As far as the vegetarian-vegan question, it's something that I've actually seriously considered. I haven't talked about it publicly a lot, but it's something that I've actually pretty seriously considered because, I mean, frankly, I do— think that there are going, like, I think that on the list of moral evils in American society, I think that this comes in a far, far cry behind things like abortion, for example, like the killing of human beings in the womb. But if you're going to talk about, but if rightly so, you say, okay, well, make your eating habits adhere to a more moral standard. It's something I'll admit I'm a hypocrite on, and it's something that I've thought about a fair bit. So, actually, thank you for urging me to consider my hypocrisy and continuing to move in that direction, because I'm thinking about it seriously. that you're a hypocrite and then continue to how can you that's what a hypocrite is i just said i am but you're preaching personal responsibility so what if i said that i was a hypocrite on the pro-life issue that you say what if i say well i think abortion is wrong but i'm going to get right i'll just i can't i'd be saying at least you're what i would say is you're upholding the right moral standard in your talk and i wish you would do so in your personal life and you are free to say the same thing to me about my eating habits Hello. Recently, you said on your show in defense of Brett Kavanaugh that you've had a bevy of public figures in recent years who have had their genitalia described on national television by people who alleged sexual assault. And then you said. stormy daniels and uh monica right we know what trump's dick looks like we know what we know what clinton's dick looks like right yeah so i'm so the what i'm wondering is why uh you are citing examples that were consensual sex and then implied well they weren't paula jones described the situation that was not consensual well i mean i thought you were referring to monica lewinsky but the the question is one who actually described his dick okay well the question is why do you think that it's incumbent on survivors of sexual assault to like describe uh the penis they were questioning it absolutely is not and if you read the next sentence i said yeah i said it is not this positive yeah you said nobody has yet described kavanaugh's genitalia now that's not this positive this positive Maybe they were generic. Who knows? Correct. Right. Okay. And the implication. What is the problem? I agree with me. The implication. Yeah, yeah. So the implication then is that if they were to describe the genitalia, it was more likely that the sexual assault would have been committed. Well, I'm more likely to believe that there is evidence that they actually had a sexual experience with the guy if they give details of the experience. Sure. I mean, that's called additional evidence. But I said dispositive. Dispositive means. It does not dispose of the question. So what exactly is the problem? Yes. I said they don't have to in order for me to say maybe this is true, but if they do give details of an experience. Look, if you're mugged and you have no description of what happened or how it happened or who did it, I'm less likely to believe your account than if you give me specific details of who did it, how it happened, and why. I mean, this is just basic evidentiary examination. Now, does that mean that you didn't get mugged? No. I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that statement. The fact that it's half jocular, which it is, apparently means nothing to people who are determined to be literal about everything. A separate victim. I was going through the fact that there was no actual evidence that was provided for any of these accounts other than the 20 to 30 years later accounts provided to the New York Times that were coming out like right as Kavanaugh was nominated. So I have you have. The specific besides like a description of the genitalia or like some sort of. OK, so contemporaneous accounts told the friends would be a good one with people going on the record about those contemporaneous accounts, not spending in the case of the one I think we're specifically talking about in that case was Julie Swetnick, I believe. or if it wasn't Julie Swetnick, it was, what was the name of the other woman? The other woman who was talking to the New York Times. She was suggesting that, thank you, Deborah Ramirez. So Deborah Ramirez suggested that she had to consider for six weeks with her lawyer whether or not this was actually Brett Kavanaugh 30 years later to determine whether it was Brett Kavanaugh. Yes. Am I allowed to have doubts about the veracity of that account? Yes. That's called human logic. So they very, I would say, compelling. OK, my original goal is in my podcast. My original statement about Christine Blasey Ford is that she gave a credible account. Then as the details came out, every single person she said was at the party denied they were at the party, including her best friend, who later came out and suggested that she'd been pressured by friends of Christine Blasey Ford to change her own account. That is 100% true. So wait, let me guess your political affiliation. It might surprise you. So, Ben, first, I'd like to thank you for being here and having an open dialogue with everybody tonight. It's greatly appreciated. Free speech is under attack in this country. So recently when you spoke at Sanford, you smeared America first patriots like myself. With all the same leftist insults Antifa uses, the same ones they're using outside to smear us walking in here today. So my question for you, Ben, is will you debate a true conservative like Nicholas J. Fuentes? Or are you too scared to defend your anti-America first positions? So, number one, number one, if you didn't notice, I answered this question like four questions ago. Number two, I will repeat the answer again. I see no purpose in debating somebody who has joked about my death. That is not something that I make a habit of. If you want me to debate somebody about immigration policy who is a limited immigration person or have a discussion with that person, I'm happy to do so. By the way, I see a very strong argument. favor of limiting immigration, both legal and certainly illegal to the United States. OK, if you want me to talk about tariff policy and have a discussion with somebody about that, I'm happy to do that. If you want me to have a discussion about Israel or Israeli policy, I'm happy to do that. What I am not happy to do is have a debate with somebody who has joked about my death, called people who work for me Shabbos Goy race traitors, praised the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. That I am not going to do. unfortunately you can get like i'm not going to stop anybody from asking questions but if you keep asking the same question you're going to keep getting the same answer so unfortunately we have time for one final question hi ben uh my name is steven i'm here as a bu student uh shout out bu um i just wanted to ask you about a recent comment that you made on the daily show where you claimed that rap is not music I've never been on The Daily Show, but I think it was probably quoted on The Daily Show or something. Whatever. Not The Daily Show. The show that you run. Sorry, I'm not extremely familiar with it. Oh, you're talking about on the Sunday special? Yes. Sure, sure. I'm sure you remember the event. In any case, you cited that the reason that rap is not music is because... because it does not contain all of three things, melody, harmony, and rhythm. I am here to present you with an opportunity to remedy this statement in front of a live audience. Okay. So, if you watch that Sunday special, you'll notice that the guest in the other seat is a man named Zuby. awesome dude, right? Zuby is a British rapper. And the next words out of my mouth were, okay, explain to me why I'm wrong. And then he proceeded to explain to me why he thought that I was wrong. And I see the case, right? He suggested that there are rap songs that have melody and there are rap songs that have harmony. Overall, I think that it's fair to say that he has convinced me that rap is a form of music, okay? I'm not conceding that I think rap is a good form of music or that I enjoy that form of music, but sure, rap is a form of music. Now, my favorite part is when people then say, oh, you say rap isn't music or rap isn't a good form of music. It's because you're racist. Jazz. This is great. Jazz is fantastic, and jazz is the historically black form of American music. I just don't happen to like rap. I'm a classically trained musician. I've been playing violin since I was five years old. I played Brahms with my father at my bar mitzvah. Like, I have very different tastes from rap. That's sort of the end of that. I'm happy that you are now clarifying these statements. It's important that you remember that when you make those kind of inflammatory statements about rap music, it's just like, how do you not expect people to either misinterpret what you're saying or for you to not? Oh, no, nobody misinterpreted what I was saying. I think rap is garbage. I mean, that has not changed. But if you somehow got from Ben Shapiro doesn't like rap to Ben Shapiro has a problem with black people, I would suggest you have a problem with the English language, not with my musical tastes. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So you want your safe space. The last thing you want is somebody invading your campus. You should always feel like you're right. Freedom is not an abstraction. It affects our happiness and our ability to flourish. It is very seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. It's always lost bit by bit. Protection of freedom of speech. If we said only things that other people liked. we'd have no reason to protect it. Notice that when Jefferson looks for a source of our rights, he can only find one, and that's the creative. We are a country that respects religious liberty. That key value has been enshrined in our founding documents. We have created equal in the eyes of God, the core principle of democracy. To believe that Islam is a religion of peace is to believe that Muslims throughout history have misunderstood their own religion. Life is the most fundamental right. None of the other rights that are listed in the Bill of Rights actually exist without first the right to life. Free markets fundamentally run on service. Not to make everyone's outcomes equal. We are diverse people with diverse skills and diverse talents. Femininity is one of the graces of our world. One of the things that makes life worth living. Feminism has sucked all the joy out of that. They've attacked manliness itself. They've attacked the virtues. Virtue comes from vir, it means man. To pretend that a man is a woman, if he believes he is a woman, nobody should be mistreated. But that's not the same thing as requiring that people say objectively untrue things. I believe I am something that I am not. It does not make me that bitch.