GLENN: Ben Shapiro. Good to have you on the program.
BEN: It an honor, of course.
GLENN: Good to have you here.
So I just want to run down just a few of the things that are going on in the world and just get your take on where we are, what we're headed towards.
First of all, quickly, let's touch on the topic that we've been on all day. Charlie Gard, the little 11-month-old child whose parents have the money to take him to America to get the treatment. The courts and the national health care system in Great Britain says no. He's got to die in a British hospital. Literally, he's got to die in a British hospital. Slate magazine just said that the right is going to use this as a case for death panels and against socialized medicine. Yeah.
(laughter)
Where do you stand on this?
BEN: I mean, it seems like a pretty solid case against death panels and socialized medicine. I don't see why we wouldn't possibly use that as a cutchall (phonetic). But, yeah, I mean, I think that -- my wife is a doctor. She's in residency, and she works in a hospital. And she deals with, you know, terminal people all the time.
And doctors will say that it's -- that -- they'll give -- they'll lay out all the choices for people who are terminal and they say, maybe you'd prefer not to be poked and prodded every five hours. Maybe you want to die at home. But this is all about the choice of the patient.
And here, in Charlie Gard's case, obviously, it's not the choice of the patient. It's not about the choice of the parents. When a government and a society decide that the quantity of life is less important than quality of life, you end up in a really dire situation. Because the goal of government at least should be to preserve quantity of life. It's your job to decide what sort of quality of life you want to enjoy. And we all have our different moral standards on that. But once the government decides that it gets to decide what quality of life is worth living, then you run into serious --
GLENN: You're in trouble. So I had my staff reach out to leaders of churches and faith over in England yesterday.
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: And I got several responses. One of them was from a pastor who said, look, the churches and the pulpits, they are not dealing with this. They are not talking about it at all.
However, the Christians in England are talking about it. It's interesting that he -- he hoisted the white flags and said, the pulpits, including mine, have surrendered on this. But the people are talking about it.
BEN: Yeah.
GLENN: So there's a huge disconnect there. But he said, please tell Glenn that this is not a case of the government just taking away the rights of a child -- or, rights of parents. It is -- it is more so that the government has paid for this child's health care. And he said now that they have the money to take him to America, I see no reason he can't go to America. However, there isn't enough money to work on cases like that here in England.
So he was making the case that if you don't have money, that it would be right and righteous to say, let him die.
If you are in a socialized health care system and you don't have the money, is it wrong? What do you do?
BEN: Well, I mean, this is why socialized health care systems don't work. I mean, eventually someone is making the final call. It's not as if these parents were born into wealth. I mean, they raised this money from a bunch of charitable people so that they could take their kid out and try and save the kid.
As far as the issue with the pulpits, I mean, this is something that happens in the United States also. I think one of the great tragedies of the latter half of the 20th century is that pulpit figures across-the-board in Judaism, in Christianity, have fled from crucial moral battles that are happening in the now, in order to keep on the good side of government because they're afraid that the government is going to come against them. And so they've run from these moral battles. And you see it all the time. And it's really devastating. It sucks the marrow from the bones of religion.
GLENN: So then let's go to another moral question, of much less importance.
The CNN battle with the WWF video. Okay? I don't -- I'm having a really hard time with this because I don't see a good guy on either side.
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: I see the president doing something that if Barack Obama would have had -- if he just would have retweeted -- not saying that Donald Trump did anything, but retweet it. If Barack Obama would have retweeted something that had an old clip of him beating the snot out of somebody and it superimposed a teabag over a guy's head, we would have gone ape crazy. We would have become animals and gone nuts.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
GLENN: Right?
BEN: For sure.
GLENN: So why don't we see now that we would have reacted the same way that the left is reacting to this and -- and forget about how others are acting, worry about how we're acting?
BEN: Because we don't care about how we're acting anymore. All we care about is the reactionary nature of politics right now. It's why President Trump has like a 90 percent approval rating among Republicans and a 10 percent approval rating among Democrats. And the same thing by the end of the Obama term, was basically true. We're so polarized that we're using the polarization as an excuse for bad behavior.
And, listen, I've spent my entire life -- my entire adult life fighting the left, and I was not expecting moral leadership from the left. I've never expected moral leadership from the left. Because they don't believe in the same values that I believe in. But I did expect moral leadership from the right. And I don't really see how moral leadership is advanced by tweeting out, you know, gifs of WWE wrestling CNN logos. I mean, this was once an office occupied by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It's a little bit clowntastic to watch the president --
GLENN: Clowntastic. So have we just surrendered to clowntasmia --
BEN: Yeah, I think the Republican Party is broken down into -- and the conservative movement has broken down into maybe three groups: Group number one are people who say this is ridiculous and silly and there's no way he should be doing this. Group two is, this is ridiculous and silly, but at least we got Gorsuch. And then group three are the people -- and this is the growing group -- this is the one that I actually worried the most about is people who actively celebrate this, where this is a feature, not a bug. It's not, well, you're going to get the stupid tweet from time to time. But at least you get Scott Pruitt over at EPA, paring back the regulations. It's the people who say, I don't really care what Scott Pruitt is doing so much. Like, I don't pay attention to that. And Gorsuch, yay. But what I'm really interested -- what really gets you jazzed up is the tweets about Mika Brzezinski's bloody face lift or Trump tackling a CNN logo. Like, that's really what gets me going.
GLENN: Well, it's amazing because we used to say, when I was at Fox, watch the other hand. And the other hand -- well, A, I don't think they're coordinated. I think both hands are just flailing, doing whatever they want. But you could make the case that they're very strategic because as we are -- we're not talking about a health care reform that is absolutely awful. It's not -- it's not any better.
BEN: Well, I'm always hesitant to credit strategy to President Trump when sheer unbridled id would do it. You know, I think this wasn't, he thought, you know what, I really need a distraction for my health reform bill. So I'm going to tweet out a dumb gif. I think it was, somebody forwarded me a dumb gif. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Wouldn't it be hilarious if I put it up on my Twitter feed? And it really was that amount of consideration.
GLENN: Right. Right. Right.
BEN: So in order for it to be a diversion, a diversion usually requires something for you to divert attention from. I don't think he's diverting attention necessarily from the health care bill because that's a giant -- like, right now, it's a cluster.
GLENN: But what kills me is that there are a lot of people that are willing -- very smart people that are willing to say -- and help me understand it, Ben.
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: That are willing to say, this is okay. The health care bill. Let's just say everything else is sane. But this is -- the people I trust now are not Mike Lee. They are what's-his-face? Turtle face from Kentucky.
BEN: McConnell.
GLENN: Okay. McConnell. They're trusting McConnell over people like Mike Lee. Help me figure that out.
BEN: Yeah. So, not to break too many groups down to other groups. But I think there are two groups of people here: One is the people who just want to see a win for Trump. And that means something has to pass. And since we're not going to pass simple repeal because Trump basically foreclosed that -- I mean, he forbade that during the campaign. He made a bunch of promises that are not in coordination with simple repeal. And he said, we're not going to let anybody go without health care. The government is going to make sure everybody is covered. I mean, he said this stuff in the campaign.
GLENN: Yeah.
BEN: So it's kind of difficult to say then now we're going to repeal and we're going to cut back Medicaid. So there's group number one that just wants to see Trump get a win. And then there's group number two who say, okay. Now we're going to be honest. We were lying for seven years. Republicans were lying for seven years when they said they were going to repeal this thing. Now we got to be honest. We're not repealing it. But the best that we can do is Medicaid restructuring and a tax cut. And that's the best we'll do here. And we'll call it Obamacare repeal so that all the idiots --
GLENN: Do you believe -- is there a group -- a growing group of conservatives that believe in socialized everything?
BEN: Yeah. I think there's a growing group of conservatives who at least don't care, who are apathetic. Who are more interested again in the fight in what they perceive to be the left than they are the fight against leftist policy. There's been a mistake that's been made, which is you identify the entirety of leftism as residing in the halls of CNN or the New York Times or at the universities. But when leftism actually starts to infect your party, then it can't be infecting your party because, hey, we're Republicans. We're conservatives. We don't believe in the -- we're not leftists. I mean, come on. We hate those guys.
And it doesn't matter -- this is why Steve Bannon, the White House chief strategist, he was out there floating trial balloons about raising taxes on the rich. And there were a bunch of people going, well, yeah, why not do that?
What? I've been here for a while. This is a new one. But people saying, well, I mean, if that's good policy and if that will help us win Democratic voters and all the rest of it, then why not do it?
Again, I think that what people -- the stuff that you and I were looking at during the campaign, we were saying, this is really -- like, some of the activity that Trump was pushing or things like Gianforte, the Montana body-slamming reporter. Things where you and I were going, this is crazy. How is this happening? There were a lot of people who were seeing that not as -- in spite of that, we're happy because we're getting good policy. The policy doesn't actually matter. All that matters is that we have for so long hated losing to the left, that people literally body-slamming reporters or just going out there labeling everything fake news, all of this stuff is -- that's what we wanted. We elected that. Right? What we wanted was the Twitter.
Okay. The Twitter is not an obstacle to getting what we want. The Twitter is what we want. The policy is the obstacle to getting what we ant because we might not get more Twitter if he doesn't get policy passed that allows him to get reelection. And I think we have to be honest with ourselves about whether we're more jazzed up about the wrestling gif or whether we're more jazzed about Gorsuch. Because I think that --
GLENN: We're more jazzed up about the wrestling --
BEN: I think that's right. And I think Trump thinks that's right too, which is why he keeps doing it. Right? He gets more applause doing that than he does with conservative policy.
GLENN: Right. Back with Ben Shapiro here in a second.
GLENN: Good friend of the program. Good friend and also a good friend to the Constitution, deeply rooted in -- in logical thought, which is rare, Ben Shapiro from The Daily Wire is with us.
STU: And a lot smarter than us, so let me ask a question. The CNN thing, their reaction to the wrestling situation, which was them saying, well, we won't release a name. But, you know, if you act badly, we might.
BEN: Yeah.
GLENN: I don't even understand that.
STU: It was a weird way of phrasing it. And I'm not defending CNN and the way they handled it. It was very clunky at best.
I was a little surprised at the uniform reaction on the right though, at least the passionate response from the right saying -- sort of giving this real reverence to an online pseudonym, as if this really means you're anonymous. You could try to be anonymous, but that does not guarantee your anonymity.
You know, who are you mad at? You're mad at CNN here, who is essentially, let's say in the school situation, the principal punishing your kid for doing something wrong, right? They're punishing your kid for doing something wrong. I always see the right as the people who are mad at their kid, not at the school. The left is the one that goes and whines about the school. Hey, why did you get my kid in trouble? You're causing real detriment. Where, the right is the one supposed to be saying, wait a minute, moronic kid, don't post anti-Semitic stuff. Don't post stuff online you don't want to associate with yourself. What am I missing?
BEN: Well, I don't think you're missing anything with the basic calculus as far as the right is supposed to be chiding people when they do this sort of stuff. Although, during the last election cycle, as the number one recipient of anti-Semitic tweets in the journalistic community, according to the ADL.
STU: Yes, 40 percent.
BEN: Forty percent of all anti-Semitic tweets directed at journalists came to me personally during the last election.
GLENN: Congratulations.
STU: Congratulations.
BEN: Thank you. That's great. I have a trophy on my desk: Most hated Jew in America, which is a real accomplishment. Yeah, it's great.
But the -- you know, I think that this story is a little bit more than for that for a couple of reasons. One is that the attempt to link Trump with the guy who created the meme and then to link him with all the other stuff that this guy had ever created was obviously a stretch.
STU: And unfair.
BEN: And unfair to Trump. And obviously a hit job on Trump. So that was CNN going over its skis on that.
Okay. So assume that and say, okay. Fine. Well, they disagree. They think that Trump associating with the Reddit crowd, he gets -- whoever he's linked to, we're now going to search for all their ancillary material and link him to that. Which, again, I have a problem with that. That's mistake number one. Mistake number two is that apparently they got the wrong guy. So apparently they didn't even get the right guy.
GLENN: Yeah.
BEN: And then mistake number three is that they apparently called him. And before he returned their call, he said, okay. CNN is on my tail. I'm going to apologize and pull all the stuff down before I call that. He does that. He calls them back. And then they run that story where they say, and we'll keep him anonymous if he obeys our orders. Okay. That's no longer journalism. That's now activism. So if you're an activist group, that's okay. Right? It's still not moral.
GLENN: What do you think of the idea that Stu floated yesterday, that's really the Buzzfeed crew that kind of came in that was pushing back against CNN, because they are more activist. Don't get me wrong, I worked at CNN. They are activist as well, but not like the Buzzfeed people.
BEN: Uh-huh. I do think that the media have become just generally more activist since Trump was elected.
GLENN: Yes. Yes.
BEN: They now see it as their -- I wrote a column for National Review where I said the dichotomy right now in the American discourse is that the left sees themselves and the media see themselves as these battered-hat, trench coat-wearing guys who are snooping on the streets, and every nook and cranny for all the corruption over at Trumpany Hall. And then the right sees Trump as a sort of Playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne type, who is an idiot during the day, but then at night, he dons the bat cape and goes out and brings justice to Mika Brzezinski's face. So I'm not sure it's a bridge that can ever be gapped -- a gap that can ever be bridged. But as far as CNN's behavior on this, I think I reacted very strongly to this because CNN is not the gatekeeper of telling people what they can do or we're going to release X. It's either newsworthy and release it, or it's not newsworthy and let it go. You don't get to hold things over people's heads.
GLENN: So here's the thing I don't understand. I mean, today I saw this for the first time. This is apparently what was on that guy's feed.
BEN: Feed or whatever, yeah.
GLENN: This comes from a pro-Hitler group.
BEN: Yeah, I've seen it.
GLENN: You're not on this.
BEN: I don't know how they missed me.
GLENN: This is all the Jews that work at CNN.
BEN: Come on.
PAT: Wait. There are Jews that work at CNN? Oh, my gosh.
GLENN: Yeah.
So this is amazing because it has all their faces with a Star of David next to it. I mean, it's so Hitler anti-Semitic kind of stuff.
PAT: Oh, that's bad.
GLENN: By saying, hey, we're not going to release this stuff, they actually I don't think did go as far as they could have to tie Trump to this kind of stuff. If they would have spent two days showing this stuff and saying, "This is the kind of stuff he was doing, blah, blah," then it would have been worse. I don't understand their strategy. I'll get to that in just a second.
GLENN: Welcome to the program. And to Ben Shapiro, who is from The Daily Wire and a -- a really bright guy who is not afraid -- we have very different approaches, the two of us. But I think we believe much of the same stuff.
BEN: Right. You're a nice person. I'm not.
(laughter)
GLENN: No. It's just -- yeah. I want to talk to you a little bit about that too before we go. Because that's not it. I don't think you're a bomb thrower by any stretch of the imagination. We were talking about this earlier today. You're very logical, and you don't mind confrontation.
BEN: Right.
GLENN: But you're not a bomb thrower. There's a difference between a bomb thrower and -- you're not quite Ravi Zacharias.
BEN: Yeah.
GLENN: But you're on that road.
BEN: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, I'd like to think that I'm more interested in saying things that I think are true than I am at offending people. And if the things that I think are true offend people, than so be it.
GLENN: Yeah. There's a totally different -- some people go out to make headlines and to offend. I don't think you -- I've never seen you do that.
BEN: Yeah. Thank you. It's something that I do take some pride in. And it's one of the reasons why -- it's so funny, I'll speak on these college campuses. And there will be these major protests and quasi-riots and all this. And then when people who are on the left actually come to the lecture, they'll say they don't understand what that was all about.
GLENN: Yeah. I know. I know.
Okay. So let's go back to where we were before the break. You were about to answer something.
BEN: It was the CNN thing.
GLENN: CNN. Yeah. So what is CNN's strategy on the way they dealt with all of this?
BEN: I think that the entire media right now are so -- as I said, we're in a reactionary period, which is really dangerous because whatever happens out of a reactionary period, it's rarely good. But the media are so reactionary that they think every story is a kill shot. And so they're interested in just getting the story out fast.
GLENN: Don't they know there is no kill shot on this one? It's just not going to happen.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. But they think everything is. Right? You have Democrats who are saying, based on his tweets last week with MSNBC, he should be impeached. It's like, really? That's your grounds? Like that was it? Have you not seen his Twitter feed?
GLENN: Is that a high crime or a misdemeanor? Which one is that?
STU: It's the Twitter clause of the Constitution.
GLENN: Yeah.
BEN: They put a lot of other clauses in there. No reason they can't put that one in there too.
They really are -- in order for them to maintain ratings -- also, actually because they believe this. They are living in this mythical world where if they break the right story, then Trump will just collapse and he won't be president anymore. And the entire reality will change. And this is why CNN was pumping the Trump/Russia collusion stuff. Not just saying that, you know, there are people who Trump has associated with, who have Russian connections -- which is true -- but saying there is active collusion in trying to blow this up into some big scandal with no evidence.
GLENN: There is no evidence of that.
BEN: None. And they were doing this for a year. And particularly post-election they were doing it because their viewers are invested in the idea that -- they want to be watching CNN at directly the moment when Trump goes down.
GLENN: Yeah, but don't they -- that's true. But don't they understand that we kind of already paved that ground, and it gave birth to the birthers?
BEN: Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
GLENN: Okay. And four years into it, Donald Trump is doing the whole birth certificate thing, which only hardens his supporters. That's all that that does. And so by CNN making everything into an -- a grounds of impeachment and a constitutional crisis, they're only hardening both sides.
BEN: They don't care. Why would they care? And I think that on the right, why would people on the right care?
You used to be able to say two things: Number one, it's bad for the American body politic to have these hardening of positions. And number two, it's not going to bring you victory. But clearly that's not true. Right? I mean, clearly -- like, we on the right keep saying, when are the Democrats going to propose something? When are they going to bring their solutions? They don't need to. Okay. Let's not pretend here.
The Republicans brought no solutions for eight years while Obama was president. And they yelled at him. And then the guy who said that he was born in Kenya is the president of the United States. So it's very difficult to make the argument that what we really need is a great unifier in order to win elections when I can't say that we're exactly the party of unification.
Now, that doesn't say something to unify with. The left wasn't providing a lot for us to unify over while President Obama was president and was providing his own form of polarization and racial extremism in terms of polarizing various racial groups for political gain.
But right now, there's not a lot of incentive on any side for a rhetoric of unity or for a rhetoric of reason.
GLENN: Well, a rhetoric of reason and unity -- and I don't like his policies at all -- was Mitt Romney.
BEN: Yes.
GLENN: And he was right down the traditional middle and everything else.
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: He was much more conservative than this president is in many ways.
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: And yet we didn't unify around that. We unify against somebody that will punch back.
BEN: And that's the whole thing. This is a rage moment. And one of the things that's happening for politicians and the media is there's a lot of money and a lot of political gain to be made in humoring people's anger. You know, I'm -- as a parent, one of the things -- I have two kids who are under the age of four. Which means you deal with tantrums a lot. And one of the things that you do with a kid who is having a tantrum is you have to say, you know, why are you having the tantrum? Is the anger justified?
Right? And usually the anger is not. It's a 3-and-a-half-year-old. The anger usually isn't. When people who are adults are angry, we no longer even bother asking them, is your anger justified? Are you mad for a good reason, or are you just mad? And then if they're mad, we say, okay. Well, we can grab that. We can use that. We can channel that anger into something politically useful, electing me or raising money for this cause. Or -- and so if there's nothing to be angry at or if there's less to be angry at than you think, then how are you going to take advantage of that? And I think that that's what you see happening on both sides of the aisle.
So on the left, they're saying, this is the worst president who ever was. He's Hitlerian. Nothing is happening, guys. Like nothing. Zero things have happened.
GLENN: Nothing.
BEN: I mean, Judge Gorsuch replaced Justice Scalia. Okay. Nothing happened. Nothing is happening. Right? There's been zero major pieces of legislation passed and signed by this president. There have been a bunch of repeals of small laws under -- under -- under Obama. But like, come on. This has been a transformational presidency? Not in any way has this been transformational. But the left is treating it like, you have a reason to be angry. They're a reason you're mad.
Not really. And on the right, you have people -- like President Trump did this during the campaign, to great effect, where he was going into these small towns that were shutting down because the industries had left. And saying, well, the reason -- you have a right to be angry. And not a right to be angry at the overregulation, which is legit, but you have a right to be angry because the Chinese and the Mexicans are stealing your job. And if we'd just win again -- if we didn't have all these idiots and we would just win again, then we would be able to bring everything back. All these factories would come flowing back in.
And, of course, none of that is true. And so what you have right now is the media trying for a buck to promote anger. And you have the politicians for a vote to try and promote anger. And never at any point does anybody -- it makes a pathological country.
Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist over at NYU, he talks about how when it comes to psychology, the single best method that's been devised for psychologists is cognitive behavioral therapy, where they trying try to take somebody who is having a chain of bad thoughts that's leading to depression. And then they try to say, why is it -- is it possible you're exaggerating the situation? Is it possible you're reading someone wrong? You break the chain of bad thoughts by saying, maybe your feelings are not justified. Maybe you should reexamine your own feelings and get control over your own feelings, and then you can control yourself as a human being. Politics is the opposite of that now. It's to take that rage and exacerbate it and magnify it and make it bigger and broader and louder.
GLENN: Yeah. So, Ben, that brings you right to you and me. And I wouldn't put us in different categories. You just approach it differently. You're approaching it with reason. But you don't mind the battle.
STU: I kind of want to see Ben Shapiro as a dad with a logical argument to the 3-and-a-half-year-old.
BEN: Thankfully, she's a pretty logical three-and-a-half-year-old. She's still three-and-a-half.
GLENN: I bet.
STU: Actually, the macaroni and cheese is the correct temperature.
(laughter)
GLENN: Right. Are you seeing and are you even looking for those people, not on the left, but the reasonable people -- I think there's -- I don't even know what the number is. On a bad day, I think it's 30 percent. On a good day, I think it's maybe 70 percent of Americans who if were presented with a group of adults that could all get along, even though they disagree and were saying, you know what, just come over and watch that stuff burn down over here. We're just going to start moving and getting some things done. Kind of the Republican Party in the 1850s that really was mainly made up of Democrats at the time that said, you're not serious. And the Whigs that joined them and said, my side is not serious either. And we actually want to solve this slavery thing.
Do you see -- do you see those reasonable people out there?
BEN: I do actually. It's a growing number of people who are disillusioned with the WWE of it all and are sick -- and they see it's kind of fake. That really it's a lot of people that are --
GLENN: And you see it on the left as well?
BEN: I think, yeah. I get a lot of letters from college kids because I speak a lot to college kids and they watch my videos. And I get a lot of letters from college kids who is, I was on the left, and I was motivated to believe the people on the right were nasty and mean and cruel. And then I watched some of your stuff, and now it's opened my mind. I'm doing some reading of my own. And I'd like to kind of examine ideas differently. And I think that there are those people who are getting over this.
I think that what's -- the future for conservatism is not going to be complete Reagan conservatism. It's going to be almost a conservative Libertarian merger. It's going to be a leave me alone thing. Because we're so sick of everybody in our business.
In fact, I think that that's actually the strongest pitch that conservatives can make right now to people on the left is not, come on over here and join us on the Trump train. It's, you hate Trump. It's, okay. I hated Obama. I thought he was terrible. Well, I have a solution for all of this, which is, how about we just take the power away from everyone in Washington, DC, and then you don't have to care who is the president. He's just some guy who lives in a house --
GLENN: Yeah. And we're not going to change your life. You live what you like. Don't change how I live my life. Let's just live side by side. I think there's a real case to be made -- I think that's what's going to come out of this.
I was in Hollywood of all places all last week, and I met with group after group after group, some of them were hardened -- at least one in each group of the probably ten meetings that I had -- at least one was hardened against me when I first walked in.
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: And it became a joke of the team that was going with me because they were like, how long before they turn? How long before they turn?
BEN: Yeah.
GLENN: Turned every single one of them because of Jonathan Haidt, actually used his method of talking their language.
BEN: Yeah.
GLENN: Speaking reason. Being humble, friendly, likable, laugh, laugh at yourself, laugh at the other side. Immediately turned.
I had huge liberals come to me and say, "I am more afraid of the left than I am of your side now."
BEN: Uh-huh.
GLENN: Because of what's happening on college campuses. This is the kind of round people up. And it's usually Jews. You know, they were the liberal Jews that were saying these kinds of things to me.
BEN: Uh-huh. I think the political situation right now, it's sort of a game of ping-pong. And the eventually, the -- people are just going to get tired of bouncing between the two polar extremes, between the Bernie Sanders left and the Black Lives Matter left and the, you know, hard-core --
GLENN: Do you think there's enough Democrats that are still out there that say, I don't want Bernie Sanders? Because the Democrats are moving towards that kind of a --
BEN: I think -- well, I think Bernie Sanders is an interesting case because Sanders is smart enough to actually not play the intersectional game as much as he plays the socialist game. So he's actually a more unifying figure for Americans than Kamala Harris, for example.
GLENN: Yes. Yes.
BEN: And so Sanders is actually -- the great danger from the Democrats is coming -- I agree with the hard left of the Democratic party, who is Bernie Sanders-ite, that the actual future of the Democratic Party and their victory is going to lie with people like Bernie Sanders and not with -- not with this separate people by their race and then run on the typical Democratic platform.
GLENN: Yes. Yes.
BEN: I mean, I think if Sanders had actually been the nominee, I think there's a much more significant chance that he is president than Hillary. I think he probably wins Michigan pretty easily.
GLENN: I agree. I agree. I agree.
BEN: So, you know, that's the danger. But that's not just because of his ideas. It's because he has steadfastly refused to engage in some of the --
GLENN: Play the game. He's not playing the game.
BEN: Exactly. That's right.
STU: Can we do one more without -- no politics here. I'm fascinated by something that you've done recently, which I just took my kid to our first baseball game. He's five. I'm indoctrinating him to be a Toronto Bluejays fan for absolutely no explainable reason.
But you actually just wrote a book about your experience of going through the 2005 White Sox championship. How did that come about? I think that's a fascinating thing.
BEN: My dad and I are huge White Sox fans. I picked up on my dad's sports allegiances. So he's from Chicago, my mom is from Chicago. I was born in LA. So that means I've never really been to a home game. I've just been to visiting games. And so we're huge White Sox fans. And in 2005, I was at Harvard Law. He was having a rough year. We just decided we were going to watch every White Sox game. So between the two of us, we watched every White Sox game that season, and they ended up winning the World Series. And so we wrote this book where half the book is us writing notes to each other: How are you doing? And we just compiled all of that into a book. So took notes on the games --
GLENN: See, I wrote you about that. And you said it's a sports book. So really no big deal.
That's not a sports book. That's a dad -- that's a father and son book. Oh, that's great.
BEN: But it is -- it's a lot of fun. If you're a baseball fan, you'll get a lot more out of it because there is a lot of baseball in there. I mean, we do love baseball, so there is a lot of baseball in there. But, yeah, it's my dad telling stories about his dad and me and my dad interrelating. And so that's --
GLENN: What's the name of the book?
BEN: It's called Say It's So.
GLENN: Ben Shapiro. He'll be on with us -- I think we're doing a Facebook thing. We're so thrilled to have you on. And keep up the good work.
BEN: As I say, it's an honor and pleasure to be with you always.
GLENN: Thank you.
