Ben Shapiro on School Safety: ‘We Should Be Guarding Our Kids’ the Way We Guard Banks

In the wake of the latest school shooting, liberals only seem interested in gun control. Why is discussing school security and other bipartisan solutions controversial?

Ben Shapiro on Socialism: 'The Suggestion That I Owe You Something Because You Are Here Is Theft'

On today’s show, Ben Shapiro listed some ways to help keep students safe, discourage shooters and potentially prevent the next tragedy – all without eroding our Second Amendment rights. Liberals have turned the gun debate into a “moral push” even though we should be able to find bipartisan, commonsense solutions like these:

The media should stop publicizing the shooters’ names and faces and giving them infamous celebrity, something that encourages future school shooters.

Lawmakers should consider measures that let family and close friends petition to have someone’s gun rights suspended if there is enough evidence that they are dangerous.

Schools should increase their security, whether it’s through fences or more armed personnel.

“We should be guarding our kids the same way we’re guarding our banks,” Shapiro said.

This article provided courtesy of TheBlaze.

STU: Editor-in-chief of the daily wire, Ben Shapiro.

Hello, Ben, how are you?

BEN: Hanging in there. How are you?

GLENN: Good.

Has anybody followed your lead on not giving the name of the shooter?

BEN: Not so far as I'm aware. So we over at The Daily Wire have taken up the policy in the last week and a half after Parkland of not turning the name or face of the shooter on our website.

I'm not aware that anybody else in the mainstream media have done that. We're not the first to the ballgame, of course. There are other outlets that have done that before.

But I am surprised that the same media that proclaims that every law-abiding gun owner in the country has to give up their rifle, is -- is happy to show continually on a loop the name and face of the shooter, when there are many studies suggesting that mass shooters actually thrive on the sort of publicity. It drives actually more common mass shootings.

GLENN: So, Ben, we are totally unhinged now from facts.

The CNN town hall debate last week was grotesque. And they still don't get it.

I mean, I think it would do a great service to CNN and a Jake Tapper, if they would just come out and say, you know what, having that crowd there was a horrible idea. Horrible idea.

Would you agree?

BEN: Totally agree. I mean, I thought it was Orwell's HEP -- I thought it was just a show trial for gun owners. I thought it was a show trial for the NRA.

And, you know, I know Jake. I like Jake. I think Jake does a good job, when he tries.

GLENN: Me too.

BEN: But I think that that -- I told him this, I thought that was a great injustice. I thought it was just a great injustice.

I thought the entire event was a setup from the start. Jake was not a moderator. Jake allowed the students to go up there and browbeat people like Senator Rubio, one of the students suggesting that when he looked at Rubio, it was like looking at the barrel of the gun of the shooter, which is just an insane statement to make publicly. And the crowd cheered that because it was more of a bang mob than it was an actual crowd of people considering possible arguments.

I understand passions are high. But that's the whole point of being in the news business. I mean, passions are high a lot of places. But there's a selective decision that's being made by news outlets as to which sorts of town halls are set up like this.

I mean, as I said at the time, I don't remember CNN doing a town hall in Texas on the border about illegal immigration after some high-profile killing of somebody by an illegal immigrant.

GLENN: No.

BEN: With all the members of the community. Of course they wouldn't do that. Because they would say, this isn't newsworthy. It's not newsworthy that people are passionate and upset after a shooting.

What's newsworthy is the argument that actually happens on the basis of reason and decency. And both of those things have completely fallen away are. And instead, CNN has decided to put on a particular set of students.

And there are a bunch of students who go to that school. I mean, there are thousands of students who go to that school. I know at least one of them who is a Second Amendment advocate who is not being booked every single day on CNN. The ones who are booked every day on CNN are, of course, these small group of students that you've seen their faces plastered all over the media, Emma Gonzalez and Cameron Cassty and HEP David Hog, and you know their names. You don't know the names of any of the people who were killed. But you know the names of these kids who are on TV the last two weeks, spouting gun control and suggesting folks like Dana Loesch, who we both know and like and are friends with, that people like Dana are actually uncaring about the death of children, which is just the sickest form of demogoguary. I mean, I've been calling that out since Piers Morgan. I hate that so much, this routine where we disagree on policy and therefore we don't get care if kids get killed. It's disgusting.

GLENN: Well, you could make the case that we care about kids getting killed in larger numbers than what is happening now. The greatest mass shootings in all of history come from out-of-control governments. And that's why we have the Second Amendment. To sit here and say we don't care about kids being shot, we absolutely do care about that. But we also care about protecting the freedoms of children and the children that haven't even been born yet.

BEN: That's exactly right. It's also true that even if you were to put aside the arguments on the founding level for the Second Amendment, you're telling me that in this particular case, the FBI failed twice. They were told specifically twice about the shooter by name, and they did nothing. The local law enforcement had at least 45 calls according to CNN from the shooter's house, including the shooter himself calling the police on himself, a few months ago. And they did nothing. And then we had an armed deputy on -- was present with a handgun. And we're now being told by the media, of course, that a handgun could never go up against a rifle. Which is just an insane contention that is completely meritless, as anyone who has ever fired a gun knows. And then they're telling us that all these law enforcement bodies failed, but we have to give up our guns.

So just to get this straight. My self-defense now rests on me giving up my guns to a bunch of people who will do nothing if somebody threatens me with a gun. So even on the most basic self-defense level, why in the world would I possibly give up my rights to keep and bear firearms, when the authorities aren't even keeping me safe? I mean, according to the Lockian HEP bargain, this is like their only job. Their only job is to protect life, liberty, and property. And they didn't do any of those things. They're not protecting life obviously. They didn't in Parkland. They're not protecting liberty because they want to seize my liberty and not protect my life. And they're not protecting the property of the school.

GLENN: Ben, where do you think this goes?

Because we all know that another shooting is going to happen. Because we're not taking care of the real issues. We're not even willing to -- you know, I was talking yesterday about, you know, they'll take and send the police for, you know, a third grader, who is brandishing a second degree lookalike firearm, otherwise known as a finger gun, and yet we cannot have a conversation -- they'll say, that's leading to violence. And we can't have a conversation about our culture, about the violent nature of our culture. The violent nature of our movies. The video games that our kids are deeply entrenched in. I'm not saying I want to ban any of that or anything else. But we can't even have a conversation about it.

It's all about control over you and any way of you defending yourself. So where do we go from here?

Because half of the country is dead set on that, it seems.

BEN: Yeah. I think it's going to be hard to go anywhere. Again, the entire premise of this conversation has become, you hate children. And you can't have a conversation with someone when they're screaming you hate children. How are we supposed to any sort of agreement about that?

I think there are things that could be done. I mean, I've suggested a bunch of things I think would be effective. Not only HEP faces, but I think that David French has proposed gun violence restraining orders, which is a bunch of basically your family members and close friends can go to a court and petition to have your gun rights temporarily suspended if the court finds you mentally incompetent or a danger to yourself or others. That seems like a decent idea to me.

GLENN: Uh-huh.

BEN: There's been talk about -- strong advocate of better security in schools. I went to a private school. And actually, my private school was nearly targeted by a mass shooter. Drove past our private school, targeting -- it was a Jewish school. Targeting the Jewish school. He saw there were armed guards. Or at least, he thought they were armed. He kept driving. He drove over to the West Valley HEP JTC, and shot that place up instead. That's because our school had hard security barriers, it had a certain number of security guards per number of students. There's bomb threats in our school every so often. Nobody at that school has ever been shot or killed on premises at least.

And it seems to me that we should be guarding our kids the same way that we guard our banks. All of this stuff I would assume should get wide agreement across the spectrum because it's relatively uncontroversial, that we should be protecting our schools in a better way. But the left doesn't want to discuss any of those things. Which demonstrates that there really is an agenda here, and the agenda has a lot less to defending schools and defending kids, and it has to do with a generalized gun control push that the left likes to engage in. And more importantly, the moral push that you are a bad human being if you disagree with them. Because again, this is what the Obama administration, in the early years, they had 60 votes in the Senate. They had the House. And they did nothing on gun control. Nothing. Because they knew the American people didn't want it.

And then as soon as the Republicans took back the house, suddenly it turned into, well, let's talk about gun control every single day and why Republicans are obstructionists, which says to me that this is a lot more about politicking than protection.

STU: Is their motivation to essentially get their base fired up. You're coming up to an election. They want all this new money coming in. And they don't necessarily want this money solved. (?) they don't have the argument anymore to take to their base.

BEN: Yeah, I think there's definitely some truth about that. I'm not going to say that their motive is awful and they don't care about kids. Or anything like that. (?) in the same way when they had the power to do so, because it was a valuable political tool for them, I think (?) if they do, number one, it's not going to stop the mass shootings. It's not going to. Not a single element they've proposed is going to minimize (?) which they proclaim they don't want. And so they would rather engine engine up the base for the elections. (?)

GLENN: So we are either going to revive the enlightenment, or we are going to tie in darkness. Which one wins?

BEN: You know, I'm -- I'm with you on this. I think the enlightenment -- there -- it's become a controversial proposition to say things like, use your reason instead of your emotion. And stem cell the truth instead of (?) and if those controversial propositions, we're in serious trouble. There are some of us who are obviously trying to fight back against us. There are some of us (?) I think one of the great debates that's happening right now, inside even the group of us that are pro-enlightenment is what roots have to be restored. Can you just (?) without restoring respect for Judeo-Christian values and thought. Can you just take the cherry on top of the Sunday. And then leave aside the religion and leave aside the (?) relearn all those things. That's right now happening among people on the right and the left. It's a debate that I think is happening between people like Jordan Peterson and Steven pinker, for example. But there must be (?) broad agreement that (?) I don't think there's even broad agreement that we're trying to get enlightenment mentality.

GLENN: Yeah, I'm reading Steven pinker's book right now. He is really -- you know, he makes a lot of good points. But the guy just does not like religion at all, to put it mildly.

And I -- you know, I think we dismiss rel because of its ills. And we -- we fail to recognize that it's set up for the very first time a real civil society, where we -- where we're able to search for truth.

BEN: 100 percent. I mean, this is one of my great critiques of pinker's book. (?) in a very substantial way. Not because I disagree with him about the value of reason. But that I think he has -- the materialist atheist movement has fundamentally undercut a lot of the contentions that they're seeking to support. You have an entire book by Pinker (?) enlightenment thinking. And that neglects 3,000 years of history. (?) can you actually rip away the (?) on the one hand and Greek thought on the other, just take those away. And suddenly the superstructure is supposed to stand. He'll talk about reason. He'll talk about the value of reason. He'll talk about the value of enlightenment. And not once in the entire book does he mention the revolution.

Well, you can't do that. If you're not going to mention the (?) French revolution. If you're not going to mention the progressives of the early 20th century. If you're not going to mention the risks that came along with the enlightenment, an alignment on traditional values and Greek (?) the notion that the universe has a purpose, that we can discover as individual human beings. If you remove all of that, then people (?) they think is based on reason pretty quickly. And that I think is what Pinker neglects. And and I think it's a problem for him. (?) we are balls of floating meat with no free will.

GLENN: That is exactly the case, as I understand it, that Nietzsche was making, when he said in a God was dead. Well, then who becomes God? What man -- and that was the beginning of this whole collective idea that led to mass murder.

BEN: Totally agree. And I think that, again, Pinker (?) what he fails to recognize is that Nietzsche was making a diagnosis, Nietzsche wasn't making a recommendation. And Nietzsche was looking at the enlightenment mentality, which said, we are smarter (?) and we've come up with our own reason, and that reason is going to die with us. The cult of reason was actually a cult in the French Revolution. The first official state rev (?) was the cult of reason. The goddess of reason. And, of course, that immediately devolves into people chopping their heads off.

GLENN: Yeah. Yeah.

BEN: I'm all for reason. I love reason. The reason has to be undergirds. (?) that can either be found through nature and nature's God. Or it can be found in the revelatory dictates of violence by a religion.

GLENN: Thank you, Ben.

Ben Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the daily wire.

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Supply Chain Crisis? Not for This Company | Bayard Winthrop | Ep 127

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Let’s thank the Pilgrims for defeating Socialism this Thanksgiving

This year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the first Thanksgiving celebrated by the Pilgrims and their Wampanoag allies in 1621. Tragically, nearly half of the Pilgrims had died by famine and disease during their first year. However, they had been met by native Americans such as Samoset and Squanto who miraculously spoke English and taught the Pilgrims how to survive in the New World. That fall the Pilgrims, despite all the hardships, found much to praise God for and they were joined by Chief Massasoit and his ninety braves came who feasted and celebrated for three days with the fifty or so surviving Pilgrims.

It is often forgotten, however, that after the first Thanksgiving everything was not smooth sailing for the Pilgrims. Indeed, shortly thereafter they endured a time of crop failure and extreme difficulties including starvation and general lack. But why did this happen? Well, at that time the Pilgrims operated under what is called the "common storehouse" system. In its essence it was basically socialism. People were assigned jobs and the fruits of their labor would be redistributed throughout the people not based on how much work you did but how much you supposedly needed.

The problem with this mode of economics is that it only fails every time. Even the Pilgrims, who were a small group with relatively homogeneous beliefs were unable to successfully operate under a socialistic system without starvation and death being only moments away. Governor William Bradford explained that under the common storehouse the people began to "allege weakness and inability" because no matter how much or how little work someone did they still were given the same amount of food. Unsurprisingly this, "was found to breed much confusion and discontent."[1]

The Pilgrims, however, were not the type of people to keep doing what does not work. And so, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery."[2] And, "after much debate of things" the Pilgrims under the direction of William Bradford, decided that each family ought to "trust to themselves" and keep what they produced instead of putting it into a common storehouse.[3] In essence, the Pilgrims decided to abandon the socialism which had led them to starvation and instead adopt the tenants of the free market.

And what was the result of this change? Well, according to Bradford, this change of course, "had very good success; for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been."[4] Eventually, the Pilgrims became a fiscally successful colony, paid off their enormous debt, and founded some of the earliest trading posts with the surrounding Indian tribes including the Aptucxet, Metteneque, and Cushnoc locations. In short, it represented one of the most significant economic revolutions which determined the early characteristics of the American nation.

The Pilgrims, of course, did not simply invent these ideas out of thin air but they instead grew out of the intimate familiarity the Pilgrims had with the Bible. The Scriptures provide clear principles for establishing a successful economic system which the Pilgrims looked to. For example, Proverbs 12:11 says, "He that tills his land shall be satisfied with bread." So the Pilgrims purchased land from the Indians and designated lots for every family to individually grow food for themselves. After all, 1 Timothy 5:8 declares, "If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever."

We often think that the battle against Socialism is a new fight sprouting out of the writings of Karl Marx which are so blindly and foolishly followed today by those deceived by leftist irrationality. However, America's fight against the evil of socialism goes back even to our very founding during the colonial period. Thankfully, our forefathers decided to reject the tenants of socialism and instead build their new colony upon the ideology of freedom, liberty, hard work, and individual responsibility.

So, this Thanksgiving, let's thank the Pilgrims for defeating socialism and let us look to their example today in our ongoing struggle for freedom.

[1] William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856), 135.

[2] William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856), 134.

[3] William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856), 134.

[4] William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856), 135.

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Like most people, science journalist Matt Ridley just wants the truth. When it comes to the origin of COVID-19, that is a tall order. Was it human-made? Did it leak from a laboratory? What is the role of gain-of-function research? Why China, why now? Ridley's latest book, "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19," is a scientific quest to answer these questions and more. A year ago, you would have been kicked off Facebook for suggesting COVID originated in a lab. For most of the pandemic, the Left practically worshipped Anthony Fauci. But lately, people have been poking around. And one of the names that appears again and again is Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance and a longtime collaborator and funder of the virus-hunting work at Wuhan Institute of Virology. In this episode of the Glenn Beck Podcast, Matt reveals the whole tangled web.

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I have one simple rule for anyone who wants to restore our nation. We will not settle for private patriotism and public compliance. The tyranny ends with us. Anyone who believes in the truth, please join me.

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COVID-19 changed everything. The way we live our lives, how we operate our businesses, how we see each other. And now, the federal government is sinking its tendrils even deeper, threatening the fabric not only of our bodily autonomy, but of the republic.

Our American way of life may never be the same. To save it, we must understand the key fundamentals of the pandemic that transfigured our society into the nightmare it is today. What is the COVID-19 origin story? Who are its top players in government and science, pulling the strings? What was their REAL response in the first days of the pandemic? The answers to these questions are frightening.

Emails, documents, and federal contracts tell a dark story that is still dominating our lives. It's time to cast a light on the shocking truth. Because only with the truth can we emerge from the darkness of this "pandemic" and take back the liberty stolen from us.

This is Glenn Beck's most important chalkboard of his life. And the most pivotal time in yours.

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