Overtime – Episode #706: Ben Shapiro, Tim Alberta

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

All right, here we are. He's an author and a staff writer for The Atlantics in Alberta, and he's the Daily Wire co-founder.
His new book is called Lions and Scavengers, Benjapiro.

Okay.

Here are the questions from the people. What does the panel think about a West Point alumni group canceling an award it was planning to give to Tom Hanks? Oh, yes, I have all this information on this.

An actor that Trump has called woke and destructive. Yes.
Well, let me read you. I actually have the, they were going to give Tom Hanks an award from West Point, the Sylvanus Thayer Award.

It said, Tom Hanks has done more for the positive portrayal of the American service member, blah, blah, blah, which is so true.

I mean, when you think about it, I mean, my favorite movie of all time is Saving Private Rock.

All time.

But I mean, he's played, you know, from the earth to the moon. I mean, Greyhound, yeah.
I mean, a million things where he's he's a patriot.

And for the military alone, I mean, he used to be a big part of bringing these honor flights of vets to D.C. every year.

Well, Trump says we don't need destructive woke recipients getting our cherished American awards.

So, you know, that's just so typical of how things are probably not going to get better in this country because it's like, wait, Tom Hanks? Oh, we forgot. He's on the blue team.
Fuck him.

No. Do you not like it?

Yeah, I mean, this is disapproved though. By the way, I will also say this.

I didn't like it when Tom Hanks went on China Night Live and did a sketch where he was wearing a MAGA hat and wouldn't shake hands with a black person. Not helpful.
I disagree.

I thought it was a great sketch because it was a continuation of the earlier sketch where he's Doug. But you think that's a fair portrayal of

MAGA. No, that's not what the point was, though, Bill.

The point was that that sketch was meant to show that Doug, in the continuation of the original sketch, that Doug on Jeopardy, as a working-class, rural white guy with his MAGA cap on, actually had a tremendous amount in common with the black panelists that he was competing against.

And that was the entire idea of the skit was that actually whatever. But why would he not shake this? And that's the moment that Bill's objecting to do.
No, I understand. But it is.

Well, it's Saturday Night Live. I mean, I don't know that we should overthink it necessarily.

No, but I can totally see why that would piss them off.

I think in the spirit of the sketch, it was plain enough.

But it's a pretty volatile area to be saying that, you know, it's one thing to have differences about how we should handle racial matters in this country.

To take it to that level, I just think it's not helpful. I mean, listen, when it comes to actors, Charlie is like the most sane actor there is.
Charlie Sheen? I think so.

Have you met many of the actors? Yes, he may be one of the more sane ones now. And so I'm not going to start removing prizes from people because...
Right.

But I mean, other than that, Tom Hanks, you know, impeccable record of serving

and also a genius actor and you know he survived on that island all those days

what does the panel think of CBS News announcing that its Sunday show Face the Nation will no longer edit recorded interviews with newsmakers okay though this is obviously coming from some pressure from Trump Christy Noam was on there and complained about you know you edit me.

I mean, I don't think this came from a good place, but as someone who's been edited. It's a good result.
Honestly, it's a good result.

I can't be too mad at it because I know that feeling of like, or even in a print interview where they just print, they don't print the question they asked you.

They just print part of your answer and they can make you look completely different than what really

went on. But I don't know if this is the answer, but...

Oh, well, look, I mean, Gallup this summer, in the most recent survey they do on institutional trust, I think it was television news, was down to 15% among all Americans.

So any step you can take towards transparency, it's not going to hurt, right?

Yeah, okay.

Let's ask about 9-11, because that was yesterday, and a lot of people are too young to even remember, and so it's not really a big deal to them. But it was a big deal for the country.

We're almost a quarter century out from there.

You mentioned it during the show, Like, we didn't handle it right going into Iraq.

I mean, that's my view. Some people maybe think we did, and maybe in the future there'll be revisionist things, and oh boy,

we missed it at the time. What a great idea that was.
I don't think so. But, I mean, Afghanistan is well on its way to being in the ninth century.
So

there's two trillion dollars well spent. I mean,

what lessons do we have from a quarter century away?

I mean, the number one lesson, which actually was the lesson of 9-11, which we should have learned at the time, is that we have in the West a capacity to project our own values onto other countries and other people that is just false.

The reason that many people thought you could just project democracy into Afghanistan or Iraq is because they're just like us. They have the same priorities we do.

President Bush gave a speech where he said, every human heart seeks freedom. I said, well, does every human heart seek freedom as the ultimate objective in the way that we see it?

And the answer, of course, is no. And we should have known that from 9-11 when people flew planes into buildings and killed 3,000 people.

It turns out that cultural differences make an awfully big difference. And we ought to know that going into conflict, and it ought to shape our warfighting goals and our foreign policy more generally.

I just talked about institutional trust a minute ago. I think maybe the great lesson that we've learned or perhaps not learned is that trust really, really matters.

If you think about Iraq, if you think about Afghanistan, if you think about really in the decade that follows, Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse, we have all of these moments now that plot points.

And as we go along, we see the ways in which by the time we get to the COVID-19 pandemic, that collapse of trust across the board, confidence across the board in all of these governing institutions in this country.

I mean, higher education, the media, law enforcement, government, Major League Baseball for crying out loud.

I mean, Americans have reached a conclusion that no one is looking out for them and that they can't trust any of these people in charge.

And I actually think that in some way we can trace a a lot of that back to 9-11.

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Okay, Ben, is Trump a scavenger or a lion?

This is your book. First,

explain basically what you're saying when you're talking about

divided into scavengers and lions. So this is not a left-right thing.

And one of the things I really tried to do in the book is not use the words right or left because I don't actually think that the division between lions and scavengers is predominantly political.

I think that lions are people. Lions are the good guys, right? Yes.

Lions are the people who want to build, and scavengers are the people who want to tear down, who see the institutions of society as things that need to be predominantly removed.

They're threats to them. They are violent.
Luigi Mangione is a good example of somebody who's a scavenger. And again, I don't think that it's predominantly about policy.

I even think that we all inside of us have both those tendencies, right? Sometimes you get up in the morning, you're ready to tackle the day and be productive and do something good.

And sometimes you're just bitching about the world and you want to tear things down. And so when I look at political figures, I try to say, are they more of one than the other?

And usually it's a combination. So I see aspects that I think are lion-like in President Trump.
I mean, obviously, I think that his policies on foreign policy are excellent.

I think they're much more aggressive than a lot of people thought they would be in a lot of ways.

He didn't quite get at how hard it would be to solve wars, though.

Well, I mean, that's true.

But the thing about President Trump, just as a politician, and this really isn't to the lion's scavenger point, is that he is heterodox but responsive, is the way that I would put it.

He tries things, and then, because he's not actually ideological, if they fail, he tends to untry. To say the leaf.
Yes, he's definitely... No, no, he's definitely flexible.
He's tried that.

Which is not always a bad thing at all. Yeah, exactly.

The mane is very lion-like.

But I must say. Zoramam Dani would be an example of a scavenger, somebody who's a complete lifelong loser, who has, he was a rapper with less successful record than I have as a rapper.

That's not even a joke, that's real. Well, we don't.

Okay, all of us in our 20s try things that don't work out. Do we become mayor after doing nothing

material?

Obviously, his forte was not in rap. It may be in politics.

It seems like his forte is destroying the real estate market in New York, increasing crime rates, and importing the Intifada. That's not my kind of candidate either.

But I must say, reading your book, which is really interesting. I mean, it's not quite the page turner Charlie's is, but you know.

But

there was, it did put me in mind of two authors that I don't know if you would want to be compared to Nietzsche and Anne Rand

So I quote both of them critically actually in the book particularly Nietzsche

But I mean it's the the theory is a little Nietzschean

Yes, I mean in the sense that there are people who are more creative and building they ought to be rewarded and the people who tear things down ought to be not rewarded But I think that's also baseline morality I mean he also went into the fact that you know he or the fact his theory about Christianity is really a religion of losers right because you know, you're saying,

I don't want this world. So what? I didn't do good in this world.
My kingdom in the next world. The meek shall inherit the earth.
Right. That's when God says, when I die, you'll inherit the earth.

Yeah,

that is his obvious critique of religion, is that he basically says that biblical religion upholds the virtue of poverty and failure as opposed to upholding the strong. That's his critique.

I think that's an unfair critique of religion, but I do think that

virtue, one of the things that I would hope that people who believe biblically, and I know that's not everybody, but I hope that good people who believe biblically, which is not everybody who believes biblically, believes that virtue should lead to better results in life than non-virtue.

That to me is one, as a believing Jew, that is one of the central points of the book of Deuteronomy, right? You're supposed to choose life so you and your children shall live.

Doesn't mean they have to agree with everything in Deuteronomy or Leviticus.

But that's not going to be built.

I know, but like,

but that's always such a silly argument, because if God wrote the book, how could there be things we don't agree with?

It either got to be perfect because it's written by you-know-who, or it's just not perfect.

Written by people, which it was, obviously, and it's full of nonsense and wickedness and things that are everything but virtue. So, Bill, you and I agree on morality.
I'd say like 87%.

But not from the Bible. I have a question.
Why? Because the... Because it's for slavery.

Because it's okay with answers.

Why do you and I agree on morality like 87.5%? I'm a religious Jew. You're an atheist.
Why do we agree on those things?

I mean, I can give you my answer. Yeah, please.
Because we probably grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of biblical history behind it.

And so you can think that you hit that triple and you formed your own morality, but the reality is you were born morally on third base. No, we.

We. Okay.

We got.

We got that morality from the Enlightenment, which was an anti-religious movement. The founding fathers, they weren't religious people.
They were deists. They weren't particularly Christy.

Thomas Jefferson used the morality of the Bible when he was ripping all the miracles out of the Bible. Yes.
He literally ordered a virtue of the Bible without the miracles. I mean, that is a word.

I was this last time I was here, and you were talking about... all of Jesus' teachings and how this was really radical new stuff, right? And how it changed the world.
It's a basic philosophy, yes.

And how without that, I mean, I think it's worth understanding that the pivot point in history when we talk about Judeo-Christian ethics, but more specifically Christian ethics, what a turning point in history that represented within the Roman Empire and beyond

in terms of medicine, in terms of care for the widow and the orphan, much of what we would consider to be sort of good moral ethical behavior was not in fact a commonplace or mainstream thing several centuries ago.

And so I think to Penn's point, some of that... Why do we still do it? Why do we still admire it?

Because cut flowers die. Meaning that if the flower is the result of the root, and then you cut the flower, you can live on with a secular humanistic morality, be a moral person, be a good person.

But it does not systemically maintain if there's no actual outgrowth from a basis of belief that this is fundamentally demanded of you by a higher power.

Because you can't get from atheism to reductive morality just by pure reason, right? Even every atheist will acknowledge this.

The values that you believe are not things that can just be reasoned to, because they assume things that are not in evidence, like the inherent value of humanity.

I mean, we're pieces of meat wandering through space. What's the inherent value of that? These are all religious faith-based premises.

You don't have to believe in God to believe in those things, but they are logical jumps. They are leaps of faith, is what we would call that in religion.

And so at least acknowledging that, recognize that we're all living in a world of faith, whether you believe in God or not.

I'm just saying the book, The Wellspring from Where You're Getting This Morality, is so deeply flawed, even if it was just the slavery thing. And it's not just that.
I mean,

if you rape a woman, it's a property crime.

We're talking about Bronze Age people who had a whole different way of looking at things, which was not as advanced as we are. And it's like, well, you know, we have these things.

It's like saying, well, jump in the pool. There's only one turd in there.

It's more like saying that

as a religious person, the basic idea is that God has to speak to humans of the time, and then human beings have to apply their reason.

This is why the relationship between reason and faith is not just you take it on faith and you do whatever the Bible says.

I mean, this is why there's a developed oral tradition in Judaism, or this is why there's a developed natural law tradition in Catholicism.

I mean, the idea is that it's an admixture of human reason and those faith-based principles. But here's the real question.

If the sort of reasonable morality that you espouse is universal, then why is it not even remotely universal on planet Earth?

It is only found in Christian-based societies. You will not find it unless it was grafted on later by us conquering someplace.
Christian-based?

You saying this with the Omicron? Yes, because Christianity, yes,

because Christians believe the first half of the Bible. I'm working on them, Bill.
I'm working on them. Well, as you know,

this is the point where I remind all Christians in my, first of all, I appreciate all the attempts to convert me.

And yes, you get infinity heaven points if you're the one who does it, is what I have heard.

All right, final question.

What does...

Ah.

Kamala Harris, boy, she does not have a lot of luck like this week.

Her book comes out. She was trying to do the press, and then, of course, all this news buried it.
The book is called 107 Days, wink, wink.

That's all the time I had to win, just 107 days. Only there were 108.
Yeah.

Who would have gotten there? And she only had a billion and a half dollars. I don't know how she could have cotton and get a message on it.

But what does the panel think of Kamala Harris's admission that it was reckless to let Joe and Jill Biden decide on his re-election bid?

Yes, this is the big takeaway from the book, is that she says, Joe, we kept saying, she says, like a mantra, it's their personal decision.

And now she's saying after the fact, well, actually, it wasn't really just a personal decision. It did have some effect on the country.

What if there was an amendment to the Constitution, say like the 25th Amendment, that allowed the vice presidents of the United States and the other cabinet officials to recognize that the president was brain dead and actually do something about it?

And what if you then just sat there and did nothing until Joe Biden had his head cave in, basically, on national television in a debate with Donald Trump and stare into the great maw of death off screen with a frozen grimace.

And then you still waited a month for him to drop out. It wasn't that bad.
It was

it.

My boss.

Let's not

rewrite the history.

It was a terrible debate performance from an elderly man, excuse me, excuse me, who in the quiet of the Oval Office had not lost his marbles and was still able to make decisions among his staff. Okay?

That's how we were dealing dealing with.

Was he able to run? No. Was he able to do the job? War bike, by the way.
War bike, yes. Well,

you don't know if he lost his marbles because he doesn't know how many there were or how many he had to find. Can I just say, look, you know, again, this is why the country will never heal.

Because nobody's ever heard of it.

But the tough thing about the Harris book, right, is that she writes this as though she was some backbench low-level staffer without agency.

I mean, it's not dissimilar to what Mike Pence did during, towards the end of the Trump presidency, and then he comes out after and says, oh, shucks.

You know, it's like, you were the vice president of the United States.

If it was reckless for him to do this, Madam Vice President, did you not have a responsibility to the country to say something about it? Yeah, I mean, Trump does the same thing. Last week,

he tweeted out, I guess we've lost India to a chance. It's like,

who did it?

Who did that? All right. Thank you guys.
Thank you, Audrey. You were great.

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