[0:00]So who's excited to see Ben Shapiro tonight? Okay, come on. Who is excited to see Ben Shapiro tonight? Little better, little better. All right. So as a program officer for Young America's Foundation, I've had the opportunity to uh travel around the state and the country with our future speaker tonight. Um as part of the Fred R Allen Lecture Series, sponsored by Young America's Foundation, Ben Shapiro will be traveling to campuses all over the country and already has. Um to dispel myths like safe spaces, microaggressions and other trigger trigger warnings and other mythical things. Um in November, Ben traveled to the University of Missouri, uh right after the school had been overrun with protests and uh brought a bit of common sense to the students there at the University of Missouri. Uh while emboldening the campus conservatives there. Uh we got some notes actually after his lecture about students who thought they were the only conservatives on campus. Um so it was really exciting to see that. Now some of you might have heard about what happened at California State University, Los Angeles. Raise your hand if you heard about that. Okay. It was fun. Ben has heard about it. Um, so for those of you who didn't know, um, last month, Ben went to California State University, Los Angeles, and about three days before the event, the school president canceled it in the name of inclusion and diversity, which is kind of odd because every liberal speaker they have there is allowed and they don't allow any conservative speakers. So we talked about it, and Ben and Young America's Foundation decided to go anyway. So we continued to prep for the event. Um they actually allowed him to speak about an hour and a half before it happened. But unfortunately, about 300 protesters decided to attend as well. And um they ended up uh barricading the doors and not allowing anyone to exit. Um so we we got about 75 to 100 people in the room to hear Ben talk about intellectual diversity. Which clearly the protesters outside had no, you know, plans on supporting. Um and actually literally blocked free speech from California State University, Los Angeles. Um, so those are some of the fun things that Ben has done over the last couple months. Um he will also be speaking at several YAF sponsored lectures this spring, including UNC Chapel Hill, Virginia Tech, University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley, and more. So it'll be very fun. Um and has appeared at several high schools as well. So for all you high schoolers in the room. Um Ben Shapiro entered UCLA at the age of 16 and graduated Suma Kum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor's degree in political science. He graduated from Harvard Law School uh Kum Laude. He was hired by Creators Syndicate at the age of 17, uh to become the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the US. His columns are printed in numerous outlets, probably too many to uh list here because you guys didn't come to hear me. Um but including townhall.com, um and ABCnews.com and many, many more. He has written several best-selling books, including Brainwashed How Universities and indoctrinate America's youth and bullies. How the Left's culture of fear and intimidation silences America. Ben Shapiro is married and lives in Los Angeles where he currently runs Benjamin Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting. He is the editor-in-chief of Daily Wire.com, host of the Ben Shapiro Show, and radio host on KRLA and KTIE. So please help me welcome Ben Shapiro.
[3:32]Well, it's a pleasure to be with an audience that doesn't want to kill me for the first time in about three weeks. Uh Amy was there, so she knows, I mean, it was um Cal State LA was a little bit more than protesters. People protesting is fine. It wasn't just that they blocked the exits. I mean, people who were trying to get in were being literally physically pushed around. People were being assaulted. Uh they they had to sneak in people two or three at a time into the room in order to make sure that they could hear the lecture.
[4:05]Somebody pulled the fire alarm about 10 minutes in to try and shut down the speech. We spoke right through it. And then afterward, the cops told us that if we tried to wait out into the crowd, it actually would have started a riot. So I had to be spirited away by 10 to 15 uniformed police officers, put into an unmarked car, driven off campus by two motorcycles flashing their lights. Uh there were multiple television police helicopters all around the place. And then, as I predicted during the speech, the protesters left there once directly to the president's office to try and ask for his resignation for allowing me to speak, even though he hadn't allowed me to speak. We told him to go screw himself and went there despite his his disapproval. So, with all that out of the way, let's talk about how you can debate folks on the left because this is sort of my specialty. It's what I'm If I'm known for anything, it's debating folks on the left. Although lately it seems I'm known for a lot of bizarre things. So, in any case, let's let's start with with here are the 10 rules for debating the left. Let's start with the question, when should you bother debating people on the left? Right? Everybody always thinks, I see a leftist, I'll debate the leftist. Not true. There are only a couple situations in which it is worthwhile to debate somebody who is on the left. One is you found the one honest leftist in America. Congratulations. There's only one of them, and he's walking around in Nebraska somewhere, sometimes he rides a donkey. But aside from that, he's you you you will not find him, so that's not real. The second time you should debate a leftist is if it's in public. If it's in public and there are other people watching, you should debate a leftist. And these that's what these tactics are for, right? These tactics are specifically for when you're debating a leftist in public.
[5:51]And the goal of this debate is not to convince the leftist because leftists are not easily convinced because they operate from the cockles of their small hearts and even tinier brains. So, the goal here is not to actually convince the leftist, it's to humiliate them as badly as possible in front of as large a number of people as possible. So here is how we're going to tonight, we're going to teach you how to rebut this particular presumption.
[6:59]So here are the 10 rules. The first rule is you have to hit first, you have to walk toward the fire. So this is something I learned from my mentor Andrew Breitbart. The idea is that you can't avoid the battle. You can try and be nice. You can try and run away from the battle. But the reality is that you are going to become a censor piece If you if you decide to go into politics at all, even to discuss it. You are going to be the focal point in a battle, so just walk toward the fire, embrace it. It's fun. Believe it or not, it's fun. It actually is. Even though, you know, there's the occasional death threat and by occasional I mean constant. But it but it actually is a lot of fun to do this. I have a lot of fun doing it. And if you're not having fun doing it, you're not doing it right. Right? And you can tell by the way with political candidates, the ones who have fun on the campaign trail tend to be the ones who are successful. People like to watch people who are having fun engaging in the battle, this is the happy warrior kind of idea, walk toward the fire, embrace it, it's gonna get ugly, but that's okay, because you know how to punch. Okay, the second rule is you need to frame your opponent. So, as I mentioned, the chief tactic of the left is that you're not a good person, right? It's unearned moral superiority. Leftists don't do anything for the world. Okay? Leftism doesn't do anything for the world. Leftism is a philosophy of stealing and taking and voting for people to put a gun to somebody else's head to take crap from you for their own personal betterment, right? That's what leftism is. Socialism is the most selfish philosophy in human history. It's the basic notion that I'm breathing and therefore you owe me crap. Okay? That and so but the way that they the way they sleep at night because they're not adding anything to the general productivity with this philosophy is, but yes, I'm a better person than you. So your job is to rip away that facade because they're not. They believe in a really terrible philosophy. So you have to frame your opponent. So, most famously, I did this probably in the Piers Morgan interview, I've done it many times. But I don't know how many of you have seen this interview. I did with Piers Morgan, it's now about three years ago. On CNN, I did right after Sandy Hook, uh on he was uh an interview on gun control. It tells you that it's been a while because Piers Morgan hasn't been on TV for a while, partially because of things like this. And um we started the debate and he wanted to try to explain to me why gun control was a wonderful thing. And I before he could even start, he'd been spending days, weeks proclaiming that anybody who didn't believe in his brand of gun control. Anyone who didn't believe in his particular notion of what we ought to do with gun law, that person didn't care enough about the dead children in Sandy Hook. So he started off the interview by saying, you know, Mr. Shapiro, you've called me a bully. What do you why? And I said, because you are a bully, and you stand on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook in order to push your political agenda. And he had nothing to say to that, because it was true, and he kind of clutched his pearls and said, how dare you? And I said, right, but I watch your show. It's true. And he said, again, how dare you? And I said, again, I watch your show. It's true. By framing him, by framing my opponent, he could no longer put himself in this higher moral category. There was no way for him to portray himself as the as the figure on the rock preaching the gospel to people. He couldn't do that anymore. I'd taken that away from him. The high moral ground no longer belonged to him. And you have to do this with folks on the left. You can't accept their premise. You have to you have to frame your opponent. This is because, unfortunately, people on the right, we like to argue in terms of policies and in terms of information. Folks on the left like to argue in terms of character. Folks on the left love this. This is why Hillary Clinton's entire argument against people on the right is that they're terrible human beings who want to hurt folks, right? This is this is Hillary's argument. This is Bernie Sanders' argument. Bernie Sanders has no intelligent argument. I'm not even sure he's speaking an intelligent language. But he but he but what he does say is that everybody who opposes him is a bad person who doesn't care about the poor enough. Well, playing the air bongos. So, so the if if you were debating Bernie Sanders, for example, the first thing that you would say to Bernie Sanders is Bernie, you like to sit on your high horse and talk about how much people ought to give, what is their fair share. Why is it that you honeymooned in the USSR while it was literally shipping people off to gulags and then killing them? Why is it that you were so okay with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and you actually made Burlington, Vermont, a sister city to the capital of Nicaragua, in the middle of a time when left's tyrants were murdering people in the streets? Why is that okay with you? What's wrong with you as a human being? Put him on the defense. You have to frame him as a person, right? Because now now he knows, you're on he's on notice. It's mutually assured destruction. If he's going to bring a character attack, you're going to bring a character attack and yours is based on fact while his isn't. So you have to frame your opponent. Rule number three, you have to frame the debate. So what the left likes to do is argue the debate in their terms, and they they have all sorts of tricks for this. So, for example, on same-sex marriage, the way they frame the debate is always, why shouldn't, why do you want to stop two people who love each other from marrying each other? This is always the way that they discuss this issue, right? That's always the question. And the answer to that isn't, well, I do want to stop those people from marrying each other. The the the answer is, why do you think a child does not deserve a mother and a father? Right? You have to change the terms of the debate because they're actually two separate questions. And the second one is significantly more important. Because personally, I don't care about what two people want to do with their lives. That's that's their problem. I may think it's sinful, but welcome to America, where I can think something is a sin and you don't have to agree. The problem that I have is when you're suggesting that government ought to value certain relationships above others, when those relationships are specifically about the bearing and rearing of children. Right? So you have to reframe the debate. You have to find the the actual reality of the debate, not the not the happy talk, not the happy emotional talk of the left. What is the debate actually about? Okay, the fourth point here, you need to spot inconsistencies in the left's argument. This takes research. You actually have to know the left's arguments better than they do. So, I'm sure that a large number of college students here go to college campuses that orient to the left, that are very much to the left. Good. Good. This will make you a better weapon. Really. I went to UCLA, I went to Harvard Law. I can argue the left side of the position pretty much as well as any leftist. I'm talking about high-level leftists. Because if you spend time learning their arguments and then learning to counter those arguments, you're never surprised. And it turns out that the vast majority of people on the left are wildly inconsistent, internally inconsistent about their arguments. Because the truth is that if they told you what they really believed, everyone hates that. Right? What the left actually believes deep down is so reprehensible and so repugnant and so gross that they will never say it out loud. Instead, they cover it in a sort of patter that's completely inconsistent. So, to to give a gun example. One one of the things you'll hear from the left about guns is that assault weapons bans are the greatest idea in the world, which makes no sense. Right? The vast majority of murders that are committed with guns are committed with handguns. Why don't they want to ban handguns? The answer is well, this is true also, there's no such thing as assault weapon, but the the the internal inconsistency in their argument. The inconsistency in their argument is that they say assault weapons are bad because they kill lots of people. The truth is that handguns are used in far more murders than so-called assault weapons. So why don't they want to ban handguns? Now, the real the reality is they do want to ban handguns, but when you get them to admit that it makes them uncomfortable because no one actually wants to ban handguns in the United States, except for like five people, and they're all in the Obama administration.
[16:16]So you can you can always spot the the left is filled with these sorts of inconsistencies, right? Even on global warming, they say, well, global warming, it's going to heat up the world and we're all going to die and the polar bears are going to drown, they won't be able to drink Coca-Cola anymore. It's going to be all sad.
[16:36]And don't you want to stop that? And then you say to them, well, but wouldn't you by your own scientific studies, isn't it true that you don't know what level of carbon emissions lead to a certain level of temperature increase? So, given that, according to your own studies, we could dramatically decrease the amount of carbon we're putting into the atmosphere and we'll still increase the temperature. The amount of the temperature increase will still happen according to your own models because that carbon's already in the atmosphere. There's no way to stop that. And they have no answer for that because it's internally inconsistent because the real agenda for global warming is a giant economic leveling and taking down of Western economies in favor of less developed economies because essentially the people pushing this are economic Marxists. Okay, fifth point, you have to force the left to answer questions. You may notice that I'm slightly aggressive in my style. Uh there's there's a reason for this. This is because if you're on the defensive, you're losing. Right? There's there's no such thing as playing defense in politics. You're on the offensive all the time. You're forcing them to answer questions. The left loves nothing better than to just grill you as though you're a defendant on the stand. But the truth is, you don't have to defend yourself against their attacks. They need to defend themselves against your attacks. So anytime you're asked a question, you should think, okay, how can I flip this so that this so that I'm asking them a question, so I'm putting them on the defensive. Right? Any of these inconsistencies is a good example of doing that. You can put them on the defensive and force them to answer questions. Leftists hate answering questions because it makes them think, and thinking is not their strong suit. Feeling is their strong suit. So if you get them away from feeling, which you did with the character argument at the beginning, and now they have to think, which is what you're trying to make them do now, they get all confused, and then they sort of start crying and it gets all awkward and then you have to and then you have to apologize because you ruined the dinner party, but it was fun anyway. Okay, the sixth point here is not getting distracted. So, you'll notice when you're in debate with folks on the left, they always have a red herring. This is amazing. I've been giving this this particular speech I've been giving for probably five years at YAF, and they're still using the same red herring. They still use it, right? It's the only it's it's the only one that they have. Right? So you're you're talking about Barack Obama's foreign policy is terrible. It's just terrible. The world's on fire. He's been feckless. He's incentivized all of America's enemies to become more powerful and more anti-American. People are dying all over the world because of President Obama's foreign policies. And the first thing they do is they scream in agony and their head swivels full 360° and they vomit in all directions and then they shout, Bush. Right? Like like Linda Blair from the Exorcist. Which is a which is a reference that your parents will get, but you may not. So the so the like Linda Blair from the Exorcist. So, in any case, the the proper answer is don't get distracted by George W. Bush. Okay? First of all, he's not that distracting. Second of all, George W. Bush is not relevant to this conversation. Okay? He's not. What does it matter what George W. Bush did in 2003 in Iraq? What matters is what you're doing right now. Right? We're not talking about that. If you want to debate Iraq, we can also debate whether it would have been better if Woodrow Wilson had stuck with his his Russian intervention in 1919 instead of allowing the Russian Reds to beat the Russian Whites. I mean, we're going to do a historical debate, Let's go all the way back to the beginning. Let's do this thing. Let's just let's just take the sucker all the way back to the top. The the proper answer to Bush is Woodrow Wilson, right? Next time somebody says Bush, you just say Woodrow Wilson or or James Garfield. Pick a random president and just say it back to them, because that's about as relevant. It's not relevant. You don't have to follow them down their imaginary silly rabbit holes.
[21:20]Okay, seventh point. If you don't know something, you need to admit it right off the bat. So this is where more people get caught in debate than any place else. If Donald Trump were a normal candidate, he'd get caught on this all the time. Right? Because because Donald Trump literally knows nothing. He knows zero things. The number of things he knows has actually started to decrease into the negatives, right? He's making up things that he doesn't know now. So the so in a normal in a normal so one of the one of the gaffes that Donald Trump had, he was being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt, and Hugh Hewitt asked him about the nuclear triad. And Donald Trump didn't know what the nuclear triad was. Okay, fair enough. Just say, look, Hugh, I'm not an expert on the nuclear triad. Maybe I'll make you my defense secretary. Right? That's that's the you know, that's that would actually be a decent answer. Right? Or I don't know the answer to your question. I want to research it and get back to you later. That's okay. What you probably shouldn't do is do the things that that Trump does, which by the way, are not going to fly in a general election. Things like where Donald Trump is asked about the Al-Quds Force and he says, oh, the Kurds. And then he says that he misheard. Right? He just makes things up on the fly. Or he's asked in the last debate about H-1B visas and he just shifts his position 180 degrees because he doesn't even know his own position because he can't read. So, in Donald so so the the point here being, you don't have to you don't have to pretend to know things that you don't because that's the easiest way to get in trouble in a debate. Because usually the left, they don't know many facts, but they usually know like one. And it doesn't have anything to do with anything usually. You know, you're just you're talking about something and they say, well, did you know that the the air speed of a swallow in flight? Right? And and you're supposed to come back with something and it's like, no, I'll check that out. I guess. Okay, you know, let me do some research and get back to you is actually a fair answer in debate. You're allowed to say it. You don't have to be the person who knows everything. Nobody knows everything. I'm close, but nobody knows everything.
[24:02]Okay, eighth point. You don't have to get sucked in by the paradigm. So it turns out that you're arguing your own beliefs and your own positions. That means you don't have to defend anybody else's beliefs and positions if you don't believe them. This is actually, I think, a great danger in American politics, uh is that people feel the necessity to defend positions they don't like and don't hold just because it's our guy. So, for example, everybody likes Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan's great. Okay, we're all agreed, right? Ronald Reagan's terrific. Okay. Ronald Reagan did stuff that was not great. Ronald Reagan, for example, passed amnesty, right? Not a great thing. The thing we all agree at this point, not a wonderful thing. Ronald Reagan was working with a Congress that raised spending. Not a wonderful thing. Ronald Reagan acknowledged he made mistakes. Ronald Reagan, when he was running for president, acknowledged the biggest mistake he made was in this state when he made abortion more available. Right? People make mistakes. That's okay. And you're allowed to say, I disagree with that position. You're allowed to say, you know what? That's just not some we can argue this, but honestly, it's not a position I hold passionately. You don't have to be sucked in by the paradigm. So if somebody says to you, well, you know, that's not what that's not what Bush says. Okay, so what? If you don't agree with Bush, you don't agree with Bush. He's not God, right? There's only one of them. So that so it so there's no there's no reason why you have to follow your idolize a politician to the extent that you're that you're going to that you're going to shift your own positions based on idolatry of a politician. Ninth point. It's actually kind of fun once in a while to let the other side have meaningless victories. This makes you look moderate, which is the left's favorite thing. So so one of the things that you can do with the left is they they like to play these linguistic games. So for example, immigration reform, right? The whole purpose of the immigration reform discussion is to make you sound like you hate Mexicans, right? That's the whole point of the immigration discussion as far as the left is concerned. The when when they say, you know, immigration reform, and you say, are you for immigration reform and you say no, then they say, you hate Mexicans, right? That's always the next line. It's it's it's in it's on page 42 of the handbook. The the proper answer to are you for immigration reform is, sure. I'd love immigration reform. Now, what specifically are you talking about? Right? So for a second, they think you're agreeing with them. And then it turns out you're not, because you're actually asking them to define terms. What the left likes to do is they like to pick terms that sound really nice. Happy, happy do. Great terms that just sound great to everybody, right? Aren't you for hope and change? You say, no, no, I'm for despair and rage. Right? That actually is my campaign platform. But what you actually should do if somebody says, are you for hope and change is you say, sure, I like hope, I like change. What the hell are you talking about? Right? Because what that means is that you're not dismissing them out of hand. You're asking them for clarification, and then they're in trouble because they don't think, again, in terms of what's under the surface. They just think in terms of these kind of broad terms. And this is the trick that they play. It's it's actually a brilliant trick. One of the things that they do is they pick terms, they know 100% of people like, and then they redefine those terms to mean something that pretty much 0% of people like. Right? Everybody likes hope. Everybody loves change. Not that many people are fond of a of a sagging economy and a and a flaccid foreign policy. Right? It turns out not that but that's what he means by hope and change. But if you say, no, I oppose your hope and change agenda, the hope and change thing that Sarah Palin liked to say. Right? If you if you say that, then they say, well, that's because you're a bad person, right? It always goes back to that original argument. Always reverse, right? You say you're against hope and change. It's because you're Eeyore. You're just terrible.
[28:44]Right. Okay. Final, final and 10th, 10th kind of point in arguing with the left.
[29:01]And that is body language actually matters when you're arguing with the left. Whoever gets angry first loses. That's the that's the general rule of debate. Unless, again, Donald Trump violates every rule of debate. But if it but but aside from Donald Trump, assume you're not Donald Trump and you're not one of the world's most famous men before you start debating someone. Assume that you're just a normal human with a normal IQ. And you and you are and and you are uh and you're asked to debate somebody. Well, then you should utilize good body language. So, the Democrats are great at this, actually. They actually train in body language. Obama did, Clinton did. They had people who actually taught them specific body language moves. So Clinton, who's probably even better than Obama at body language, Clinton was very famous for for doing this motion with his hand, right? When he's driving home a point, it's this. The elevator button push, right? He he goes forward like this because if he goes like that, he's lecturing you. And if he goes like this, he's a fascist. But if he goes like this, right, then he's just gently prodding you. He's gently encouraging you. Like seriously, these things actually matter. Right? If I'm smiling when I make this speech, this is a very different speech, than if I'm then if I'm raging at you, right? It's it's these things make a difference. Body language, imagery, these things matter, right? In 2008, some of you, I think, are old enough to remember 2008.
[31:16]In 2008, if you can recall the conventions, if you if you Barack Obama descended from the clouds, ala Lenny Riefenstahl onto a stage with Greek pantheons behind him and the trumpets blared and Zeus crowned him king God, and it was it was in front of 60,000 people and it was just unbelievable. And then John McCain toddled onto a stage, holding a microphone between his hands and he and you know, he has physical infirmities because of his time being tortured, because he's an American hero. He's not a community organizer who's never done anything. And so he toddles but for whatever reason, he toddles onto the stage, and he looks like John McCain, right? There's no way to change that. He looks like John McCain. And he's and he proceeds to stand in front of a podium like this. And then behind him, they've put a a lime green screen. Not like a green screen. Not like you and I would think of a green screen because we're technologically savvy. Like a green screen where they're going to put some cool animation behind him with like a flowing American flag or a waterfall or a bald eagle or something. No, it's just it's just a lime green screen, like they're making a pornography in San Fernando Valley. And then he proceeds to and then he proceeds to speak and nobody hears a word he says because the because the imagery matters. There's a difference between the God king being crowned and a little old man speaking in somebody's basement. Right? And so it's it's So, all these things actually matter. So think about it. Like you actually have to think about being well-dressed, something that comes not naturally to me at all. You actually have to think about getting a haircut once in a while, dudes. You actually have to you actually have to learn some elements of body language. Again, Bill Clinton was the best at this. Bill Clinton, he uh he had he was famous for having three forms of handshake. Four if you include Lewinsky.
[33:55]And and it was he had the uh the three forms of handshake were he would shake somebody if he'd just was meeting you for the first time. He would go for the double hand clasp, right? He clasped your hand. Nice to meet you, great to meet you. The second one was if you were a potential donor, right? And that was hand here and then the other hand on the on the bicep, right? You're a good friend, right? You're an awesome dude. And then there was the kind of hug, right? That was if you were if you were a big donor, or a huge donor from China for whom he was going to declassify nuclear secrets, then he grabs you by the hand and takes the other hand and puts it sort of on the back of your neck on your shoulder because you're a you're just a dude and we're we're dudes together and it's awesome. So body language actually matters when you're debating people and when and and in normal conversation, when you just do politics, as a general rule, this is why. Again, you know, the most famous case, of course, is 1960, where Nixon wins the debate with Kennedy on the radio and loses the debate with Kennedy in in in terms of TV because he's sweaty and he's got the flu and he just bummed and he clocked his knee on the car and all this stuff, and he's favoring one leg. It turns out that people actually do look at you and they make a decision about whether you're winning or losing in the first half a second of a debate, essentially. So, those are your 10 rules for debating folks on the left. Now, the final point that I'd like to make here is that it is imperative that you enter the battle. And it's not again, it's not going to be a choice for you. Right? We're now of a generation. I'm I'm not that much older than most of the people in the room. I'm 32. Right? And I uh and it's it's in my lifetime. The obligations to become part of politics has actually risen dramatically. It used to be that when you turned on ESPN, you didn't get eight minutes of the president of the United States giving his his NCAA picks. Right? Which is what we I was working out yesterday and that's what Obama was doing. It used to be that you could turn on a normal TV show and not be afraid of being hit with the politics of the left dramatically in your face. It used to be that you could have a normal conversation with people about politics without it verging on violence, which is essentially where we're moving. You're going to have to learn to enter the fray because they're not going to leave you alone. There's no such thing as the left leaving you alone anymore. Even all the people You know, you guys aren't politically motivated, but all the people out there, all the all the people who are conservative out there, who think they can just live their lives and be left alone with their families. The government will just leave them be, the left will allow them to live their lives if they just keep quiet, it's nonsense. They're not going to allow them to do that. The left is firmly convinced that it is in the right, and the left is firmly convinced that it has both the capacity and the moral superiority to control every aspect of our lives because, again, we are benighted, bad human beings. The only way to fight it back against that is, as President Obama's White House like to say, to punch back twice as hard.
[37:31]Thanks so much, happy to take questions. And just to clarify, and just to clarify for the Donald Trump voters. That's not literal. People shouldn't actually be cane for their opinions.
[38:00]The the truth is, the the real answer to that question is do your research, right? I mean, before I do a debate, I I never go into a debate without researching my opponent's writings and positions ever. It's it's just like it's just like a sports game. You have to research your opponent. It's a boxing match. You have to scout how your opponent fights and then you have to gauge your opponent. I never walk in to any debate without without doing deep prep.
[59:01]All right. Let's give Ben another round of applause. All right, let's give Ben another round of applause.
