Tesla, SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk and conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro both attended the European Jewish Association conference, where they discussed the dangers of DEI practices and the future of college campuses.
Dave Rubin plays a clip of their brutally honest conversation.
“Some of these rallies on college campuses in favor of Hamas — I mean, they unite the weirdest coalitions, maybe, in human history,” Shapiro began. “You’ll see LGBTQ flags in favor of Hamas, where, of course, if an LGBTQ person were to be actually in the Gaza Strip, they would no longer be in the Gaza Strip — they would be dead.”
“Exactly,” Musk agreed. “That’s seriously out of touch.”
“There is a coalitional idea here that, basically, power structures must be torn down at all costs, and if that means allying with people who hate me, then I’ll ally with people who hate me,” Shapiro continued, noting that this kind of paradoxical support has “grown in fervor since October 7.”
“What do you make of the future of the West if the West continues to embrace that idea?” he asked Musk.
“We really need to stop this principle that the normally weaker party is always right. … If you are in ‘oppressed or the weaker party,’ it doesn’t mean you’re right,” Musk answered, adding that if “weaker groups want to annihilate you, that does not make them good.”
“We have to get rid of the rule that if you’re weaker, you’re automatically good,” he continued. “You judge any group or individual against absolute moral standards, not whether they’re the so-called oppressed or oppressor.”
A solid answer, but Shapiro had more questions.
“What do you think the future of the universities in the United States looks like given the fact that entire universities appear to have been corrupted by moral relativism? … Do you think that a wave of change is coming to the universities?… What is the solution for universities in the United States as well as abroad?” he pressed.
“I think we need to return to what things were (or mostly were), which is a focus on merit. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman, what race you are, what beliefs you have; what matters is how good are you at your job,” Musk explained, adding that “that’s the least racist [or] sexist you can be.”
“You could be a three-legged, green Martian [who] wears a kimono and drinks yak’s milk. Who cares?…What matters is how good is your work; that’s it,” he analogized.
Dave not only admires Musk’s answer but also how he — “as absolutely brilliant as he is” — explains “complex things in very simple ways.”
“Just because you are the perceived weaker group (in this case the Palestinians), it does not mean you are good, no matter what your perceived oppression is,” he says, reiterating Musk’s comment.
“You are not allowed to burn babies alive and put them into ovens; you are not allowed to rape women and murder men, women, and children … that does not make you good or just, but unfortunately, that is what much of the modern left now believes.”
To hear Musk and Shapiro’s conversation, watch the clip below.
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