So he spoke last night at the University of Utah. I'll give you the rundown. We have some pretty

amazing information from there. Plus, Hugh Hefner is dead. And aside from talking First Amendment

and boobs, we'll also talk about tax reform and where that is. We'll give you all of the information.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

Okay, so I want to start by talking about Hugh Heffner because Hugh Heffner's death is apparently a deep cultural moment.

The obituaries are just endless.

The New York Times ran a 3,300 word obituary about a guy who's mostly famous for putting boobs in a magazine, which is pretty incredible, who lived the life of a Saudi oil chic, but occasionally published John Updike and Norman Mailer, and therefore, I guess, his entire life was just roses and nothing. But we'll get to all of that. And as you may have noticed, I don't abide by this rule that when someone dies, we have to pretend they were awesome. So I'm going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what Hugh Hefner meant to culture and what we should take away from that. But first, I want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Wink. So does the current news cycle make you want to drink heavily? If so, Wink is the place to go. Their wine is just terrific. People around the office have tried their wine, they say that it's just wonderful. But what makes Wink special is that if you don't know anything about wine,

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office uses it and they say that the wine is just terrific. Okay, so I was going to begin with Trumponomics, but it's more fun to talk about Hugh Hefner. Right? I mean, this is why Hugh Heffner is a cultural figure, because we have to pretend that Hugh Heffner was a forward-thinking genius of the culture instead of basically a purveyor of pornography. Now, none of this is to say that he doesn't have a First Amendment right to push his pornography.

I mean, he did have a First Amendment right. genius of the culture instead of basically a purveyor of pornography. Now, none of this is to say

that he doesn't have a First Amendment right to push his pornography. I mean, he did have a First Amendment right to push his pornography, although I think there actually is a fairly decent argument under the First Amendment that the First Amendment was not supposed to cover obscenity. Like, I don't think that John Adams and James Madison were sitting around in 1789 thinking to themselves, you know what we really need to protect, Hugh Hefner with the money shot.

That's what we need to protect, right? What Robert Bork argues in his book talking about the First Amendment is that the First Amendment was essentially in trying to protect political speech. That was the goal. But let's assume that we're going to take a libertarian position on the First Amendment. Better that government should not regulate any of this than that government should regulate the wrong stuff. So let's say that all this stuff is protected. Now the question becomes, was Hugh Hefner's business good for the world or was it kind of bad for the world? So what I've seen a lot of in the obits today is focus on the stuff that is not Hugh Hefner's core business, right? It's in a lot of focus on the fact that he supported civil rights, which is great, terrific. You know who else supported civil rights, Rosa Parks? You know what she didn't do? Pose nude. Right? So this idea that Hugh Hefner is somehow culturally important because of civil rights is not the case. Okay, let's be real about this. Hugh Hefner is famous because he was an old perv. Okay, he was a purve from the time that he was young and he was a perv when he was a

parody of himself. He didn't become a different human. He wasn't different at 30 than he was at 91. He's the exact same person. He never changed. And that's why it was so ridiculous, watching him try to live the life of a 30-year-old swinging bachelor when he was 91 and somebody had to milk his prostate

for him.

The whole thing is ridiculous. So the New York Times runs this glowing obit of Hugh Hefner. I did look it up. I was trying to figure out whether they granted more time to Hugh Hefner or Ronald Reagan. They did grant more time to Ronald Reagan. So good for the New York Times on that. They granted more time to Hugh Hefner than William F. Buckley, which I think is sort of telling about where the Times stands on this. But here's what they write.

And this is, I don't even have to give you indicators like this.

I'll just review this glowing profile of Hugh Hefner, apparently one of the greatest human beings to have ever walked the earth.

It goes, Moses, Jesus, Hugh Hewaffner.

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