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Sept. 23, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
56:53
Glenn Beck | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 20
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The word that you need to look for is chaos.
If what you're doing is causing chaos, you are going to be part of the problem.
So here we are on the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special with Glenn Beck.
And we're going to get into his new book, Addicted to Outrage, in just one second.
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Glenn Beck.
How are you?
Thanks for stopping by, dude.
I appreciate it.
Very good.
You bet.
Well, he has a brand new book out, does Glenn Beck, Addicted to Outrage, sure to be a New York Times bestseller like all of his other books are.
This one is really, you can tell, a labor of love.
First of all, it's longer than a lot of your other books.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And second of all, it really covers an enormous amount of ground.
What prompted you to write this book in the first place?
The last...
Four years, probably.
You know, I mean, Ben, we've talked about this before.
I kind of went into a depression of my job is to make sense of the world, and my job is to point to the exits.
They're here, here, and here.
And I couldn't point to the exits anymore.
I didn't understand the world we were living in anymore.
Uh, and people would ask, okay, so, okay, what do we do?
What do we do?
I got to a point to when, you know, there's 120 different genders.
I don't know, because I don't know where this is even coming from.
You know, four years ago, I'm thinking, okay, I just don't want to do this anymore because I don't have an answer.
Started doing my homework, started doing some research, started thinking differently, and really started to bone up on postmodernism and what's really happening.
Where is this coming from?
Once you find that and you see what the goal is of just straight-up deconstruction, I can't think of a positive thing of postmodernism.
Not one.
It's all about taking apart the Western way of life and anything that came out of the Enlightenment.
It's really, hey everybody, let's go back to the Dark Ages.
Literally.
Would you agree?
I think there's some truth to that.
Yeah.
So, I can't think of a positive in that.
How do you sell that positively?
So when you start to understand that, you understand that there is no truth, there is no meaning, etc., etc., you start to understand maybe suicide rates, you start to understand why people are arguing back and forth, why people feel betrayed, why people feel like you're a hypocrite.
Wait, you were just saying this yesterday.
It's all postmodernism.
Once you know that, Now what?
And so I've spent the last couple of years, and a solid year writing that, in fact it's the second time I wrote that book, just trying to say, okay, so now that we know that, we know their goal is chaos, How do we diffuse that?
How do we take it apart?
And we're going at it at 180 degrees the wrong direction.
Do you think that the actual goal of the postmodernists is cast or do you think it's just a natural byproduct of their ideology?
meaning that to kind of steel man the case for postmodernism, basically what they would say is that we're all individuals who operate with certain linguistic sort of limitations.
We operate in our own world.
There's no such thing as a universal truth.
There's just your truth or my truth.
There's just my logic and your logic.
And we need to acknowledge that so we can build a new world based on our own subjective views of the world that might be better than the patriarchal norms that have been put in place.
So I think that's a really charitable viewpoint of it.
I think if you go back to the roots of what's being taught now, you go back to the 1960s and the Paris riots, where we're not making, we cannot destroy culture.
They thought they had it.
They had the Beatles, they thought.
They had all of the culture.
They had the hippie movement.
Everything was going their way.
Then it fell apart because they didn't have all of the levers to take Western culture down, okay?
And again, it's almost like what they learned at the Frankfurt School.
People in the West, they would describe us as, they're being bought off, they're being bribed.
They're not going to rise up because they're being hypnotized, brainwashed with their cars and their products and everything else.
They're not going to be the workers of the world unite and tear it down.
So when you look at it from that point of view, from the groups that got together in the 50s and then again in the 60s after the Paris riots, you then see that come and jump over here with the express plan of being a virus and to take down the Western way of life.
So is that, I mean, I guess the opposition would say maybe that's conspiratorial thinking.
Is it motivated, or is it just the way that things happen?
Like, are these people stating their case?
No, I think there's, see, this is the problem, you know, and there's no nuance in today's world anymore.
And that leaves us in a world of black and white, and that's not The way things are.
There are those that look at postmodernism as some of the founders did of this particular strain of the movement that want to tear it apart because they are Marxist revolutionaries, okay?
There are others that look at this, you know, for literature and to be able to understand it, etc, etc.
They don't necessarily have the same goals.
In fact, I know professors who actually were Marxist until recently, and one of them is a guy who was postmodern literature and felt that there was meaning in there until recently.
Now he sees, wait a minute, the extreme is taking the wheel here.
It's not those of us who are like, no, there's some real meaning here, but it's the extreme.
And the extremes are the ones that have control.
So there's a lot in your title here, Addicted to Outrage.
I want to start with the first word and then we'll skip the conjunction and we'll get to the last word.
So the first word, addicted, you talk in the book about the idea that we have actually created an addiction to the feeling that we get, the sort of emotional high that we get from ripping other people down and feeling outraged Sure.
Okay, so let's start with the addiction.
We know, I've talked to programmers and code writers for Facebook and Google and everything else.
and that actually allows you to sort of shape this. - Sure, okay, so let's start with the addiction.
We know, I've talked to programmers and code writers for Facebook and Google and everything else.
They all will tell you, if they're honest, We wrote this with all the bells and whistles and we looked at each other and how can we get people to spend more time with us?
Okay?
Everybody does that.
It's not a bad thing.
It's... Cable News is doing that.
What do I do to get you to watch for another five minutes?
So, the device that we have now, you know, Facebook, Twitter, all of these things that we have, You know, the slang word dope comes from dopamine, a hit that is naturally provided to us that we get that makes us feel good.
There's all kinds of these drugs that are in us that are natural and addictive.
And, you know, when you're not getting them, you start to become depressed.
When you are getting them, you're feeling good.
Every time you get a like, every time you get a retweet, every time you hear a buzz or a ding, you get a dopamine hit.
Somebody likes me.
The entire country used to say, these people in the media, all they're doing, they're only doing these things because they want the clicks.
Still, people will say that.
But no one is saying, what about you?
Because why are you saying this?
You're saying this because you want your tweet or your Facebook post to take off as well.
You're doing it for the clicks as well.
And because we keep getting this constant positive reinforcement of the negative that we put out, call them a name, you'll get more dopamine.
We become addicted to that rush and it feels good.
Without the addiction, it still kind of feels good for conservatives because no one has ever hit back for us.
And when you have been beaten and beaten and beaten for so long, and you think that the Western world is under attack and everything that you hold dear, and it's going to go away, You look for somebody, if you've tried to play all of the fairways, you look for somebody who's going to come in and just go, I'm going to take you by the scruff of the neck and I'm going to take you out back and beat the snot out of you.
That's a problem because that adds to the chaos of our society.
We abandon our principles and principles are all we have.
If you look at Kavanaugh, what's happening with Kavanaugh?
Let's not talk about whether she's telling the truth or he's telling the truth.
Let's step back a bit and look at that and say, look, people on the right are calling her names.
People on the left are calling him names.
We're not going to get anywhere.
And all that's doing is reinforcing to each side, we're right and they're the enemy.
And the more you get aggravated and outraged by it, the harder you dig in because you're too vested in that now.
I'm going to believe her till the end of time.
I'm going to believe him till the end of time.
Meanwhile, we miss the principle.
You know better than most.
Look, there's criminal law, there's civil law, and then those things are based on our society.
What do we want as people that we think is fair?
What do we really believe is justice?
We've had a criminal court system that hasn't been just for a long time.
Back and forth, you know, it's got its problems.
Still, I think it's one of the best in the world, but it has its problems.
No one, no one, if you take politics out, if you take the Supreme Court justice or the Democratic charges, take that all out, and I come to you and say, Ben, how do you feel about living in a country where someone could make an accusation Not know the facts, have zero evidence.
It's 37 years later.
The people that she did tell, the one, tells a slightly different story.
And at the critical point in your career, at the 11th hour, someone can make a charge and call you a rapist.
And we have to decide now whether you're a rapist, whether you can have a job, whether you're going to be in society or not, just based on do we like her or you better?
Which one's going to perform better on TV?
What do you think?
Is that a fair society?
Is that a just society?
Horrible!
Why aren't we talking about that?
We are arguing over these little things while the big principles are just crumbling.
Nobody wants to live in that society.
Last night in LA, I had a conversation with a guy who you would definitely know, everybody in the audience would know, who is a very left guy.
He sat in our apartment here while we were eating dinner.
I had dinner with a couple of friends and he came in.
He said, I can't keep up with my own side.
I'm constantly on the outs now because I can't keep up with them.
And you have to 100% buy into all of it.
This is dangerous.
This is dangerous.
When you have people who are prominent on the left saying, I think I need to say something, That tells you that the absolute crazies are in control, and the average person doesn't want any part of it.
So, as I was asking before, so your own addiction and your background in the past, some people may not have heard that story, and I think it does lend some color to your talking about the dopamine hits and the addiction that we're all experiencing.
So, you know, my mom died when I was really young, and it just kind of took my life and turned it around.
I had been working in radio when I was 13.
And so I had this really bad toxic mixture of kind of being like you, but you've conquered this apparently.
I became a monster because everybody was like, oh my gosh, look how great he's going to be.
Imagine when he's 30.
You know, you heard all that.
I bought it and I became a monster.
And I hated myself.
And I started drinking and smoking pot every day.
15 years old.
Every day until I was 30.
Thirty years old, my life completely falls apart.
It was my 30th birthday, and I remember looking at the alarm clock, and it was about to turn midnight.
And it was the day of those old digital clocks where the numbers kind of floated almost, you know?
And I saw it turn midnight, and I said to myself, your life is about to change.
And I didn't know how yet.
But it took me three years to finally admit that I was an alcoholic because I was a very high-functioning alcoholic.
Most people didn't even know.
I was plowed all the time.
And so that's not what an alcoholic is.
An alcoholic is somebody who's lost all their money and they're a wino in the streets.
That's not what an alcoholic is.
And every day I would get up and I'd look at myself in the mirror and I would say, you're pathetic.
You said this time yesterday that you wouldn't drink today.
And what did you do?
I know, I know.
Not today.
Not today.
Sometime in the day, I found a very reasonable excuse to start drinking and doing drugs.
So I did.
Next day, say the same thing in the mirror.
It got so bad, But I couldn't look at myself in the mirror anymore.
Every time I would go into the bathroom, any place, if there was a mirror, I either didn't use the sink or I opened the mirror so I couldn't see myself.
My daughter came down.
My two daughters had breakfast with me and I was having blackouts.
And, you know, it's not, you know, in the movies, They make that funny and charming.
Oh, did we do that?
No, it's not funny and charming.
You know, your body is on autopilot and shut everything else down or it's going to die.
You know what I mean?
And so I was having blackouts, which will freak you out.
And my kids came down for breakfast one morning and they were sitting there and they said, Dad, tell us the story of Inky, Blinky and Stinky again.
And that was a story of three little mice that go to the Island of Cheese that I just made up every night.
And I realized, not only could I not remember the story, I don't remember even putting them to bed.
I don't remember being with them at all.
And I sat there in such shame, and I thought, what are you doing?
And I lied to my kids, and I said, I remember the story, but do you remember the story?
And as I fought back the tears over breakfast as they were telling me the story, all I'm thinking is, you gotta stop.
And so I went to AA, and I was in the basement of this church in Connecticut.
I lived in a nice neighborhood.
And none of the people looked like alcoholics.
You know?
They were all successful looking.
There was this old lady that was sitting right in front of me.
She had a sweater set and pearls.
Do you know who Selma Diamond is?
No.
Okay.
She was a great comedy writer in television years ago and early radio.
But she was hysterical.
And she, you remember Night Court?
Yes.
Okay.
She was the bailiff.
Okay.
Remember the woman that talked like this?
That woman sounded like Selma Diamond, okay?
And she's this beautiful old woman in a sweater set in pearls.
And I stand up and I said, hi, my name is Glenn.
And I think, I don't know if I'm an alcoholic.
And everybody kind of laughed.
And somebody said, why do you feel that way?
I mean, you're here.
Pretty good indication.
And I said, well, because you don't look like alcoholics.
Without even turning around, she said, oh honey, we are all drunks in this room.
That one comment gave me permission that you can still Be out of control in your life and not be in the gutter.
And I don't know why that was so hard for me, but I think in a way it's the same thing we're having here.
We don't, we know our lives, everything in our country is out of control.
Every day we look and we say, I'm going to get off Facebook.
I'm going to get off Twitter.
It's just too ugly.
I don't want to, we're doing it.
What's the difference?
We are addicted.
The companies are designing it for us to be addicted.
We want that, yeah, in our life.
We all know this isn't good.
The only difference here is I can't think of a good reason to drink.
We're excusing it because we're standing up for our country and no one wants to surrender in the most important fight maybe in the history of all mankind.
So how do we fight and fight the addiction at the same time?
Okay, we're going to talk a little bit about that, and I want to get to the other half of the title about outrage.
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Okay, Glenn, so I totally agree about the addiction.
I, myself, am a social media addict.
I'm particularly a Twitter addict.
Legitimately, over the weekend, I thought, I'm going to remove Twitter from my phone.
I'm just going to take it off my phone, because I go on my computer far less frequently than I have my phone on me, and it's a weekend, and I'm walking around with my kids, and I'm still checking the news, checking the news, just trying to check Twitter, and my wife said, why don't you just delete it off your phone?
I did, and then five hours later, I put it back on the phone, because obviously, you've got to know what's going on in the news.
I know, I know.
Especially if you run a news website.
That's my excuse that I run a news website, but I totally agree.
We are all addicted to social media, addicted to being in the moment.
And what that means, I used to think that it was the most informed people in America who were going to save the country.
And I've started to think maybe it's the least informed people in America who are going to save the country because those of us who are the most informed are busy smacking each other across the head on a routine basis.
But that brings us to the second half of the title, Outrage.
When we talk about how outraged we are at each other, some outrage obviously is legit, some outrage is not.
How do you distinguish which outrage is legitimate and which outrage is just us being outraged?
Well, there's a couple of things.
First of all, let's go back to Kavanaugh.
Do you really think that the Democrats believe the woman who was was saying this about Kavanaugh.
Because if you did, why'd you hold on to it for weeks?
Why'd you do it at the 11th hour?
Why didn't you insist the FBI was involved right away?
If it was about her, not the process, you would have handled it differently.
There are so many things that people are absolutely outraged about.
The one I quote in the book is the border.
Ben, you know me, I was at the border when Obama was putting those people into the cages, taking the children.
My thing was, they're not only taking away from their families, they're separating the children.
So a group of children come, they're brothers and sisters, well you're 10, you're 7, you go in that cage and you're in this building.
Oh my gosh, can you imagine being a seven-year-old girl and separated from your brother in another country?
How horrible.
The Border Patrol agents were coming to me and saying, can you get the press to even listen to this?
I'm telling you, this is horrible.
No, I can't get the press.
I can't get the press.
I tried.
I called everybody in the press.
No one cared.
Your own side killed you for it.
And my own side killed me for it.
Courage doesn't count when you take on your enemies.
Courage only counts when you stand up to your friends and go, brother, come on, you're better than this.
So, nobody would listen to it.
Then all of a sudden, they discover a picture taken from that time period, and they're morally outraged.
They just can't take it.
Then they are like, oh, oh, crap.
Okay, make excuse, make excuse.
Oh, well, look at what's happening now.
Okay, well, how about the separation of the kids?
How about that one?
Is anyone talking to you about how they're taking brothers and sisters and still separating them and the trauma that that might cause?
No.
They don't care.
They have one line.
They didn't care then.
They only care right now because it's political expediency.
On top of that, what's the answer?
What's the answer?
The answer is you must stop the chaos at the border, which means you have to go to the countries and say, we as the United States of America want to make it really clear.
Every single person that comes across our border We'll go home.
Period.
Do not send your kids.
If you are a refugee, if there is something going on, there is a system, go to the United States Embassy.
Here are the things that we look for for refugee status.
We are a nation that brings refugees in for safety.
We have every intention of continuing that for real refugees.
No more chaos.
That's the way you fix it, but nobody's interested in fixing it.
Are people really outraged by the shooting in Parkland?
Are they really outraged by it?
Or are they seeing an opportunity to divide us on the one subject, that and abortion.
We're not changing, okay?
Half of the country, and abortion is even weaker than this, The Second Amendment is the Second Amendment to a good number of people in the country.
A good number of people don't care about guns.
They want to change it.
It's not going anywhere.
Our children are at risk.
Actually, as the book points out, we're not.
The lowest shootings, you know, school shootings, I think in the last 30 years, it's down.
It's a rapid decline.
Safer now than it was in the 90s or the 80s in schools.
So, but if you really cared, we would do something about it.
If the parents in Parkland, and I just asked one of the parents this just recently and they didn't give me an answer.
I mean, no disrespect, but if I was a parent in the Parkland school district, I would have, and I didn't believe in guns, I would have been doing the thing about guns, but I also would have demanded the resignation of the sheriff.
I would have demanded a change at the school board.
I would have demanded changes at the school.
They haven't done any of that.
So, is this really about children dying or is this about politics?
I can't have, I can't, I don't want to be a part of a society that's using things that are so, stop using our emotions.
Stop playing on our emotions.
It's either real or it's not.
They accused me of playing on people's emotions when I said the caliphate was coming.
Look what happened.
There are things that you can look at because you'll take people at their word and say, no, they really mean it.
They're going to try to do this.
And you can warn people.
That's not preying on their emotions.
That is just telling the truth and saying, I think, if you look at these things, 2 plus 2 equals 4.
I think this is where we're headed.
The other is, I'm just going to say these things.
Because I can twist them into that, make you feel like the boogeyman's coming, so you run to me.
Both sides are doing it.
And it's going to be the death of us, Ben.
Do you think that it's a question of the sincerity, or do you think that it's a question of people who are legitimately outraged, but for different purposes?
Meaning that, you know, it's easy for me to sit here and say, you know, if a parent in Parkland really cared, they'd do something about the Sheriff Scott Israel.
Totally agree with that, obviously.
But what if there's a parent in Parkland, and they think, yeah, you know, there's the Scott Israel issue, and sure, he's a schmuck, I'm much more concerned that kids all over the country are really being scared.
How do we decide whether the person's outrage is legitimate or whether the person is being manipulative?
And is it possible that in misreading that motivation we could be contributing to part of the problem as well?
So this is why our system of government is wholly inadequate for immoral and irreligious people.
People are trying to tear down capitalism.
First of all, capitalism, as I outline extensively in the book, has changed the world.
I mean, this is the greatest time, even with all of our problems, Donald Trump and Barack Obama's America, the best time and the best place to be alive in all of human history.
So please, pipe down.
But you look at capitalism and you say capitalism is bad.
Well, that's because you forgot the first half, moral sentiments.
If you just read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, you'll understand the invisible hand.
But you will not understand what an immoral population will do with that invisible hand.
It will come and it will choke the life out of people.
So you have to be a decent people.
I still believe that most Americans, right and left, are decent.
Not all.
Never.
But they're decent.
They don't want to destroy somebody else, and they don't want to, you know, my way or the highway.
I don't want any Jews or blacks or conservatives or liberals or homosexuals or cisgender whatever.
They don't want that.
They just want to live next to each other and raise their families.
Don't tell me what to do.
I won't tell you what to do.
Let's just, let's just live our life.
We have to return to that, because I can't tell you who's telling you the truth and who's not, who's really outraged.
I know that there's two things on outrage going on right now.
Some people are not outraged, and I would say that if it's involved in politics, It's most likely not true.
Then there are the people that are absolutely true, that were the, I gotta give him a trophy, I have to give him a ribbon, everybody wins, oh, everybody's so special, that are just coming out of college now.
They actually believe that they're outraged.
They really are outraged.
But those people need to be told, you gotta get over it.
You gotta get, you gotta get a life.
Because what, you know, as Jonathan Haidt says in his new book, Coddling of American Mind, you have, your parents and society has prepared the road for you.
That's not reality.
They should have prepared you for the road.
And what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
But right now we live in a society that says the opposite.
What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
And we've got to avoid all of that stuff.
No!
No.
So I want to talk to you in one second about the application of your principle, how people on the left have responded to you trying to outstretch your hand and how well that's going.
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Once more, ben.robinhood.com.
Okay, Glenn, so you've... I'm sure the number one question you're gonna get asked about this book is, here you're saying that we are addicted to outrage, but you're Glenn Beck.
I'm sure this is the question that you're going to get most frequently, particularly from folks on the left.
Aren't you that guy who was doing chalkboards on Fox?
And you talk in the book a little bit about, you know, what you think of those days and where you think you're right and where you think you're wrong.
So let me ask you, what do you think was right and what do you think was wrong there?
I think I was right on the direction.
I mean, you know, pretty much everything that I was writing on those chalkboards, pretty much it's happened.
Where I was wrong, but I want to put it into context, was possibly the presentation.
You work at Fox.
What's your job at Fox?
To get ratings, presumably.
Correct.
To get ratings.
If you don't get ratings, how long are you going to last?
Not long.
Okay.
That's what they hire you for.
Get ratings.
Because I know who you are, and you know who I am.
Tell the truth, okay?
As you perceive it.
I am a... I'm an entertainer.
I grew up as a kid listening to Orson Welles.
I mean, I love theater of the mind.
I love it.
I know how to stunt.
I know how I can take a live frog, you know, cut to tape, replace it with a plastic frog, throw it in boiling water, and it'll set the world on fire.
But people are watching.
Because they see that, they'll also hear the truth.
My problem was, I honestly believed, that's how naive I was, I honestly believed that if I could get members of the press to actually hear on a day-after-day basis facts, real facts, honest questioning, saying, Don't trust me.
I was saying this for the press as much as the average individual.
Do not take my word for it.
Look this up for yourself.
I'm begging the press.
Look it up for yourself.
This is not crazy conspiracy talk.
This is what's happening right now.
And you don't have to condemn it, but we should recognize it and answer for it.
They don't care.
They don't care.
And they've gone dead inside.
You can talk to people about some of the bigger concepts of what we're facing.
None of them know what they're talking about.
None of them.
Their eyes just glaze over.
They're not intellectually curious.
They think their responsibility is to parrot Whatever it is the party is saying, and I saw this on both sides.
I mean, I worked at CNN and Fox.
I know both of them inside and out.
It's not that different.
It's not that different.
At Fox, I had pure independence.
You know, they tried to do things, but, you know, I was smart enough to set up my contract the way it was.
It's all about parties.
It's all about parties.
And when I left there, you can't be—I went from the third or fourth most admired man in the world.
Think of that.
I mean, I remember when I saw that.
AP does that survey every year.
I was between Nelson Mandela, and I think I was actually not between them.
It was Nelson Mandela, me and the Pope tied for third or fourth place.
Me and the Pope, okay?
And my family and I, we read that and we're like, this is hysterical, okay?
How off-center is America when I'm even near that, when I'm handing that list to somebody?
The very next year, one of the most hated men in America.
I didn't change anything.
I changed networks.
I did the same show on CNN as I did on Fox.
I changed networks and that's what happens?
Wait a minute.
Time goes on.
You're getting beaten as badly as I was beaten.
Called all kinds of names, your children, my children were accosted in the park, several parks, many different states, from Alaska to Hawaii to New York.
The park experience, you say park to any of my kids and they're like, no, let's not go to the park.
So you can't go into that position and then not say, which guy am I?
I know I'm not Nelson Mandela and the Pope, so dismiss that.
But I'm not that guy either.
And it's easy to say, well, that's the media.
That's the media for you.
That's George Soros for you.
No, that's part of it and a big part of it.
But I played a role in that too.
And the role I played was not recognizing the time that we were in.
And not knowing how high the stakes were of the people I was playing against.
You know, you're not going to win.
And so playing, you know, being in Lederhosen and, you know, doing all the crazy things that we did, I don't regret any of it.
I don't regret really almost anything I said, even the president being a racist.
You read the book last night.
Yep.
Well, you clarified it in, like, the next sentence.
It makes sense to you?
Sure.
Yeah.
And if you don't know— I said very similar things.
I said very similar things at the time.
Right.
And what I said was, he's racist.
Well, no, he's not.
He just has a real deep-seated hatred for the white culture.
Well, I couldn't verbalize it at the time because it's 2008.
I know I've got Jeremiah Wright sitting out there who doesn't like the white culture, doesn't like America, the history of America.
So, but what is that?
Is that racism?
No.
No, it's actually post-modernism.
It's all of this crap that's out there.
And so when you're asking me, is he racist?
That was what I grabbed at, just like I think people are grabbing at Donald Trump's a racist.
Donald Trump's not a racist.
He's not a racist.
I don't think.
What he is, Or what, I should say, what people like Don Lemon, I think, and I don't know, I've not talked to Don about this, but to give him the benefit of the doubt, let's reverse the roles.
I just went through this, okay?
You didn't understand because I didn't understand what I was trying to say.
Somebody is, he's got this thing where he wants to deconstruct the Western way of life.
All the people around him want to deconstruct.
Okay.
He's a postmodernist.
He's not racist.
Postmodernist, okay?
What Don fails to see, and really kind of what I failed to see during the last election, was people feel, you know, when you're in, where is it, Norway, I think, or Sweden, you can't fly the Swedish flag.
If you fly the Swedish flag, I think it's Sweden, you will be called a racist because you have to fly the EU flag.
Well, no.
When I went to Sweden a couple of years ago, I talked to somebody and they said, well, you know, it's nothing special.
I said, this isn't special?
Have you been to Copenhagen?
Have you been to Sweden before?
No.
Okay.
Go.
It's like gingerbread houses.
It's the greatest architecture.
It's completely unique, completely different.
It is really cool.
And I sat there.
I was on the street with somebody.
I said, you don't see how unique this is?
Don't be ashamed of your culture, your history.
This is great.
And you can't find it anywhere else.
It doesn't mean it's better than anything else.
It just means it is different.
Be proud of your culture.
You can't do that.
Well, people want that.
They're proud of where we came from, what we struggled through.
We should be ashamed of the appropriate things in our history that we're ashamed of.
But you can't just erase all of that.
So when people are saying, hey, my culture matters.
What people on the left here is racist.
You're trying to erase my past and my heritage.
Oh, you like slavery?
No, that's not what I'm saying.
But that's what people on the left associate.
So, when Don Lemon says, well, he likes racists because look at the language he is using.
You know, the culture is being erased.
You know, our heritage is important.
Yes, it is.
But it means different things to different people.
So, back away from the cliff.
Let's try to understand each other's language, and then we can condemn each other.
But do it on actual, tangible things.
Truth.
So, in the last few years, you've been saying a lot of things that are honest, because you're a really honest guy, or an emotionally open guy, and an honest guy, and that's ticked off a lot of people on your own side.
How has that been, number one?
And number two, What's the response of people on the left been to the quote-unquote New Glenn Beck, the kind of attempts to reach across the aisle and have discussions?
Because I can imagine that while you are opening, you're putting out an open hand, I can't imagine that in every case, certainly not publicly, there are people who are actually taking it.
Oh publicly, no.
The worst, the most shameful on the left I think is GLAAD.
I went to go see the president of GLAAD and her crew.
She came into my office in New York City and I called for the meeting and I said, just leave your arms at home and can we just come and talk?
And I started the meeting and I said, look, everyone, everyone on my side will hate me for this, will hate me for this.
I don't agree with anything that you guys do, okay?
I think you're a very militant group.
However, Right now, in Russia, they are abusing homosexuals, abducting them, killing them, taking their driver's license away.
This is at the time, what, five years ago.
It was getting really ugly.
In Iran, they're throwing homosexuals off the rooftops of buildings.
People need to be brave.
And people need to say, look, Ben, in our case, it's not that wide, but I need Penn Jillette to be able to stand next to the Pope and have both of them say, look, there's a lot of huge things we disagree with, but there's a couple of principles that we do.
And for GLAAD and Glenn Beck to stand next to each other and say, killing homosexuals is wrong.
We've just taken a big chip off the table of both sides, okay?
We've lowered the temperature and we can talk.
Spend an hour showing them the picture, showing them the news of all around the world where we could agree all they wanted to talk about were wedding cakes.
And I got so frustrated, I just said, do you care about wedding cakes or saving the lives of people?
They cared about wedding cakes.
I have decided that if you're in politics, I don't know, I'm not going to you for honest brokering.
Somebody came out here to L.A.
and somebody, very big VC guy, had listened to me at one point and I went into a conference About a thousand people there, all lefties, all high-tech.
And I started my speech, I had 20 minutes, and I said, let me just start here.
Raise your hand, and don't be shy, and they weren't.
Raise your hand if you think you hate me.
Literally, 95, 98%, okay?
Everybody.
And I was like, okay, well, you're not shy.
Give me 20 minutes.
And I never changed a principle.
I used Jonathan Haidt's book of The Righteous Mind.
I just started to speak their language.
Without changing my principles.
And I did the most important thing any of us can do.
Start with an apology or some place where you got it wrong.
I did.
At the end, I think it was only my family that was raising their hands.
I asked the same thing, and it was maybe 5%.
It was an exact flip of the room in 20 minutes.
And that's only because I'm trying to hear them.
My mistake during the Trump run-up, I became so strident.
Because I was certain who he was.
Well, as it turns out, he is, in some degrees, who I thought he was, or worse.
In some ways, he's a miracle, okay?
You know, he is both sides.
But I was so positive that he would have nothing good, and I wasn't listening to people.
We used to respect people.
We don't respect them anymore.
And that is stopping us from doing what people who respect each other.
Ben, I know if you walk down the hall and you start cussing people out, that's so unlike you, that somebody will say, Ben, is something going on?
What's going on?
Right?
So America starts acting irrationally, start going in a direction they've always said they would never go, and I didn't say, what's happening?
What is happening in your life?
It's why the media is still missing the Trump voter.
They're unwilling to ask, so what is it?
And listen and accept the answer.
It may not be the answer you're looking for, but it is the answer.
Live in the world you actually live in, or live in some fantasy world.
I choose to live in the world that's actually existing.
Listen to people.
So, you talk a lot about, in the book, outrage and the culture of outrage, but then you talk about, you know, the serious problems that outrage is preventing us from discussing.
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Okay, so Glenn, you talk.
I have to tell you, I understand why Steven Crowder didn't wear pants.
It is the fires of hell hot in here.
Oh yeah.
How are you wearing a jacket?
I'm wearing a jacket because you're wearing a jacket.
Oh, I thought I was wearing a jacket because you're wearing a jacket to be honest with you.
I don't know who started this jacket fight, but suddenly we're stuck with it.
Mainly I turn up the heat so that it looks like I'm really grilling you.
Yeah, I know.
When you start sweating like Richard Nixon in 1960, I can see it was all my questioning.
You know, you talk here about, you know, the fact that we're engaged with outrage, and I've said on my program a thousand times that, as you say, we're living in the best time in human history.
If you could be born any time, you'd want to be born... Right now.
Right now.
But we're angry at each other, but we are, because of that anger, missing some really deep problems.
So what are the deep problems?
Not just the outrage culture, what are the deep problems we're missing that we're going to have to figure out solutions for over the next 10-15 years?
So I lay out about, I don't know, five or ten of them that I think are are we're absolutely going to have to deal with.
Anywhere from, what is life?
You know, is AI, AGI, ASI, is that going to claim to be life and will we accept that?
You know, they just turned a sex robot around at the Canadian border from Japan.
You can't import sex robots that look like children, okay?
So, you have a sex robot.
Is that good for pedophiles?
Would it be good to have them get it out on a robot?
Or is that bad?
Discussion's going on.
Nobody knows about it.
How about the... I think it's called the smart machine.
I can't remember.
MIT is doing it.
And it's online.
And they're asking you to go online and just take some quizzes.
And what this quiz is, is the value of life.
You're in a car.
It's an auto drive.
You're in the car, and there's a car in front of you.
It's just slammed on the brakes.
If you swerve this way, you're going to hit a nun and two kids.
If you swerve this way, you're going to go into the other sidewalk, and you're going to hit a whole bunch of kids and puppy dogs.
If you go straight, you're going to hit Elon Musk and Steve Jobs.
Okay?
What do you do?
Now they're asking people online.
Then the rest of the brilliant elites are programming based a little bit of what's online and the debate that's going on right now that we're not a part of.
Here's the problem.
The computer in the car will know who's in the car in front of you.
But as it says in this survey, it can know who they are, what they do, what they contribute to society, how many, if any, they employ, how many benefits they're getting from the government, how their health is.
It can calculate all of that as it makes a decision.
Well, now there is no random strike.
Now we are saying who's worth something and who's not.
Bain Capital came out a few months ago, said, by 2030, we will have 30% unemployment.
That is the Great Depression.
Here's the thing, it's permanent unemployment.
There is no going back.
We have a society right now that is saying, hey, look at the job numbers, look how low, huh?
Unemployment's low, historic lows.
Well, you have Silicon Valley right now working on devices and algorithms and machines that are, their goal is 100% unemployment.
100% unemployment.
So what gives your life meaning?
What does that mean when that transition starts to hit?
What do you do with the people who the truck drivers are going to be the first?
Uber drivers, cab drivers, truck drivers are the first.
What happens when that's displaced?
Because in most states, number one job, truck driving.
So, how many people does that affect?
What do you do for civil society?
The universal basic income, something I don't believe in, but what do we do about that?
Is that right for the future?
We can't have a universal basic income conversation because To a conservative, that sounds like socialism, not capitalism.
Socialism.
We don't want socialism.
We don't want communism.
But the world is changing.
So how do we bring our guard down, bring their guard down, and actually talk about it without bringing politics into it, and see what is right?
On top of that, you have Radicalized Islam.
You have the mullahs in Iran who are dead set on destroying Israel.
They believe in something called the 12th Imam, the Mahi, which they say is living among us now.
He's like our Jesus, if you will.
Not your Jesus.
Your Jesus.
Whose coming back at the end of days.
But this one can be brought back by washing the world in blood and causing chaos.
The reason why I bring that up, chaos is the operative word, and I said this when I was on Fox.
The word that you need to look for and then you need to be aware of is chaos.
If what you're doing is causing chaos, you are going to be part of the problem.
They're looking for chaos.
A guy named Alexander Dugin in Russia.
Only one reporter in the Washington Post is on this guy.
Nobody is on this guy.
He has started something called the World National Conservative Movement.
This is a fascistic movement based on what he calls the fourth political theory.
The symbol of his fourth political theory is the ancient symbol of chaos.
He believes, literally, we have to go through Armageddon to be able to reset the world.
Then you have the Marxists revolutionaries here that want to reset the world, to reset the West, and then start all over again.
We're being pulled by all these forces of chaos and nobody's recognizing it.
We're arguing on the smallest little things that don't matter.
Wedding cakes.
Shut up about wedding cakes!
How about the bigger principles?
We've got to get back to the bigger principles.
So that's my final question for you, which is, what are those bigger principles that we have to unify around?
Like, where do we unify around this?
I'm going to ask you that, but that is our final question.
And if you want to hear Glenn's answer, you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
See, that's how he pitches.
Oh my gosh.
Check that out, right?
You evil capitalist.
Yeah, look at that.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
You can hear the end of our conversation there.
Otherwise, we're going to leave you in this abysmal darkness.
So, it's all up to you.
Glenn, what are these values that we need to center around?
This is where you should cut it right after the sentence.
I've spent four years trying to figure that one out.
Here's the answer.
Well, the book is addicted to outrage.
Glenn Beck, one of the foremost thinkers in the country.
Glenn, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, executive producer Jeremy Boring, associate producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caromina.
Hair and makeup is by Jesua Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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