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Dec. 2, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:06
A Very Merry Un-Thanksgiving To You! | Ep. 907
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Colin Kaepernick celebrates un-thanksgiving, the New York Times op-ed page defends woke conspiratorialism, and Britain is hit with another terror attack.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty.
So I have a lot to get to today.
First, let me just say, it is the most wonderful time of the year for crapping on America, apparently.
Apparently it is that time of the year.
See, we are approaching a 2020 election, and as we approach that 2020 election, it is apparent that in order to gain the huzzahs of the mainstream media, in order to receive praise from the mainstream media, all you really have to do is take a dump All over the systems that have created prosperity and liberalism and freedom in the West.
If you do that, then the media will praise you.
Endlessly.
Because our media, unfortunately, are populated with people who don't have a proper understanding of American history.
Many of them read Howard Zinn's People History of the United States and think they know things now, even though that history is taken out of context and is completely meritless in terms of its general worldview.
This is the way that a lot of people in the United States, particularly in the media, think.
And what this means is that you're seeing even presidential candidates having to pay homage to this sort of worldview.
Well, the latest to do this is Pete Buttigieg.
Now, again, Buttigieg, his draw is that he's been running as a moderate in the past couple of months.
He started off his campaign running as a moderate.
Then he swiveled to the left in an attempt to grab that woke base.
And then when that failed, he swiveled back to the center and he started picking up in the polls.
And right now he's leading in Iowa and he's doing well in New Hampshire as well.
Elizabeth Warren, conversely, She started off as the sort of rational alternative to Bernie Sanders, and then she skewed way out to the left and started talking nationalized healthcare, and then she fell apart because people don't like that sort of thing.
Well, Buttigieg is making that same mistake now.
The reason he's doing that is because he traveled down to South Carolina over the weekend, and he is trying to gain some black support for his candidacy.
Right now, he has none.
He's the whitest candidate in the race, or at least is perceived as such.
In reality, Elizabeth Warren is even whiter because she's the whitest person who has ever lived, but Pete Buttigieg traveled down to South Carolina.
He needs to start making some inroads in the black vote because the fact is that about two-thirds of the South Carolina primary base is black.
So, the AP reports, as he labors to win over black voters whose support is vital to his Democratic presidential bid, Pete Buttigieg found a receptive host on Sunday and a civil rights activist who is sought to continue Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr.' 's push for a racially diverse national campaign against poverty.
After attending services at Rev.
William Barber's Greenleaf Christian Church, Buttigieg stayed for a discussion with the Poor People's Campaign begun by King shortly before his assassination in 1968.
Barber, a pastor and former North Carolina NAACP president, revived the movement to unite a new generation of Americans of all races to combat economic inequality.
Now, this of course was specifically designed in order to win Buttigieg some sort of support.
He had had himself a rough week after he was attacked by Michael Harriot.
Michael Harriot...
And it was this columnist before The Root who wrote a column about how Pete Buttigieg was a lying MFer.
Why?
Because Pete Buttigieg had suggested quite reasonably back in 2011 that educational inequality in the United States is not entirely due to systemic factors.
Much educational inequality in the United States is due to the fact that there are a lot of kids who are growing up in areas where they do not have parental figures who are deeply ensconced in the education system, who are not teaching them that education is, in fact, a ladder out of poverty.
That was true.
And he was ripped up and down by Michael Harriot for that.
And now Booty Judge is attempting to respond to that criticism by basically, it appears, bowing before the dictates of a sort of politically correct wokeness.
Now Michael Harriot, who wrote this really, this pair of incredibly self-indulgent pieces which were praised as brilliant and wonderful because the more purple your writing is and the more you spice them with meaningful...
Parables and anecdotes, the more people think that you have something important to say.
Well, Harriet was on MSNBC and he was talking about Buttigieg, and he said, well, Democrats have to know how to talk to black voters.
Now, this is in and of itself a bizarre contention, because the fact is, Democrats and Republicans should be talking to all voters, presumably, in the same way, because we're all individuals.
The idea that you talk to a black voter differently than you talk to a Latino voter differently than you talk to a white voter, Is really awful for our politics.
If you are tailoring your message specifically based on the race of the people to whom you are speaking, that would be you being kind of racist, right?
If you are attempting to speak to white audiences, I mean reverse the racism, you see how true this is.
If you spoke to white audiences differently than you speak to black audiences, then this is presumably you being a racist.
But according to Michael Harriot, you have to tailor your message.
What does it mean to tailor your message?
You're not allowed to say true things if it's offensive to certain groups of people.
So here's Michael Harriot saying this, and then we'll see Pete Buttigieg doing some of this.
So here's Michael Harriot, of The Root, again, a man who wrote that Pete Buttigieg was a lying MF-er based on the fact that Buttigieg made a perfectly rational statement about educational inequality of outcome in the United States.
And then Buttigieg called him, and then he wrote another piece about what a wonderful guy Michael Harriot is.
There are people and candidates who come from places in America where they don't have to court the black vote.
They don't have to appeal to black citizens.
They don't have to appeal to black voters.
And they can still get elected into the positions as mayor of South Bend or to senator.
But when they have to Okay, so what does it mean to speak to black voters differently?
Well, Pete Buttigieg thinks that what that means is nodding along when people say insane things about the evils of the United States.
So, Reverend William Barber is sitting across from Buttigieg, and he starts lecturing him on the evils of the United States, and Buttigieg just sits there and goes right along with it, as far as I can see.
I don't see any blowback from Buttigieg or an attempt to correct the record.
Here is William Barber jumping into a statement about how people who are illegally entering the United States from south of America's border are reclaiming land that was originally won by the United States.
So it's legitimate, therefore, to be an illegal immigrant.
Whenever people say, we call people illegal aliens and all these things that are not human and certainly not Christian, Why can't we just own in America that some of the people that are trying to come from Mexico here are coming back to land we stole?
And the reason we took the land is because people wanted to keep their slaves.
Okay, so the Mexican-American War is a very controversial aspect of American history.
There were folks like Abraham Lincoln who were very much opposed to the Mexican-American War because they believed that the Mexican-American War was designed to admit new slave states to the Union.
Okay, so that part is true.
But what Barber says there, that illegal immigrants are crossing the border because of some sort of revenge play from 1848, is Perfectly insane.
And any sovereign country has to be in control of their own borders.
Obviously.
But the fact that Buttigieg is nodding along to that speaks of how members of the left believe they have to appeal to various members of the democratic constituency.
In other words, the intellectual base of the left, the stuff that starts on college campuses and then filters out to the media and then filters out to so-called thought leaders in the democratic community, it is quite anti-American in certain aspects of how it views American history and how it views capitalism, how it views Western liberalism.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, so that perspective that you saw there from Reverend William Barber, and that is being nodded along to by Pete Buttigieg, unfortunately, That perspective is gaining credence in certain parts of the American population.
Not broken down by race, but broken down by politics.
And that is deeply negative.
It's why you see people like Colin Kaepernick being granted all sorts of endless media time for his virtue-signaling stupidity on a wide variety of topics.
So, for example, Colin Kaepernick over the weekend Well, again, retains his fame only because the media keep covering his various anti-American protests, whether he's putting pigs on his socks or whether he's saying that the Betsy Ross flag is racist.
Well, his latest bid for attention, since he obviously doesn't want to play quarterback in the NFL, he trashed the United States on un-Thanksgiving Day, which I guess is sort of like your unbirthday in Alice in Wonderland.
A very merry un-Thanksgiving Day to you.
He said that he was accusing the United States of having stolen billions of acres of land from indigenous people, and then he released a video on his Twitter account to play into all this.
So here is Colin Kaepernick, a millionaire, thanks to the Western system he is currently criticizing, in America, a country that he apparently really does not like in many ways.
Here he is.
Cutting a video on un-Thanksgiving Day because apparently we're not supposed to be thankful to God that we live in this country.
We're not supposed to be thankful to God that Western civilization arrived on these shores.
We're supposed to pretend that everything would have been better for the world if Europeans had never come to the continent.
Which, again, that is not to discount any of the evils Europeans committed when arriving on this continent.
But to pretend that the world would be a better place, broadly speaking, if Europeans had never colonized the United States, is to be completely ignorant of world history, economics, and pretty much everything else.
Here's Colin Kaepernick doing that routine, presumably, well, leaning back in his mansion and watching this thing on his Twitter account created on his iPhone.
It's been 50 years since the occupation.
And that struggle has continued for that 50 years.
And before that 50 years, it will continue from this point.
It's our responsibility to honor our ancestors and honor our elders by carrying on that struggle.
Don't let their sacrifices be in vain.
That's why it's important for all of us to be here today.
To show that we're together, that we're unified, that we have that solidarity.
And I hope to spend many more of these with you.
Okay, and then Kaepernick wrote on Twitter, Spent the morning at Indigenous People's Sunrise Ceremony on the 50-year anniversary of the occupation of Alcatraz.
The U.S. government has stolen over 1.5 billion acres of land from Indigenous people.
Thank you to my Indigenous family.
I'm with you today and always.
Okay, it is certainly worthwhile to recognize that the United States is based on European peoples coming to land that they did not originally discover.
There are people here already.
And then taking over that land.
It is also important to recognize that is the entire history of human migration over the course of all of human history.
Literally all of it.
And that before the Europeans even arrived on this continent, there were plenty of people who were colonizing each other's lands.
There were internecine warfares between Native American tribes.
There were people who were colonizing other people's land.
This has been happening throughout history.
To single out European colonization of the Americas as a unique evil in the history of the world is simply ridiculous.
And not only is it ridiculous, it's particularly ridiculous on Thanksgiving, which is a day specifically designated to be tolerant and open.
Thanksgiving is a day that was specifically created in order to recognize the common humanity between Native Americans and European peoples who arrived on the continent.
I mean, it's a ridiculous take on American history, a context-free take on American history, but unfortunately, it is this sort of view of America that is splitting the country right now.
It's one of the things that really is splitting the country.
I think that it also goes to the 1619 Project, for example, which is something that the New York Times was pushing.
You remember that the New York Times pushed the so-called 1619 Project.
The idea of the United States was not founded in 1776.
It was founded in 1619 with the original arrival of African slaves on the American continent being brought by European slave traders.
Okay, there's only one problem with that.
Even historians recognize now that the 1619 Project is basically a bunch of garbage.
James McPherson, who is a Civil War historian, he wrote a very famous book called Battle Cry of Freedom, which is a terrific book, by the way, if you ever want to read some Civil War history.
He said this about the 1619 project.
He said, I'd say, almost from the outset, I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account which lacked context and perspective on the complexity of slavery, which was clearly, obviously, not an exclusively American institution, but existed throughout history.
And slavery in the United States was only a small part of a larger world process that unfolded over many centuries.
In the United States, too, there was not only slavery, but also an anti-slavery movement.
So I thought the account, which emphasized American racism, which is obviously a major part of the history, no question about it, But it focused so narrowly on that part of the story, it left most of the history out.
He also suggested the idea that racism is a permanent condition.
It's just not true.
It doesn't account for the countervailing tendencies in American history.
Opposition to slavery and opposition to racism has been an important theme in American history.
And it's not just McPherson who's been complaining about the 1619 Project.
Gordon Wood, who's another Pulitzer Prize winner on the Revolutionary War, He said that he was surprised by the scope of the 16 at 19 project.
He said it is so wrong in so many ways and yet that sort of false history that is being taught to the American people by idiots like Colin Kaepernick and then supposed knowledgeable people like Howard Zinn and then being pressed forward by politicians who bow to it.
It's really horrible for the country.
If you want to have an American unity, I'm writing a whole book on this right now.
If you want to have any sort of American unity, there are certain ties that have to bind us together.
A basic understanding of the American philosophy, the creedal truths of what it means to be American, which are basically embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
The idea that all men are created equal, and that we have equal rights, and that those rights include rights to life, liberty, and property, and the pursuit of happiness.
Those are basic, creedal American truths.
Those have been twisted away from us.
We have to share history.
We have to believe that we're all part of the same stream of history.
Yes, some of us were victimized in that history, and some of us Our grandparents were the aggressors in that history.
But we're all part of that same history because we're all part of the same story, we're all part of the same country.
And yet what we are seeing now is an attempt to revise history and divide Americans from each other by making us permanent identity groups that are simply victimizing each other through hierarchies of power.
What we're watching right now is that the ties that bind us in terms of our understanding of rights, a culture of rights, rights expressed in the Bill of Rights, those rights are being overthrown on a daily basis by people who believe that those rights, as expressed in the Bill of Rights, are actually just an expression of people attempting to cram down their own power view of politics.
And so, for example, the right to free speech is merely powerful people expressing themselves and non-powerful people being silenced.
So, we have to silence the right to free speech through hate crimes, through hate speech laws, and through campaign finance reform, Yeah, less speech is the answer.
We're taking all of the ties that bind us together, and then we are ripping them apart.
And then we're ripping them apart, and we're celebrating as we do this.
On the left, unfortunately.
Perfect example of this today, there's a piece by a guy named Damon Young, who's the author of a book called What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker.
And it's in the New York Times, it's called In Defense of Woke.
And he talks about why wokeness is good.
Now, understand the word wokeness.
You have to sort of understand where wokeness comes from.
Woke, originally, was a sort of mocking term, a derisive term, that was used to describe people who believed in conspiracy theories.
They were woke to the conspiracy.
But it has migrated, so that now it's a term of praise, because if you are woke to the American system, you see how evil, inherently, the American system is, and therefore you are woke.
Otherwise, you are asleep.
And you'll see, this is what the New York Times Op-Ed today is praising.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so this op-ed in the New York Times really is indicative of a certain worldview that is gaining credence and tearing apart the country.
It's called Indefensive Woke by Damon Young.
Does Donald Trump and his supporters want the rest of us to stay asleep?
You see, if you want to talk about American history in positive ways, if you see America as a generally good development, if you see capitalism as a generally good development, it's because you want people to stay asleep.
Everybody has to get woke.
Everybody has to wake up.
So, it was quaint, really, that feeling I had in the months after the 2016 presidential election, where I convinced myself I'd do everything possible in the next four years to prevent Donald Trump from becoming normalized.
It was our duty to never stop shouting about his abnormalities, and I believed that this conscientiousness had an unlimited bandwidth.
I'd be obstinate and cantankerous.
I'd be unflinching.
I'd be resolute.
The fate of the republic depended on it.
But there I was, on a lazy Saturday three years later, sitting in my living room, choosing to binge-watch Queen Sugar instead of recaps of the impeachment inquiry.
If I hadn't been doing that, I would have browsed Zillow to scout shelving space ideas for open-concept kitchens.
Either way, while my disdain for the president and his supporters remains, my capacity for hyper-consciousness has faded.
I don't possess the stamina for the sort of vigilance necessary to stay cognizant of everything he's doing, nor do I wish to.
Someone has to do it, though, and I'm just not woke enough.
Drat.
There's that word.
Woke.
Rarely has a colloquialism had as many mutations.
Woke described his racial awareness and cynicism so extra it bordered on parody where you're so awake that your third eye saw things that aren't there.
The movies I'm gonna get you sucka and don't be a menace to South Central while drinking your juice in the hood satirized this concept.
Each film's most racially conscious character was either married to a white woman or willing to trample a sister to get to one.
Also, Woke was used exclusively by black people to refer to other black people.
It was our word because only we were mindful enough to recognize when that pro-blackness was a performance.
As the aughts approached, like 2000, the term started to lose its racial connotation, becoming a catch-all instead for any sort of progressive behavior.
You were woke if you recycled, or maybe just retweeted an infographic on the virtues of recycling.
White people were deemed woke.
Some, painfully, even took it upon themselves to be the arbiters of wokeness.
And now?
Well, woke floats in the linguistic purgatory of terms coined by us that can no longer be said unironically.
What was a compliment just a few years ago has become, at best, an eye-roll.
Mostly, though, it's used as a pejorative.
Bill Maher seems to consider wokeness his personal albatross, as he's apparently blind to the paradox of getting paid likely millions of dollars a year to complain about what he believes he's no longer allowed to say.
Progressives have to be careful not to be so woke that will scare moderates into voting for Donald Trump, warn usually white male columnists in every major American newspaper.
When the beloved and iconic Deadspin was effectively killed this fall, haters crawled out of the internet's crevices, cheering the demise of a marriage of sports and wokeness they considered Well, actually, it effectively committed suicide with its own wokeness.
But, here is the point of this very silly column.
These are the key paragraphs.
This columnist suggests Today, when I turn on the news and attempt to slog through the impeachment inquiry, I'm reminded of some of the inane conspiracy theories my wokest college classmates considered gospel.
There was the Tommy Hilfiger one, where he shouldn't buy his clothes because he went on Oprah and expressed disgust at black people wearing them.
There was the Timberland one, where he should stop buying those boots because the emblem, a tree, represented lynchings.
These conspiracies could be debunked with superficial research.
But even as we'd roll our eyes at them for believing these untruths, we knew they weren't wrong about America.
They just had bad information.
That's the key sentence right there.
That's the key sentence for so many people on the quote-unquote woke left.
Every horrible thing you could possibly come up with to say about America, Maybe it's not right, but it's justified.
Don't take them literally, but take them seriously.
In other words, if it's a bad conspiracy theory about the United States, if it is a context-free interpretation of American history, if the idea is that America is universally the worst, and so we just sort of craft the fact pattern in order to meet that end, that's justified because, after all, the point is correct.
America is terrible.
So in other words, this person is saying that yes, wokeness used to encompass this sort of conspiratorialism, but conspiratorialism is not unjustified in a country where America is conspiratorially racist.
He says that, sure, we can point out that some of these conspiracy theories were dumb, like Tommy Hilfiger, or the Timberland boots, but the Tuskegee experiment did happen, and COINTELPRO did happen, and redlining did happen, and gerrymandering is happening, and black people were targeted for subprime lending.
We are arrested and incarcerated today at wildly disproportionate rates, while the perpetually woke are dismissed.
They're also the canaries in our coal mines, alerting us to the dangers we might be too drowsy to see.
Right, that's the key right there.
Whatever you say that's bad about the country is justified because those are just people with highly attuned antennae.
And because their antennae are so highly attuned, they can see the evils in American society where you cannot.
And so that's why we should be paying attention to people who make crazed claims about the nature of the United States and American history, because in the end, they're just the bleeding edge, right?
I mean, they're just the tip of the spear.
And even in that paragraph, Where this columnist is trying to put together all the things that do happen, he puts together a bunch of things that did happen, and a bunch of claims he's making about now, and not all the claims he's making about now are true.
So for example, he says, the Tuskegee experiment did happen.
Correct.
And then he says, gerrymandering is happening.
Well, gerrymandering has always happened.
I mean, there's nothing new about gerrymandering.
The claim that gerrymandering is purely racial is not completely justified, and the idea that it's happening now, as opposed to then, is silly.
In fact, gerrymandering has been happening throughout... It's named after Elbridge Gerry, who's one of the founders.
What are you talking about?
When he conflates redlining from the 1970s and 1980s with arrest rates that are disproportionate today, disproportionate racially, but not disproportionate in terms of crime, that is a conflation.
That does not make any sense.
And so this column ends.
Today, however, the President of the United States is possibly involved in a multinational scheme to suppress votes, discredit rivals, and threaten whistleblowers.
This fever dream feels like the premise of a John Grisham novel that his editor rejected for being too absurd.
But I am bored out of my mind with the impeachment proceedings and would rather watch my shower faucet drip.
Or perhaps just go to bed early and catch up on some sleep.
And when I find myself giving the insufficiently woke a hard time, I remember, someone has to stay awake.
This is an article in the New York Times specifically accusing the President of the United States of, quote, a multinational scheme to suppress votes, discredit rivals, and threaten whistleblowers.
To suppress votes?
He's gonna have to explain that one.
But, again, every conspiracy is justified because, in the end, America is a very bad place.
And you see this sort of conspiratorialism across the West, unfortunately.
A belief that the West is a uniquely terrible place.
In fact, there's an article from ProjectSyndicate.org written by Greta Thunberg, who is, of course, the 16-year-old climate change activist who sailed over here to lecture us all about carbon emissions, and Luisa Neubauer and Angela Valenzuela.
And this column basically suggests that all of the talk about climate change is really not about climate change, it's about the evils of the West generally.
This column says, for more than a year, children and young people from around the world have been striking for the climate.
We launched a movement that defied all expectations, with millions of people lending their voices and their bodies to the cause.
Okay, I'm sorry.
Like, you marching is not, quote-unquote, lending your body to the cause, since no one was actually putting your body in danger.
These folks, including Greta Thunberg, say, we did not do this because it was our dream, but because we didn't see anyone else taking action to secure our future, and despite the vocal support we have received from many adults, including some of the world's most powerful leaders, we still don't.
Striking is not a choice we relish.
We do it because we see no other options.
Countless negotiations have produced much-typed, but ultimately empty commitments from the world's governments, the same governments that allow fossil fuel companies to drill forever more oil and gas and burn away our futures for their profit.
By the way, I just would like to point out here that carbon-based fuels are one of the great causes of increased world prosperity over the past 50 to 60 years.
Not in the West, okay?
In the second world and the third world, in developing countries.
But here is the real point.
The real point is that these kids are calling, Greta Thunberg and the other people who wrote this column, they are not just calling for change on climate change.
This is part of a broader worldview.
It's part of a broader rubric that suggests that the West is responsible for all global ills.
Quote, that action must be powerful and wide ranging.
After all, the climate crisis is not just about the environment.
And here we go.
It is a crisis of human rights, of justice, and of political will.
Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it.
You're gonna have to explain how sexism is responsible for climate change.
That one you're gonna have to explain to me.
That if women didn't run the world, what, we would have solar power?
That if women ran the world, we'd have solar power?
Somehow we would have broken the, we would have broken The Da Vinci Code, we would have figured out how to provide cheap nuclear and solar power that surpassed the rates of carbon-based fuels.
Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it.
We need to dismantle them all.
Our political leaders can no longer shirk their responsibilities.
You wonder why folks on the right are sort of suspicious of the climate change movement?
It's because of nonsense like this.
If you just want to claim that there are environmental consequences to the use of carbon-based fuels, that's an argument.
You want to suggest that you want to dismantle basically the entire Western system and condemn it as entirely evil, simply because you don't like it, and then blame climate change?
Yes, that's radical stuff, and it is leading to a crack-up in Western civilization.
We'll get to more of this in just one second, because the election of 2020 is going to be largely about this conflict of visions, and elections all over the world are going to be about this conflict of visions.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, so more on the conflict of visions that is arising.
In the West.
In the United States.
Abroad.
I mean, Western civilization may be on the verge of a crack-up, specifically because all of the ties that bind us are being frayed.
Cord by cord, they are being cut.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so this is a conflict that is breaking out across the West again.
The view of Western history, Western civilization, institutions like capitalism that have raised more than half the globe from abject, sheer starvation-level poverty in the last 40 years alone.
And there's a group of people in the West who don't like any of this and want all of it to go away and see everything through a glass darkly.
Every single development in the West is seen as an inherent bad.
And so you have idiots like Mark Ruffalo, who has earned millions of dollars saying lines that other people wrote for him on a screen And he tweeted out the other day, it's time for an economic revolution.
Capitalism today is failing us, killing us, and robbing from our children's future.
Really, capitalism is killing us?
Capitalism has allowed 7 billion people to live on planet Earth.
That's what capitalism has done.
Capitalism has allowed the child mortality rate on planet Earth to drop dramatically.
Capitalism has allowed people to live, to have families, to not die at age 30.
And Mark Ruffalo, a very, very wealthy actor, sitting in his L.A.
penthouse, presumably, is talking about how capitalism is failing us and killing us and robbing from our children's future.
Absolute insanity.
Anytime Mark Ruffalo feels like donating his entire paycheck to the third world and then getting right with Karl Marx, he can do it.
It's just amazing.
It's just amazing.
By the way, he was browsing as of 2017, a $10 million renovated Upper West Side brownstone.
So that sounds like a guy who really hates capitalism.
He tweeted out a piece from Time Magazine called, How America's Elites Lost Their Grip.
All about how capitalism has failed all of us and how socialism is now the wave of the future.
Again, if you are standing against the capitalist system, and then you propose that you're standing in favor of human beings, you're going to have to square those things.
And don't give me that the countries of Sweden and Denmark and Finland are somehow socialist paradises.
If you want exorbitant tax rates starting at 60 grand a year, And if you still want to live in a free market system, that's a free market system, ma'am.
If you ask the people from Sweden and Norway whether they are living in a free market system, they will tell you they are living in a free market system.
The government does not own all the means of production.
But the fact is that this conflict over vision, over what America stands for, what the West stands for, is continuing to resonate across the West.
It is really dangerous.
It's really dangerous because ideally you'd have two sides that both agreed on fundamental principles, they just disagreed about how to get to the goal.
And that'd be the idea, is that you have everybody agreeing that Western civilization is a pretty wonderful place, that free market capitalism is an engine of growth, some disagreements about what government should take care of and what government should not take care of, some disagreements on sort of marginalia, You'd have some disagreements on foreign policy, you'd have some disagreements on the nature of just how much to cast blame on American history as opposed to credit American history, but a basic understanding that America is a pretty incredibly wonderful place by any sort of historical or contemporaneous standards.
There'd be that basic agreement.
But that does not exist.
It does not.
And increasingly, it is not existing.
You can see this in Great Britain as well, by the way, in the conflict over the London Bridge Killer.
For those of you who missed it, over the Thanksgiving Day weekend, there was a terrorist who... He was a convicted terrorist.
He actually served time in jail.
He murdered two people on London Bridge on Friday.
It turns out that he was released early.
Boris Johnson, who is currently the Prime Minister and is running for Prime Minister again in the new elections that are about to happen over there, he said, the reason this killer was out on the streets was because of automatic early release, which was brought in by a leftist government.
He said, I've only been in office for 120 days.
He says, we take a new approach.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn was suggesting that convicted terrorists should not necessarily serve their full sentences.
He suggested that it would be a mistake to re-entrench the idea that if you're a convicted terrorist who tries to kill people on London Bridge, that you should have to stay in jail for a while.
The killer, in this case, was a convicted terrorist.
He was 28 years old.
He was wearing a fake suicide vest and wielding knives.
He went on a rampage at a conference on criminal rehabilitation.
Ah, the irony.
A conference on criminal rehabilitation beside London Bridge.
Police said that this terrorist had been previously convicted of terrorism offenses, but was freed early from prison.
Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn, who's an open communist at this point, he said it depends on the circumstance, it depends on the sentence, but crucially, it depends on what they've done in prison.
So he wants to continue to let people out of prison.
And then here is his general His general belief, Jeremy Corbyn, is that the West bears some sort of responsibility for every sin on Earth, including the sins of terrorists, who, after all, are simply responding to the Western predations that have been so prevalent over the course of the globe.
Now all of this is leading, as I say, to tremendous political polarization.
And you see people like Thomas Edsel, who is a data-driven, kind of interesting columnist over at the New York Times, desperately trying to cling to the ideal.
And I'll give him credit for this.
He's trying to cling to the ideal that liberals in the United States and abroad, that they do not hold completely separate Visions of what the world should be than people who are not of the left.
So Edsel has a piece in the New York Times called liberals do not want to destroy the family or society for that matter.
How did this preposterous idea leap to the forefront of conservative thinking?
Okay, well, I've just given you about half an hour on how this quote-unquote preposterous idea leapt to the forefront of conservative thinking, and it is because you have leading politicians in the Democratic Party and abroad, you have leading media members who are specifically spending every single day talking about the innate evils of Western systems,
It's because grave changes brought about by the social left in the United States have had deep, abiding ramifications for American life, and the left has not only not apologized for those things, but has attempted to accelerate the pace of social change to the point where they are now talking about obliterating the distinctions between male and female completely, so that a male can become a female, a female can become a male, and if you disagree, then you're a bigot.
And Thomas Edsel is sitting there going, why do these conservatives think that people are tearing down institutions?
Why would people think that the left is trying to destroy it?
Because Greta Thunberg had a piece over the weekend in which she talked about how basically the West was a series of colonialist, patriarchal, and racist institutions that needed to be torn out at the root to save us all from drowning, thanks to global warming.
Maybe that.
Maybe because one of the hottest political candidates on the 2020 scene is sitting there nodding while a reverend suggests to him that illegal aliens should be able to cross into the United States on a moral level because Texas used to belong to Mexico.
Maybe that.
It's...
Like, this is not an evidence-free situation.
It's not that the right is simply making things up about what the left thinks.
The left has been fairly clear about what it thinks on a variety of these issues.
And it's particularly true of cultural elites.
Now where Edsel is right is that if you ask mainstream liberals, if you ask most people who are constituents, Constituents, what they think of America, I still think that most quote-unquote mainstream liberals believe that America is a great place.
By polling data, this is true, by the way.
If you ask most mainstream liberals whether they believe that capitalism is a good thing, most will still say yes.
If you ask them whether they believe in the American flag and apple pie and motherhood, they will say yes.
But the elites in the democratic institutions, in the higher echelons of media, in the halls of power, increasingly they don't believe this.
And on Twitter, they certainly don't believe this.
The media elite on Twitter who have created this woke echo chamber for themselves, they don't agree with this.
They don't.
And so people are reacting to the thought leaders, as they should, because the fact is that thought leaders lead.
Those are the people who have outsized media impact.
So Thomas Edsel has this whole piece.
And he suggests that Attorney General William Barr, who warned in a speech at Notre Dame on October 11th that secular liberalism had unleashed, quote, licentiousness, the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good.
He said that there was a glaring incongruity.
How could Barr possibly fail to recognize there is no better example of a man in unbridled pursuit of his own appetites than his boss?
Okay, well, this is not about Trump.
I love how the left tries to turn everything into a referendum on Trump.
Trump is a perfect example of somebody who is a social liberal except on issues like abortion, right?
Donald Trump is not somebody who believes in traditional standards of family, obviously.
This is not somebody who believes in traditional moral boundaries with regard to sexual behavior.
Obviously that's true.
But the right properly sees Trump as a bulwark against the left's wholesale onslaught on these values themselves.
The fact that Trump doesn't abide by them on a personal level, or maybe even care about some of those values on a personal level, does not mean that he is not a tool to stop the left in its ongoing drive to destroy fundamental basic institutions.
But Thomas Edsel says, the forces of secularism press on with even greater militancy that the message that Barr is putting out.
It's part of a renewed drive by social conservatives to demonize liberal elites.
This theme underpins the new book by Mary Eberstadt, a senior research fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute, Primal Screams, How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics.
The alterations of traditional family structure and the social order brought forth by the sexual revolution, Eberstadt writes, have simultaneously rained down destruction on the natural habitat of the human animal, with radical results we are only beginning to understand.
The assault on liberal elites also dominates why liberalism failed by Patrick Deneen, and the words of Robert George, professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton, He says in practice many if not most liberals are as deeply disturbed by family dysfunction as conservatives, but they are not ranting about it.
Instead of promoting the kind of anarchy described by Barr and others on the right, scholars on the left now acknowledge that the sexual revolution and personal autonomy movement had significant costs as well as notable gains.
Well I'm not seeing that from a lot of folks on the political left, are you?
I'm sure there are scholars who have come out and pointed out that, oh yes, it seems that when we completely wrecked the ideal of the family back in the 1950s and 60s and suggested, as third-wave feminists did, that family situations were mini-concentration camps.
That is a direct paraphrase, if there is such a thing.
It's an actual paraphrase of feminist literature.
Now they're coming around to the idea that maybe that was damaging?
Oh, well, good for them.
Good for them.
Except you don't hear that ever.
What you hear from the left is that conservatives, evil Republicans, they want to bring us back to those dysfunctional, leave-it-to-beaver family ideals of the 1950s.
That is the message being promoted.
In a 2015 study, Pew, a liberal think tank, reported the percentage of children under 18 living with two parents in their first marriage fell from 73% in 1960 to 46% in 2014.
Yes, but the fact that Pew reported it, and it's a liberal think tank, does not change the fact that it was liberals who drove that change in the first place!
The hell is Edsel talking about?
And then he says there's the fact that it is well-educated, often secular, liberal elites, so detested by social conservatives, who are reviving the traditional two-parent family, with declining divorce rates and a commitment to combined forces to invest in their children.
Okay, well, there is a correlation between economic success, if this is the point, between economic success and living in a stable two-parent household, and creating stable two-parent households for your children.
That is true.
But Charles Murray wrote a very famous book called Coming Apart, in which he talked about how denizens of sort of rich, liberal, elite areas were preaching values entirely at odds from the lifestyles they were living, and how this was bleeding down to the population.
So Edsel tries to make the case that we all agree that families are good.
We all agree on basic social principles.
And conservatives are crazy to think that the left is pushing on this stuff.
And then, in the same newspaper, they'll talk about how drag queens are going to take down Trump.
How drag queens' story hour is going to fix America.
About how males can be females and females can be males, and we need to reset the standards of what constitutes bigotry in the United States.
About how those who suggest that traditional family is in fact superior to non-traditional family, in terms of both the effects on children and the effects on the spouses, that if you point this out, you're a bigot.
Again, I wish that Edsel's world were the reality.
I wish that Edsel were the leader of the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, he is not.
Unfortunately, he is not.
And we're starting to see, by the way, this breakout into the open in the views that people have of Joe Biden.
So Joe Biden tends to be a guy who's more on the Thomas Edsel side of this conflict.
Joe Biden is running in Iowa, and he's being derided for the fact that he is a quote-unquote boomer.
And it's not going great for him.
So he was campaigning in Iowa.
He's fading in Iowa in the polls.
And there's a famous picture that is now going around of Joe Biden standing next to some dude in Iowa who's completely ignoring him.
He's just at a cafe and Joe Biden is looking down at him.
And the guy's like, I got better things to do, man.
I'm watching TV.
Like you can see he's watching the football game.
He doesn't care that Joe Biden's standing next to him.
He was asked about this.
He said, yeah, Iowa is Republican territory.
Why do I care about Joe Biden?
But the fact is that Joe Biden is being derided by members of his own party For being too old, out of touch, his...
His slogan in Iowa has been no more malarkey.
He's on what he calls his no more malarkey tour, and he's being mocked for all of that because he's supposedly out of touch.
To be in touch means to call Michael Harriot over at The Root and basically apologize for having rational viewpoints on inequality in America, so long as it pleases Michael Harriot.
The unwoke thing to do is to be a fan of Joe Biden, who seems to be a sort of fan of traditional Americanism, even if he has been an agent of, I would say, Radical social change in a variety of areas.
So Biden is perceived as fading, but his popularity among the Democratic base, honestly, I see that sort of as a hopeful sign for the fact that there are a lot of Democrats who don't believe in the more radical agenda of the Democratic Party.
Unfortunately, he is a bad vessel for this movement.
And so you end up with Joe Biden talking about hairy legs on the campaign trail.
And by the way, you know, I sit on the stand and it get hot.
I got a lot of, I got hairy legs that turn that, that, that, that, that, that turn blonde in the sun.
And the kids used to come up and reach in the pool and rub my leg down.
So it was straight and then watch the hair come back up again.
They'd look at it.
So I learned about roaches.
I learned about kids jumping on my lap and I've loved kids jumping on my lap.
Um, that, um, yeah.
It's not going so great for the old guard Democratic Party, but at least Biden's durability as a candidate, that is mostly reliant on the Edsel point of view, which again, I hope wins out.
Okay, now, we are approaching, unfortunately, the end of the show, but I would be remiss if I did not sound off on this insane interview between Molly Jongfast, who has become just insufferable.
If she wasn't already, she's just insufferable.
Alright, let's talk about somebody with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
She has a piece in the Daily Beast today.
It is an interview with Lisa Page.
Now, Lisa Page is best known as the person who is an FBI lawyer schtupping Peter Strzok, and the two of them were texting each other about how much they hated Trump, basically.
Trump has used this as a talking point in his campaign, pointing out that there are members of the so-called Deep State who are out to get him from the very beginning.
Well, she has now come out and done an interview, and Mollie Jung Fast's interview with her is just absolutely fawning.
She says it's not that often that you interview a subject who has no interest in being famous.
But recently, I did just that when I sat down with Lisa Page the week before Thanksgiving in my hotel room in Washington, D.C.
Page, of course, is the former FBI lawyer whose text message exchanges with Agent Peter struck that belittled Donald Trump and expressed fear at his possible victory became international news.
They were hijacked by Trump to fuel his deep state conspiracy.
For nearly two years since her name first made the papers, she's been publicly silent.
I asked her why she was willing to talk now.
Honestly, his demeaning fake orgasm was really the straw that broke the camel's back, she says.
The president called out her name as he acted out an orgasm in front of thousands of people at a Minneapolis rally on October 11th.
Here's what it looked like when Trump supposedly demeaned her by faking an orgasm, which, again, I don't know what your orgasms sound like, but this is a weird take on an orgasm if this is supposedly an orgasm.
Months earlier, Peter struck.
Remember, he and his lover, Lisa Page.
She's going to win.
Ten million to one, she's gonna win, I'm telling you, Peter.
I'm telling you, Peter, she's gonna win.
Peter, oh, I love you so much.
I love you, Peter!
I love you, too, Lisa!
Lisa, I love you.
Lisa!
Lisa!
Oh, God, I love you, Lisa.
And if she doesn't win, Lisa, We've got an insurance policy, Lisa!
We'll get that son of a bitch out.
Okay, so she said that that was what set her off and now she had to be interviewed.
Okay, first of all, if he is faking an orgasm, that's funny.
Sorry, that's funny.
Also, yeah, you don't get to play the victim.
She's playing the victim now.
You don't get to play the victim after you text with your lover.
You're both married.
You're texting with your lover between...
Setting rendezvous points about how you're going to take down one of the candidates for president of the United States.
Yeah, you're not a victim.
You're not a victim.
Sorry, that's not the way this works.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I like and then a thing that I hate.
So, things that I like.
If you have not yet seen Ford vs Ferrari, it's terrific.
It's terrific.
It's a really, really good movie.
Matt Damon and Christian Bale, two of our best actors.
And it is based on the Ford attempt in the mid-60s to win Le Mans, which is the 24-hour race.
The way it works, by the way, it's not one driver for 24 hours.
It is one car that is raced for 24 hours, which means that it has to be a pretty durable piece of machinery.
And the entire movie is basically about Ford attempting to overcome Ferrari and the entrepreneurial and artistic spirit of individuals who are attempting to do something cool, which is really what the movie is about.
You want to talk about movies that are really in praise of capitalism?
This is a movie that is basically in praise of capitalism, even though it tries to make the corporate higher-ups the villains of the piece.
Here is a little bit of the preview.
It's terrific.
Ford hates guys like us because we're different.
We heard he's difficult.
Ken?
No, no, Ken's a puppy dog.
It's awful.
The computer will find it.
Get some Scotch tape and a ball of wool.
What are they doing?
Making your car faster.
And both of them should be nominated for Best Actor.
One of them will probably be nominated for Best Supporting, but both Damon and Bale are terrific in this film.
The film is beautifully directed.
It's a two and a half hour movie, but it feels like an hour and a half movie.
Really, really first rate.
Definitely worth the watch, and a very cool American story, because America is a badass place with fast cars and beautiful women.
It's a fantastic, fantastic country.
It really is.
Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
Okay, so.
There is an entire article in the New York Times about why shade is racist.
Not kidding you.
Shade.
Why?
Because it turns out that in more impoverished areas of the United States, there is less shade.
Yes, because you are packing tenements together.
Very often you have apartment buildings.
It turns out.
In places where people live on top of each other, there's less space.
I know.
Very difficult to understand.
Suburbia.
More trees.
Why?
Because there's more land in suburbia.
You're spending more money to live out there.
That's right.
But apparently, this is a sign of evil inequality.
And in LA, this is a big problem, according to the New York Times.
Quote, But I do love the lack of ironic subtext in these New York Times pieces.
Los Angeles has been governed by Democrats basically my entire lifetime, with the brief exception of Richard Reardon as mayor.
It is an entirely democratic city.
It is also turning into a junk heap.
It has been turning into a junk heap because it is a liberal city.
It is a horribly, horribly governed city.
And so whenever they talk about glittering emblems of inequality, you might want to look to, I don't know, the state and local government, which have been dominated by Democrats basically since I was a teenager.
Anyway, the New York Times says, There's no end to the glittering emblems of privilege in the city.
Teslas clog the freeways.
Affluent families scramble for coveted spots in fancy kindergartens.
And up in the hills of Bel Air, where a sprawling estate just hit the market for a record $225 million, lush trees line the streets, providing welcome relief from punishing heat.
They say the sun has always been in the draw of L.A., but these days, shade is increasingly seen as a precious commodity as the crises of climate change and inequality converge.
See, because they didn't plant a lot of trees in heavily urban areas, which happens to be true of every heavily urban area basically in the United States.
I mean, if you walk down the middle of Midtown Manhattan, not a lot of shade happening on those streets either.
The difference is L.A.
is real hot.
So if you don't want to live here, Good news, there are buses.
Every single day.
But apparently, you're supposed to... The shade is an inequality issue.
Now listen, you wanna plant more trees?
I'm all for it.
You wanna beautify LA?
Enjoy.
Like, I think that that is something that is totally worthwhile.
I'm for more shade.
But the fact that every single thing Can be chalked up to income inequality?
Or the fact that we are supposed to look at every aspect of inequality as though it is a problem with the quote-unquote system?
Yes, inequality has existed.
It will exist.
It will continue to exist.
You know what the difference is now and before?
The fact is that we have air conditioning in Los Angeles.
The fact is that virtually everyone in the United States, including people who are living in poverty, at least has a unit air conditioner.
That's a pretty big change from the 1920s and 1930s.
But the idea here is that we just look at the trees and we know that income inequality has come to LA.
Guess what was not in LA 70 years ago?
Lots of trees in downtown.
It's just... Yes, it is better to be rich than poor.
This has always been true for all of human history.
Pointing out that fact does not recommend a solution, nor does it suggest that the fact that it is better to be rich than poor means that the problem itself is that there are rich people and people who are less rich.
The problem is, how do we get people to rise from poverty?
Not that somebody has a $225 million estate in Bel Air, but how do we make life better for the people in downtown?
Folks in LA keep thinking if they tax that $225 million estate, magically life in downtown becomes better.
That ain't the truth.
By the way, the only thing that's made downtown better in recent history has been public-private projects done with literally tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars in private money in cooperation with the city of Los Angeles.
But everything is an inequality issue.
When you boil down everything to inequality, Basically, the New York Times is a drunk looking for the car keys under the lamp.
The proverbial drunk looking for the car keys under the lamp.
Is that if they're not there, then it must be they don't exist?
You're only looking where the light is?
Well, for them, everything exists in the light of inequality.
And therefore, if you're worried about shade, that's not a problem with bad city planning.
That's not a problem with bad city governance.
That's a problem that there are some rich people and some poor people.
Well done, New York Times.
You've really hit the nail on the head.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours.
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I'm Ben Shapiro.
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A Muslim terrorist goes on a rampage, climate activists admit environmentalism isn't about the environment, and Bernie Sanders calls Christianity un-American.
We examine what all these three stories have in common, that all human conflict is religious.
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