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July 13, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show

57:26

The Closing Of The American Mind | Ep. 1050

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	As the left shifts the Overton window, cancel culture becomes more and more demanding.
	Coronavirus continues to rage across the country as President Trump finally dons a mask.
	And crime surges while AOC blames, you guessed it, capitalism.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.com.
	Don't like the government spying on you?
	Then visit expressvpn.com to stay anonymous.
	Okay, well I hope that you had a safe and happy weekend.
	We're going to get to all the news because there is plenty of it.
	We begin today with a simple observation.
	The push to the left is not going to stop if Joe Biden becomes president.
	I think there are a lot of people who believe that Joe Biden becoming president simply will let everything get back to normal.
	And once Joe Biden is president, and the polls seem to reflect this, and once Joe Biden is president, everybody can go back about their business, all the crazy stops, everybody calms down.
	The left calms down because Trump is no longer president, and the right calms down because Trump is no longer president, and slow old Joe just is kind of there, and everything goes back to quasi-normal.
	I think that this is really missing the boat.
	I think the reason this is missing the boat is because we have had this pattern in American politics for quite a while, where everybody misinterprets an election victory as a mandate for their particular program.
	And to be fair, This is a bipartisan issue.
	So in 2004, after George W. Bush won, and he beat John Kerry, instead of interpreting that as, I just beat John Kerry, he interpreted it as, well, I guess that my program is popular now, so I'm gonna move forward with social security privatization and immigration reform.
	Both of those things, dead on arrival.
	And they died immediately, and within two years, the entire Congress has been lost.
	A 12-year dominant run for Republicans in Congress is gone.
	And the same thing happened for Barack Obama in 2008.
	So after 2008, he wins a sweeping victory over John McCain.
	And his first thought is, you know what I'm going to do?
	I'm going to do Obamacare.
	And the Americans were like, you're going to do what now?
	And in 2010, the Republicans sweep back into power in the House, two years after Obama wins this sweeping victory.
	So if Joe Biden were to win a sweeping victory in 2020, I don't think that he would interpret that as, oh, I guess people just really didn't like Donald Trump.
	Instead, he would interpret that as, well, now it's time for my LBJ FDR type program.
	And here's the reality.
	The American people, when they elect people to government, It's very rare that they are endorsing wholesale all of the big movement-type changes that the politicians think they are endorsing.
	See, what's funny about this is that politicians deep down, they know this.
	Deep down, politicians know that politics is basically about personal appeal and how you appear to voters.
	They understand that politics is very rarely about policy.
	They understand that the policies they espouse are like number four on the list of why people generally vote for them.
	People vote for them because they feel comfortable with them, or because they feel that they're going to maintain the status quo, Or because maybe they're going to trim around the edges.
	But most Americans, generally speaking, are somewhere in the center of politics, right?
	There are people like me who are out on the right, and there are people on the left.
	And we are fighting over sort of the ideological turf.
	And the people in the middle are kind of like, okay, well, if you swing too far out, there's going to be a natural backlash.
	And that's why you've seen American politics swinging wildly like a pendulum.
	Because the politicians keep misinterpreting the movement of the pendulum as an endorsement of their position, instead of interpreting the movement of the pendulum as just a natural movement of the pendulum, meaning the pendulum swings.
	But that pendulum swing does not mean that the ball at the end of the pendulum, or the razor at the end of the pendulum, is going to immediately stop in your corner.
	Right, it's going to swing back because the pendulum really wants to go to zero, right?
	The pendulum really wants to stop down there at the center, but American politics doesn't allow anybody to do that.
	This is why if President Trump had actually come into office and then governed as a centrist, which I would have opposed, he'd probably be relatively popular today, right?
	If he had pushed forward a giant infrastructure package and if he had endorsed a bunch of big government programs, but if at the same time he had also scaled back some of the regulations, right?
	That kind of stuff is kind of popular, which is what Bill Clinton did during his second term, which is why he left office popular despite being impeached.
	So my going inclination here is that Joe Biden, especially if he wins a big sweeping victory, which is what the polls tend to suggest is what's going to happen, at least right now.
	Times could change.
	Things could be different.
	We could come up with a vaccine for coronavirus, which would change everything.
	But barring some sort of cataclysmic event, Trump is not on a winning path here.
	I mean, that's just the simple fact of matters.
	A pullout today showing Biden up in Texas.
	I mean, if Biden wins Texas, then basically he's going to win 40 states.
	And you've got a historic size landslide.
	Like he actually outperforms Barack Obama circa 2008, which is insane.
	Okay.
	That is a possibility at this point.
	If that happens, I don't think Biden is going to interpret that the way he should, which is, I'm dead and people hate Trump, right?
	Which is the actual reason why people would vote for Biden.
	He will interpret that as, this is an endorsement of all the liberal principles I've ever stood for.
	This is an endorsement of my entire career.
	Because contrary to popular opinion, Joe Biden was one of the left-most senators in the United States Senate for nearly his entire career.
	He has sort of these outlier moments where he supported things that were not wildly left, like the criminal reform, the criminal justice reform bill in 1994.
	But that is a rarity, okay?
	Usually he's very far to the left, which is why he was very much aligned with Barack Obama.
	Okay, what does that mean?
	Well, what does that mean?
	It means, number one, that if Biden were to be elected in a landslide, I think the left would declare that this was the end of politics and they would go for broke.
	And by going for broke, they would actually push the American public back against them.
	In other words, you could have a situation where Republicans lose the presidency, lose the Senate, and two years later, the Republicans are back in Congress.
	That is a very significant possibility.
	But the other problem is that with every election, and this is where the right really misses the boat, because the right tends to focus in on politics, I talked about this, been talking about this for weeks, the right tends to focus in on electoral politics, they don't tend to focus in on the cultural underpinnings of politics, and so the deck of the ship keeps tilting to the left.
	I just keep tilting to the left.
	And so even though the pendulum does swing back and forth, if the entire base of the pendulum is sliding to the left, that means that the swing between right and left is happening on a ground that is not even.
	It means that the entire move of the United States is in the wrong direction.
	We're going to get to this in just one second.
	Why the debate matters and why the shift of the debate really, really matters.
	How the Overton window is shifting far to the left.
	We're going to get to that in one moment.
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	Okay, so.
	The shift in American politics, the movement of the entire base of the pendulum to the left is the real worry here.
	Not whatever Joe Biden tries to do in the next couple of years.
	Because if Joe Biden is elected president, God forbid, what he will try to do, probably he goes for a public option in the Senate.
	Maybe he tries to break the filibuster, although I wonder.
	I mean, I do wonder whether Joe Biden goes along with that.
	He's a Senate creature.
	Maybe he does.
	Maybe he does.
	If he does, he's making an awful mistake because the fact is Republicans will eventually retake the Senate and that will come back to haunt him in exactly the same way that getting rid of the judicial filibuster ended up haunting Democrats when Donald Trump became president.
	But whatever changes he makes over the next two years, I think the American public is going to say it's too much and they're going to swing back to the other side.
	They're going to say, listen, we were reacting to Trump.
	We weren't reacting to, we love you.
	We were reacting to, we weren't that big on this Trump guy.
	If Biden is to win a sweeping victory.
	But that doesn't mean that the ground can't shift.
	So I'm not sanguine about this and no one should be sanguine about this.
	There's a piece by a law professor named Amna Akbar, a law professor who studies leftist social movements and apparently teaches at Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University.
	And this person has a piece called The Left is Remaking the World.
	The professor writes, The uprisings in response to the killing of George Floyd are far different from anything that has come before.
	Not just because they may be the largest in our history or that seven weeks in, people are still in the streets, but also because for the last few years, organizers have been thinking boldly.
	They've been pushing demands from defund the police to cancel rent to pass the Green New Deal that would upend the status quo and redistribute power from elites to the working class.
	And now ordinary people are too.
	Social movements have helped spread these demands to a public mobilized by the pandemic and the protests.
	Now, on a practical level, am I afraid that defund the police is going to become like a mainstream democratic talking point?
	No, I don't think that's gonna happen.
	But the generalized anti-police feeling is going to be mainstreamed.
	That is the goal of many of these leftist movements, is not to achieve the policy outcome, but to shift the ground upon which we speak.
	So, there's a general perception that police are good people who are trying to take care of you and your family and your community.
	That was the generalized perception of police.
	And over the last few years, we've seen that image battered.
	For some good reasons and many, many bad reasons.
	Right?
	The videos that come out, obviously it's going to undermine your faith in police officers.
	But, at the same time, we have something like...
	It literally tends to hundreds of millions of interactions between police and American citizens every year.
	There are 800,000 law enforcement agents in the United States.
	It turns out what the polls show is that while people may express distrust with police in general, when asked about their local police, they're very much in favor of their local police.
	The goal of some of these movements is to delegitimize that, to make room for later on, five, 10 years down the line, to make room for some of the more radical policies.
	What radicals understand is that given time, And given energy, they can accomplish anything.
	They need both.
	They need the time and they need the energy.
	The energy is now to shift the cultural debate.
	Get rid of all the cultural totems of being pro-police.
	Get rid of PAW Patrol.
	These things all seem very silly, but in the end, I'm not sure they're so silly.
	I think that's why the left is fighting for them.
	Because if you are fighting to get rid of all of the cultural totems that remind you that the police are the good guys, well then it's a lot easier 10 years from now to say, yeah, you don't think of the police all that well, do you?
	Well, what if we just got rid of them?
	What if we just, right?
	That's it.
	That's a 10-year program.
	It's not something that's going to happen in the next six months.
	The idea of canceling rent.
	It's absurd.
	No one is going to stand in favor of canceling rent right now.
	But if the idea is that landlords are inevitably evil and terrible and are trying to cheat you, and they're very bad people, and then 10 years from now there's another economic collapse, and they're like, you know what?
	We're just going to seize property and nationalize it.
	The more you push the culture to the left, the more you are seeding the ground for the future leftist crops to grow.
	And this is what this law professor understands.
	This professor says these movements are in conversation with one another, cross endorsing demands.
	They expand their grassroots basis.
	This is another.
	It's actually a good point.
	The defund the police group is a small group.
	The past of the Green New Deal group is a small group.
	But then what they do, and you've seen this on college campuses, they unite forces against the broader infrastructure.
	It's not like everybody in the defund the police group gives a damn about the Green New Deal.
	It's not like everybody in the Green New Deal gives a damn about defund the police.
	But when you put them together in opposition to X, X being the system, well, then you can sometimes forge a coalition of power.
	Cancel the rent campaigns have joined the call to defund the police.
	This month, racial climate and economic justice organizations are hosting a four-day crash course on defunding the police.
	Each demand demonstrates a new attitude among leftist social movements.
	They don't want to reduce police violence or sidestep our environmentally unsustainable global supply chain or create grace periods for late rent.
	These are the responses of reformers and policy elites.
	Instead, the people making these demands want a new society.
	Here it is.
	Okay, let's just make a couple of points here.
	If you took that sentence seriously, you'd be talking about the end of civilization, right?
	A break from prisons and the police would mean the purge.
	It means all the criminals go free.
	A break from carbon means basically every fuel that you use right now goes away immediately.
	A break from rent means no one builds another unit ever, right?
	They just stop.
	There's no more real estate development anywhere in the United States, and all the landlords man in their buildings, and then who takes care of the buildings?
	This means the collapse of civilization is what they are calling for, but they're open about that, right?
	They want a new society.
	They want counselors in place of cops, housing for all, a jobs guarantee, which really spells what we really want in the end, is government to take over all the functions of the private market.
	We'll get rid of energy, we'll get rid of police, we'll get rid of prisons, we'll get rid of rent, and then what'll come in?
	A big, friendly government to give you a hug!
	Well, many people find this naive.
	Polls, participation in protests, and growing membership in social movement organizations show these demands are drawing larger and larger parts of the public toward a fundamental critique of the status quo and a radical vision for the future.
	This is correct.
	This is written as a piece of fan mail to this movement.
	But the idea that leftist movements are pushing the entire discussion to the left, that part is correct.
	And they're pushing Joe Biden too.
	And we're gonna get to that in just one second.
	This is the inherent danger of a Joe Biden presidency.
	Not that Joe Biden Does anything radical right off the bat.
	If he does, there will be a backlash.
	Not that Joe Biden is going to be some sort of world-changing candidate.
	I don't think he will be.
	But the simple idea that by electing Joe Biden, you have opened the door to the next step in the social revolution.
	And that Joe Biden not only is not going to shut that door, he's embracing bits and pieces of it on a moment-to-moment basis.
	And he's emboldening this movement to move on to the next step.
	Because remember, this is a progressive movement.
	And when I say progressive, I don't mean like they're making progress.
	What I mean is that they progress step over step.
	It is not the Russian Revolution.
	It is a soft revolution that happens over the course of time.
	And the left understands this.
	This is why they've been pushing consistently for years.
	I use the example of same-sex marriage.
	Because no matter what you think of same-sex marriage, it's an excellent example of how a leftist movement progressed from one idea to another.
	All the while suggesting that they had basically reached the end point in their crusade, right?
	Originally, it was, we just want the right for anybody to sleep with whomever they want, and that's none of your business.
	And most Americans were like, okay, sounds good.
	And then, they were like, well, you know what?
	We want civil unions, so that a gay couple So a gay partner isn't barred from the hospital if their partner is dying in the hospital.
	And most people are like, okay, well, you could deal with a contract or you could just do a contract.
	But I suppose if you want to make that the default, that you can form a civil union and then you can do that and you can will property, then sure, go for it.
	And they said, don't worry, we definitely do not want marriage.
	And then people are like, okay, well, civil unions sound good.
	And they're like, well, no, we want marriage because marriage is exactly the same as a civil union.
	We're just changing the terms and we deserve respect for our relationship.
	And actually, most Americans eventually started to be like, well, you know, I'm not comfortable with equating traditional marriage and same sex marriage, but.
	Your argument that it's not gonna affect my marriage and it doesn't really affect my life, okay, okay.
	And then it was, well, actually, now we're going to require your business to subsidize same-sex marriage, even if you are a religious person.
	We're going to require you to bake a cake for the same-sex wedding.
	And people are like, well, hold up.
	This started at, you just wanted people to be left alone, and now it's your coming into my business and demanding of me that I celebrate your behavior, right?
	This is a pretty grand shift.
	That is the shift that happened.
	This is how the left changes the conversation consistently in order to push forward an agenda that would have been unpalatable to most Americans when the first agenda was put forward, right?
	The gay rights movement begins in the late 1960s.
	It takes 50 years to get to the point where you're demanding that bakers be forced to bake cakes for your same-sex wedding, right?
	That is a long process.
	And again, that's not an argument against any element of that process, although obviously I have personal arguments against same-sex marriage being upheld on a traditional level or on the same level as traditional marriage, and I have serious problems with the idea that anybody should be forced to do anything in their business that they don't want to do as a general matter.
	But the argument I'm making is really not about same-sex marriage.
	It's really about looking at how, when you keep shifting the ground, eventually the policy follows.
	You don't have to shove the rock down the hill.
	All you have to do is increase the slope of the hill.
	That's all you have to do.
	It's like curling.
	All you have to do is sweep away all of the detritus in front of the rock, and then it makes it easier for the rock to sail in.
	And that's exactly what the left is doing right now.
	We're going to get to more of this in just a moment and how Joe Biden, he may not be the one pushing the rock, but he is certainly the guy who is clearing all of the detritus off the ice in preparation for the rock to be put.
	First curling metaphor in the history of political radio.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so Joe Biden is the curling guy, right?
	He's gonna be the person who sweeps away all of the little chips of ice in precisely the correct pattern.
	is that the leftist stone hurled down the ice can land in the target area.
	Matt Viser writing at the Washington Post says, Joe Biden is looking at building 500 million solar panels, slashing US carbon emissions within 15 years, and rapidly expanding a government-sponsored healthcare plan.
	He wants to overhaul the way policing is conducted on American streets and the way success is measured in primary schools.
	Wait a second, doesn't that sound like a very soft version of everything that we just read about in that piece one second ago?
	The overhauling the way policing is conducted, That is the soft corollary of defund the police.
	Building 500 million solar panels, that is the soft corollary of the Green New Deal.
	Slashing U.S.
	carbon emissions.
	That is the soft corollary of getting rid of carbon.
	These are all soft corollaries.
	All he's doing is helping to shift the ground.
	And this is what Democrats understand in a way Republicans do not.
	Even Republicans in power never try to shift the culture.
	Instead, what they attempt to do is shift the politics.
	They'll shift the tax rates or something.
	They'll appoint some good judges.
	Because Republicans still have a fundamental disconnect.
	As to what government has become in American life.
	Government is not merely the promulgator of policy.
	Government is now the promulgator of morality.
	This is what the left has understood.
	They've used government as the substitute for religion and God and social institutions.
	And so whatever government approves, and whatever government actors say, this is why most Americans look to the president for leadership.
	If you ask most Americans at the beginning of the republic, they'd be like, that's weird.
	Like, we need a strong leader because otherwise the country's gonna fall apart.
	We need George Washington.
	But then, basically, I mean, when James Monroe was president, no one ran in opposition.
	The federal government was so weak that people were like, are we really?
	Like, do we care?
	There were some hard-fought presidential campaigns, but the reality is that if you ask most Americans between, like, Let's say Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln to name two of those presidents today.
	You probably couldn't.
	Most Americans can't.
	If you ask most Americans to name two presidents between Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt, they probably could not.
	I'm not just speaking of general American ignorance, I'm talking about the role of American government in American life.
	Now, most Americans are like, I need my president to be a great moral leader.
	I've never thought you need a president to be a great moral leader.
	I'd prefer he be a moral person, but I don't think that you need the president to be the, he's not the person you go to for great moral advice or for a vision of the world.
	But because government has become so powerful, the part of the presidency that involves speaking about the nature of American culture and America herself has become more and more important.
	And the policymaking end has become sort of the trailing after effect.
	The direction in which we move the country ends up being the chief forward-going factor, and then what follows is the policy.
	This is why, for example, the bleed-over from Reagan, really reshifting the conversation, doesn't even happen during the Reagan administration.
	It happens when Bill Clinton has to cut capital gains taxes, and when Bill Clinton has to put in place welfare reform.
	That is the trailing aftereffect of Reagan's reshifting the idea of how government is supposed to work in American life.
	And what we are seeing now is really the trailing after effect of really Barack Obama.
	And we're going to see that continue into Joe Biden.
	And if Joe Biden continues to forward that, you're going to see that continue past Joe Biden, which is why he calls himself a transitional figure.
	Over the past week, according to the Washington Post, the presumptive Democratic nominee has offered the biggest burst of policy proposals since he effectively won the nomination, including a plan to spend $700 billion on American products and research.
	It marks a significant move to the left, from where Biden and his party were only recently, on everything from climate to guns to healthcare and policing, and reflects a fundamental shift in the political landscape.
	Why?
	Well, because number one, Biden thinks he's going to win big, and so he can get very, very progressive.
	According to the Washington Post, it's a remarkable turn for a candidate who was once defined by incrementalism, but is now attempting to show voters how he'd grappled with tens of thousands of Americans dying from a global pandemic, an economy in tatters, and a country wracked by a reckoning over racism.
	And so he's moving far to the left, and he's doing so very quickly.
	Now, again, that bears political danger for the Democratic Party in the near term, but it does mean that everything is being shoved to the left.
	It also explains why, on the show, I spend a lot of time focusing on what I call the radical left, because I think the radical left becomes the mainstream Democratic Party within about five years.
	Basically, it's just a lead time to either stop the radical left now, or that is going to be the mainstream Democratic Party that you are fighting within the next five years to a decade.
	That is the basic rule.
	Whatever starts on the radical left ends up in the mainstream.
	I mean, it really is quite fascinating how this works, this sort of bleed over.
	And so when we look at the attempt to quash free speech, for example, when we looked at the defund the police movement, we look at the cancel culture, and we realize that the unofficial cancel culture, which is becoming more and more prevalent in America, eventually is going to find its way into the halls of democratic power and then into government.
	That's when things start to get incredibly, incredibly scary.
	Because there you're not just talking about expanding the size and scope of government, you're talking about encroachment on fundamental freedoms.
	In other words, I don't think that simple social pressure is going to be sufficient for people on the left.
	I think if people on the left had their way, they would be encoding hate speech laws in American law today.
	And I think within five to ten years, that will be the common sense position of the Democratic Party.
	I think within two election cycles, you're going to see the Democratic Party openly promulgating directives at hate speech, and hoping to appoint enough justices to overturn the First Amendment.
	I think right now you'd have the support of at least two.
	I think that Ginsburg and probably Sotomayor would support the idea of encroaching on free speech on behalf of quote-unquote hate speech.
	I think that's fairly clear.
	And over the years, I think that'll become a more and more common position in the Democratic Party.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so where does this cross streams with the cancel culture?
	Well, this is the most powerful cultural movement on the left right now is the cancel culture.
	If you say the wrong thing, we are going to come after you with everything we've got.
	And principles of freedom and justice require that freedom and justice themselves be put to the side.
	So last week we discussed a letter that was printed in Harper's Weekly.
	By 153 left and center left individuals, old school liberals, people who disagree with me on politics, but also agree that freedom of speech is pretty important and don't like cancel culture very much.
	And we're talking about people I think are just atrocious in their politics, people like Noam Chomsky.
	But we're also talking about people who are sort of old school, classical liberals like Francis Fukuyama.
	There are a bunch of people on that list.
	Well, a counter came out.
	The counter came out from a bevy of cancel culture mavens who are very upset, very, very upset that people would speak out against cancel culture.
	And it's worth looking at their point of view simply because, number one, a lot of these people are in positions of power, and number two, because this will be the dominant position inside the Democratic Party within five years.
	This will be the dominant position inside the Democratic Party in five years.
	Now, I will say, it is quite amusing.
	This letter, this response letter, is signed by a bunch of people.
	Like, some names that you would know, many people who you wouldn't necessarily know.
	Many of the people who have signed, signed it unsigned.
	So they say, cancel culture doesn't exist, right?
	Cancel culture doesn't exist.
	Also, I'm not going to sign my name to this letter because I'm afraid that I will be canceled or fired, right?
	So apparently, cancel culture does not exist except that they're afraid of it.
	Anyway, their letter says, a more specific letter on justice and open debate.
	They say the signatories to that original letter, many of them white, wealthy, and endowed with massive platforms, argue they are afraid of being silenced, that so-called cancel culture is out of control, that they fear for their jobs and free exchange of ideas, even as they speak from one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.
	This is a very common argument, is that if you are concerned that there's a group of people who trot around going after your advertisers if you're on TV, or there's a group of people who will go to your boss if they disagree with what you say, and if you are powerful, if you're in a powerful position, but you're afraid of what might happen, Well, obviously you're powerful right now, so why are you afraid of what might happen?
	Hmm?
	Hmm?
	And then after you've been cancelled, then they say, well, cancel culture didn't really exist.
	That was just the voice of the people.
	The letter, according to this response letter, was spearheaded by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a black writer who believes that racism at once persists and is also capable of being transcended, especially at the interpersonal level.
	Since the letter was published, some commentators have used Williams' presence and the presence of other non-white writers to argue the letter presents a selection of diverse voices.
	But they missed the point.
	The irony of the piece is that nowhere in it do the signatories mention how marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.
	So in other words, we should be able to cancel people because we believe the system itself results in injustice.
	This is the Robin DiAngelo view of racism again.
	Any system that results in a balance, a racial mix we don't like at the end of it, the system is to blame.
	And thus the system must be torn down.
	And if you are complicit in the system, you're a racist and it doesn't matter if you're black like Thomas Chatterton Williams.
	The content of the letter does not deal with the problem of power.
	Who has it and who does not?
	Harper's is a prestigious institution backed by money and influence.
	Harper's has decided to bestow its platform, not to marginalize people, but to people who already have large followings and plenty of opportunities to make their views heard.
	So, basically, you're simultaneously complaining that these people are powerful and therefore they shouldn't be able to complain, and you're complaining you don't have enough power and that people should give you power.
	It seems like mainly your viewpoint is a power viewpoint.
	It seems like your viewpoint is driven by a desire for other people's power that you have not yourself earned.
	This entire letter is about how free speech is really about power and how truly the attempt to cancel speech, the attempt to crack down on people, that is actually a force for good.
	That force for good is making the world a better place.
	They say, it is impossible to see how signatories to this letter are contributing to the most vital causes of our time during this moment of widespread reckoning with oppressive social systems.
	In other words, we disagree with you and we don't like you, so they shouldn't have their letter in Harper's Weekly.
	Also, cancel culture doesn't exist and it's good.
	Right, so this is the viewpoint increasingly of groups on the left.
	The good news about that letter is at least now we have a long list of people who believe cancel culture is good.
	But how does this manifest in real life?
	Well, it manifests as things like boycotting Goya.
	Right, so Goya is this major Latino-owned company.
	And now it's subject of an online attempt to boycott, with NBC News cheering along the progress.
	This is what the media do.
	Again, the media love these boycotts because it creates a story where there is none.
	Do you really think that Goya is going to lose enough of its profit to sustain it for an hour?
	The answer is no.
	There's no widespread boycott of Goya.
	It's not a thing.
	Every time people say there's a widespread boycott, it never really materializes.
	It materializes for like a day.
	You can do it to a small business, right?
	Because if you remove a week of income from a small business, it really hurts the small business.
	But if you remove like A million bucks from the income of Goya?
	They just call that a rounding error.
	Anyway, NBC News says, Goya's CEO's Trump's comment led Latinos to call for a boycott that Goya was surprised says a lot.
	By Julio Ricardo Varela.
	Goya Food CEO Bob Yunanou might be regretting his Rose Garden endorsement of a president he called a blessed leader.
	His remarks at a Thursday White House event where President Trump hosted a group of Hispanic supporters came at a time when U.S.
	Latinos are facing a disproportionate effect from COVID-19 and experiencing a 14.5% unemployment rate.
	He certainly struck a chord with Latinos, but not the one he or Trump hoped for.
	Instead, his comments were met with massive calls to boycott Goya, the iconic mostly East Coast Latino food brand that has been both a staple and a nutritional pariah for the country's largest non-white population.
	Well, maybe because he didn't think he was risking his company's future when he said something nice about the sitting president of the United States.
	Maybe that.
	Maybe he didn't realize that you guys were such jackasses.
	head of one of the richest Spanish-American families would be willing to risk his company's future by siding with this president of all presidents.
	Well, maybe because he didn't think he was risking his company's future when he said something nice about the sitting presidents of the United States.
	Maybe that.
	Maybe he didn't realize that you guys were such jackasses.
	Maybe it's that simple.
	But the boycott of Goya is merely the first step, right?
	The cancel culture is quite real.
	The attempt to boycott people based on the great evil of a man said a nice thing about the president of the United States is utterly insane, but it is quite real.
	It is not the only example these days.
	There are many examples these days, and it will lead to a predictable effect.
	As I say, everything that begins in the culture ends in the government when it comes to the left.
	Everything that begins in the culture ends in the government.
	That, because there's a simple rule on the left, as my friend Eric Erickson has said, That if something is tolerated, eventually it will be mandated.
	According to the left, if something is to be tolerated eventually, the government will make it mandatory.
	And everything that is not tolerated will be banned.
	There is no third category called, we disagree but we leave you alone, in the world of the left.
	It just doesn't exist.
	Like they're forced to right now because of institutional structures, but that's why they're thrashing up against the glass of the institutional structures, trying to break out of that barrier.
	In one second, we'll get to more of this, and then we'll get to the COVID updates and everything else.
	First, let us talk about a simple fact.
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	All righty, we're gonna get to more on the cancel culture and then we'll get to your COVID-19 updates.
	President Trump donning a mask and all of that.
	First, my new book, How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
	It is on sale next Tuesday, July 21st.
	Long awaited, long sought after.
	6 p.m.
	Eastern, 3 p.m.
	Pacific.
	We will be doing a virtual live signing event the day of release.
	With your purchase of a signed copy, you can write in a question which may be read and answered as I sign your book live on the air.
	It's a magical experience.
	You can pre-order your signed copy and write in your question at dailywire.com slash Ben.
	The book covers two fundamentally different visions of America that are currently on the table.
	One is the disintegrationist vision, a vision of America that says that America's history is evil, that America's philosophy is evil, and that America's culture of rights is actually just cover for brutal power hierarchies.
	Sound kind of relevant?
	Yeah, because it is.
	It's everything that's going on right now.
	That is one vision of the culture.
	That is one vision of America.
	Narratives like the Robin DiAngelo White Fragility or the New York Times 1619 Project.
	Those are the disintegrationists.
	People who wish to see the country come apart, to fray and break, or for 51% of the population to simply dominate the other 49% of the population.
	Then, there's a unionist vision of America.
	That is a traditionalist vision of America that says America's history is flawed but great.
	It says that America's philosophy is unparalleled in the annals of human history.
	That says that America's culture of rights is the fundamental framework within which we should all operate.
	Right?
	You need to be a unionist, not a disintegrationist.
	The disintegrations are using the cancel culture, they're deleting or silencing people they don't like.
	The book not only explicates everything that is going on here in, I think, a pretty thorough and deep fashion, it also debunks it in a way that you can use to argue with friends and family and arm yourself against these bad ideas.
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	Details how the disintegrationists have gained so much cultural ground so quickly and offers a penetrating view of our culture at a time in our history when it is absolutely vital that you be familiar with it.
	Again, that's dailywire.com slash Ben to order your signed copy today and join my live signing on Tuesday, July 21st.
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	you're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So one of the people who signed that anti-cancel culture letter is now they're trying to cancel him.
	So obviously cancel culture doesn't exist.
	The Linguistic Society of America is trying to come after Harvard linguist Steven Pinker.
	I've talked about Steven Pinker on the show before, apparently because he said very, very bad things.
	600 people signed a letter trying to kick him off the Distinguished Fellows list from the Linguistic Society of America.
	What exactly did he do?
	Well, he said, for example, that data matters, right?
	He actually declared that police don't shoot blacks disproportionately.
	They want to kick him off the Linguistic Society of America for pointing out that police do not shoot blacks disproportionately, which is 100% true.
	Also, Pinker is blamed for referencing a 2017 New York Times op-ed suggesting a way to reduce the terrible toll of killings by police.
	Pinker tweeted, police kill too many people, black and white.
	Focus on race distracts from solving problems as we do with plane crashes.
	Which, again, is like, obvious, isn't it?
	Apparently, that's very bad.
	It's like saying all lives matter.
	Also, Pinker is very bad.
	Because, in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Why Violence Has Declined, he noted that in 1984, Bernie Getz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car.
	Apparently, because he said mild-mannered, this was Pinker's tendency to downplay very real violence, and so they attempted to get him kicked off of the Linguistic Society of America.
	Now, Pinker's pretty powerful, and so he didn't go down easily.
	The LSA executive committee issued a letter to Pinker affirming the group is committed to intellectual freedom.
	But again, the assault simply does not stop.
	And here's the thing, it's not going to stop in the end until it becomes legislation.
	And that is the end goal.
	There's a wild, I mean, the assault is so crazy, the cancel culture assault.
	This is my favorite example.
	Penn State, which is a college where I spoke, and there was nearly a riot when I spoke there.
	This was back in 2016, I believe.
	It got crazy.
	It might have been 2017.
	It was wild.
	There were protesters banging on the doors and trying to disrupt.
	Police were insufficient.
	It was very crazy.
	Okay, Penn State Liberal Arts, they put out a tweet.
	That said, dear students, each of you belongs here.
	And then it was a list of various groups of students.
	Dear black students, your lives matter.
	Dear Muslim and Jewish students, your beliefs are valued here.
	Dear conservative students, your viewpoints are important.
	Okay, they deleted it.
	They deleted the tweet because it said, dear conservative students, your viewpoints are important.
	Okay, but here's the best example of where things are going.
	And I think that this is where things are going.
	And you may think this is okay.
	If you think this is okay, then I would suggest that you really need to reconsider the values you prioritize.
	Okay, so here's the story.
	This is out of Great Britain.
	West Midlands police have arrested a 12-year-old boy after Crystal Palace winger Wilfried Zaha received racist messages on social media ahead of the club's Premier League clash with Aston Villa on Sunday.
	Zaha27 shared the obscene messages on Twitter before the match, and Via said they would investigate the incident with police.
	After VIA's 2-0 win over Palace, a police statement read, We were alerted to a series of racist messages sent to a footballer today, and after looking into them and conducting checks, we have arrested a boy.
	The 12-year-old from Solihull has been taken into custody.
	Thanks to everyone who raised it, racism won't be tolerated.
	Before the match, the Palace manager Roy Hodgson was asked about the incident and told Sky Sports, It is very saddening on the day.
	There is no excuse at all.
	that a player wakes up to this cowardly and despicable abuse.
	I think it is right that Wolf made people aware of it.
	I don't think it's something you should have kept quiet about.
	I think it's very good that our club, Aston Villa and the Premier League are doing everything they can to find out who the despicable individual is.
	And one can only hope they will get identified and they will get called to account and they will pay for these actions.
	There is literally no excuse.
	There is no excuse at all.
	Before kickoff, both sets of players took a knee to support the Black Lives Matter movement.
	Okay, the kid who was arrested is 12. 12 12 years old, for sending hate tweets.
	Okay, now, hate tweets are bad.
	They're ugly.
	They're yucky.
	In fact, Twitter attempts to take down those tweets, right?
	That's part of their policy.
	If you believe that 12-year-old boys should be arrested for sending nasty, racist tweets to adult soccer players, I've got some questions to you about your priorities.
	Should somebody take the kid aside and say, you've done something wrong?
	Of course.
	Should that be how we normally, I mean, that's normally how we handle things, right?
	As adults, that's how we handle things.
	If we treated, what's amazing is, if we treated each other like people we actually like, the world would be a much more reasonable place.
	If somebody you knew and were acquainted with said something kind of nasty to you, Wouldn't you take them aside and be like, you know, dude, that was really a terrible thing to say, and I would appreciate it if you didn't say it again like that?
	Or would you call the cops?
	Using the cops as the great moral arbiter, the great Zeus thundering lightning from the sky, right?
	Firing lightning at 12-year-old boys.
	If that's the direction that we're going to move as a culture, then that's a very bad thing.
	So I know there are people on the left today and they're saying, listen, we're not calling for legislation.
	There's a difference between cancel culture and government action.
	I totally agree.
	There is a difference between cancel culture and government action.
	I just don't trust you that you're going to limit this.
	I don't.
	I don't trust it.
	First of all, I think that your application of cancel culture is a moral negative.
	I think it is ugly that you are attempting to boycott a company because the head of that company supports a political cause you don't like.
	I buy from tons of companies I don't like.
	Right now, on my feet, are Nike shoes that I bought a couple of years ago.
	I disagreed with the political priorities of Nike.
	I still disagree with the political priorities of Nike.
	Guess what?
	I like their shoes.
	And I frankly don't care the political priorities of Nike.
	And that holds true about all of my corporate purchases.
	I mean, I'm working right now on an Apple computer.
	Do I agree with everything the Apple leadership says about the world?
	Of course not.
	You think that I agree with Tim Cook on virtually anything?
	Of course not.
	But would that be a rationale for boycotting Apple, per se?
	I think pretty bad for the country when this becomes the way that we do business as a general rule.
	This is what the cancel culture wants, but more than that, I don't think the cancel culture stops with this.
	I think the cancel culture goes directly in the position, toward the position held by Canada or the UK, that free speech is not an absolute, and that free speech should instead be essentially quashed by government.
	I think that we are moving very quickly toward what just happened in the UK.
	And that should scare the hell out of anybody who believes that rights are a fundamental thing and pre-exist government to begin.
	Okay, meanwhile, on the COVID front, We have seen this extraordinary uptick in the number of positive cases in states across the country.
	It is not merely happening in Florida.
	It has also happened in Texas.
	It has also happened in California.
	It seems to be largely dependent, again, on how much time people are spending with air conditioning.
	The reason I point this out is because Colorado opened up at the same time as Georgia.
	Colorado has seen a 41% decrease in day-over-day Diagnoses of COVID-19, and that's because right now the weather in Colorado is pretty temperate, so people are outdoors a lot.
	They're not spending a lot of time in indoor spaces, you know, in Florida, in Texas, in California.
	In California, it was like 106 degrees yesterday.
	So people are spending time in indoor spaces a lot.
	My favorite thing by the media, by the way, my favorite aspect of dishonesty by the media is this new pitch for New York.
	This I find really incredible.
	Jennifer Rubin had the incredible gall to suggest that New York handled this thing right.
	I am not kidding.
	She said, New York City reports zero COVID-19 deaths for the first time since pandemic hit.
	This is what competent government can accomplish.
	The death rate on Alderaan went down to zero.
	Like two days after Admiral Tarkin ordered the complete destruction of Alderaan, no one died two days after that.
	Because they were already dead because Alderaan no longer existed, okay guys?
	The reason you haven't seen an uptick in New York is because it killed everyone, okay?
	Killed 33,000 people in New York.
	That is not a great leadership moment.
	By the way, if you actually take the chart of New York, what you will see in the chart of New York's death is exactly the chart that they told us we were supposed to avoid.
	Right?
	If you look at, you remember the Bend the Curve chart?
	Remember that?
	The Flatten the Curve chart?
	Remember that one?
	It had the very big, tall bell curve, and it said, this one's bad because it's going to overwhelm the hospital system.
	And then it said, and if you do this right, then what you will get is a less steep curve.
	Same area under the curve.
	Okay, that less steep curve is looking a lot more like Texas or Florida or California than it looks like New York.
	New York looks like the bad curve.
	But we're being told that now, because it's amazing, the momentary thinking on COVID-19 is truly incredible.
	And people were saying this about Sweden.
	Well, look at Sweden.
	Sweden's having a lot of death.
	And I kept saying, guys, you need to wait some months.
	You need to wait some months, right?
	Because Sweden is going to go through it.
	And then on the other end, there's not going to be a second wave.
	Because Sweden will have already gone through it.
	And that's exactly what you're seeing.
	You're seeing rising caseload in Sweden, and the death toll continues to decline in Sweden, because it's already run through the population.
	And you're seeing that in New York as well.
	But at the time, everybody was like, look at Sweden's numbers today.
	I was like, no, you gotta wait.
	And now, when it comes to New York, they're like, look at the numbers now.
	You should have short-term memory loss, and you should forget what happened two months ago when it was completely overrunning NYU Langone.
	Oh my God, I can't keep up with the machinations that are committed in order to drive forward narrative about democratic competence here.
	It's pretty incredible.
	Okay, with all of that said, with the cases spiking and with the death rate seeming to rise in a lot of these states, there've been over a hundred deaths in places like Florida and Texas the last few days, President Trump finally put on a mask.
	Here is what that sounded like.
	Okay, so President Trump is wearing a mask looking, as he likes to say, like the Lone Ranger.
	So that's very exciting stuff.
	Okay, and again, he should have done this a while ago, I think.
	I think that the...
	The president, because he's a stubborn dude, he had a moment there where he really could have taken the leadership position on all of this, when he could have basically said to the Democrats, you guys are out there saying that everybody should just be able to protest as they see fit, and it'll just be fun and games.
	And I'm taking this thing real seriously.
	Instead, he kind of didn't.
	He kept downplaying it.
	He wants it to go away.
	And so he wished a world where it had just gone away, kind of.
	Well, now he finally put on the mask.
	This became a talking point for the left.
	Meanwhile, Anthony Fauci has been sounding off, suggesting that we might need renewed lockdowns from time to time.
	Saying that we definitely can't reopen the schools.
	By the way, quick note here.
	Again, on a data-driven point, people keep saying that Florida had this biggest single-day increase in positives yesterday.
	They had like 15,000 positive cases.
	The single biggest test day in history yesterday.
	So the actual positivity rate in Florida went down slightly over last week.
	So they're testing a lot more.
	So that increase in absolute number of tests, that one actually is due to the increase in how many tests are done, right?
	So the increased number of people who have it is not pure testing, but the increased identification of people who have it is at least partly testing, right?
	It's not all testing, but it is partly testing.
	And yesterday is a good example of that.
	Louisiana continues to be savaged.
	Louisiana has a Democratic governor, so we don't talk about Louisiana.
	But Louisiana has the highest case rate per capita in the nation at this point.
	Pittsburgh is experiencing a major surge, according to the New York Times.
	Again, Pittsburgh is in Pennsylvania.
	Pennsylvania is largely governed by Democrats, has a Democratic governor.
	Therefore, we're not supposed to talk about Pittsburgh too much.
	But big battle has broken out over Anthony Fauci, who's been a little bit sidelined here, according to the Washington Post.
	For months, Fauci has played a lead role in America's coronavirus pandemic.
	But as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttling some of his planned TV appearances and largely keeping him out of the Oval Office for more than a month, even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.
	In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has found himself in the president's crosshairs during a Fox News interview.
	Trump said Fauci is a nice man, but he's made a lot of mistakes.
	When Greta Van Susteren asked him last week about Fauci's assessment the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly, I disagree with him.
	So this sort of conflict is exactly, Fauci is a new resistance hero, because obviously, even though Trump basically made Fauci famous, right?
	Nobody knew Fauci's name, unless you were a real maven of this stuff, until the last six months or so.
	Now Trump's the bad guy for attacking Fauci and all of that.
	Fauci has gotten his message out.
	He said, as a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don't think you can say we're doing great.
	I mean, we're just not.
	A White House official released a statement saying, several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things, and then included a lengthy list of the scientists' comments from earlier in the outbreak.
	And by the way, this is not unfair.
	Okay, it really isn't.
	I know that it's, here's how you know it's not unfair.
	People will say Trump was totally wrong about the masks in March.
	Like, this has become the talking point.
	So has Fauci.
	Like, pointing out that scientists have basically not had a handle on this thing from the beginning and continue to not have a handle on this thing is not actually Wrong.
	I know you're supposed to basically say that Fauci is the godhead at this point, but as I pointed out, I think he's a man trying to do his best in a situation where he has not a ton of leverage and also a situation where nobody really knows anything.
	I mean, the most incredible thing about this virus is that we are now Four months into this pandemic, everybody's been partially locked down.
	It could go on forever, basically.
	And nobody knows anything.
	We still don't know if kids are really transmitting it.
	We don't know if the asymptomatic transmit it.
	We don't know whether it's fully airborne or whether it is mostly droplets.
	We don't know anything, right?
	That's the part that's crazy.
	And so Fauci's opinion is as good as yours, maybe better than yours, but it's no better than John Ioannidis over at Stanford.
	There's no reason that Scott Atlas knows tons less than Dr. Fauci about this stuff.
	But if you quote anybody who contradicts Fauci, Fauci because he's repeating points that the left likes right now that we should shut down schools and that we are in a bad position and that bad governance has been responsible for all of this.
	Again, other countries are experiencing a spike too.
	Israel had to shut down again.
	Israel opened up the schools.
	There was a super spreader event at a school and they had to shut down again.
	Admiral Girard, who is one of the White House's top officials on this stuff, he's really heading the response effort, he says, listen, Fauci's not 100% right.
	I respect Dr. Fauci a lot, but Dr. Fauci is not 100% right, and he also doesn't necessarily, and he admits that, have the whole national interest in mind.
	He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.
	But let me just say, there is absolutely open discourse, I feel, Absolutely free saying anything to the vice president within those rooms.
	The vice president, I know, briefs the president on a daily basis, so nobody feels like anything is held back.
	We all take this as a serious crisis.
	It's got to be science driving the policy, and that's the way it is.
	You know, science should be driving the debate, but politics is obviously driving the debate.
	How do you know this?
	Because in all the conversation, for example, about reopening schools, it's become incredibly political.
	Like, I think there's a good argument to be made that schools should open.
	I think that there's an okay, not fantastic argument to be made that the schools should remain somewhat closed.
	I can hear these arguments on any side.
	I really don't see them as political.
	But you can see how this is breaking down purely politically because Trump says something and immediately he's like a catalyst added to some sort of bizarre concoction where both the elements in the concoction are polarized because the catalyst has been added.
	And you've seen this on schools.
	Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
	Alrighty, so remember how crime was not going to skyrocket when we got rid of the cops?
	Remember that?
	That was funny.
	That was really super funny.
	I bring you the genius of AOC.
	Okay, so AOC was asked about why crime is continuing to surge in places like New York.
	And it is continuing to surge.
	So the New York Post reports, New York's plague of gun crime continued this weekend with 15 people shot in the same number of hours Since midday on Saturday, police sources told the Post of 15 shootings in 15 hours in New York City.
	The shootings, including a 21-year-old man left fighting for his life after being shot in the head while sitting in a car in Sheepshead Bay early on Sunday, were more in one day than the whole of the same week last year, according to sources.
	They kept 43 shootings so far this week, more than triple last year's tally of 13 for the same period.
	I'd gone to bed early, and the next thing I knew, I heard two pops out my window that sounded just like fireworks, said a neighbor.
	who identified herself as Lucy of the Sheepshead Bay shooting.
	I heard plenty of fireworks around here a week ago.
	I didn't think anything of it until I heard someone screaming.
	And then there were police lights and ambulance lights.
	So there are tons and tons of shootings over the weekend.
	Commissioner Dermot Shea has blamed bail reform and prisoner releases over the coronavirus pandemic for the alarming rise in gun crime, which has brought increased criticism for Mayor Bill de Blasio.
	Criminal justice experts say the cops should focus on the flow of illegal guns into the city instead of just playing the blame game.
	So you're never supposed to blame the politicians for cutting the cops.
	You're supposed to blame the cops for not doing a better job policing while you're cutting the cops.
	By the way, crime is surging around the country.
	It is not just in New York City.
	According to the Wall Street Journal, in Milwaukee, homicides are up 37% so far this year, on pace to break the record of 167 in 1991, which included 16 murders by Jeffrey Dahmer.
	Homicides so far this year in Chicago are ahead of the pace in 2016.
	That was the city's highest tally since 1996.
	In New York and LA, killings this year are up 23% and 11.6%.
	In Kansas City, Missouri, they've recorded 99 killings since January, far outpacing any record for the first six months of the year.
	Community groups acknowledge the crime increase, but say more aggressive policing to combat it shouldn't come at the expense of enacting broader reform.
	Oh, is that what's happening right now?
	It is not a shock that as you continue to slash police budgets and signal to criminals that they can basically get away with it, and that if a cop attempts to defend a citizen, that that cop may be hauled up for arrest.
	That's going to be a bit of a problem.
	City leaders and law enforcement officials say the months of lockdown, rising unemployment, more guns on the street, and the fallout from mass protests over the George Floyd killing helped create conditions for more violence.
	At the same time, law enforcement officials say they are weighing the risks of aggressively enforcing the law, concerned that a backlash from activists, protesters, and residents could trigger attacks on police or a replay of the riots and looting that marked some of the earlier protests.
	In some cases, officials say police are backing away from some kinds of petty crime arrests that give them a higher profile on the street, hoping to quell tensions, which, of course, is exactly the wrong tactic.
	It's exactly the wrong tactic.
	Broken windows policing, which was utilized in New York City in the aftermath of the great crime wave beginning in the 60s and stretching all the way to the early 1990s, Broken window policing was the idea that you have to stop ignoring the people who are jumping turnstiles.
	You actually have to start policing small-level crime, because if you don't, then people will engage in larger-scale crime.
	Police departments all over the country have decided they're no longer going to do this.
	And so, naturally, you're seeing more violence.
	And that violence is becoming politicized.
	There's an awful, awful case out of Indianapolis.
	According to the Post Millennial, a 24-year-old named Jessica Doty was fatally shot early on Sunday, allegedly following an argument with supporters of Black Lives Matter.
	The victim's family said the dispute was sparked by an argument involving Black Lives Matter and language, according to Fox 59.
	The two sides parted ways before witnesses claimed the perpetrator opened fire from a bridge nearby and then ran away.
	The victim's father, Robert J. Doty, told Cassandra Fairbanks his daughter told the Black Lives Matter supporters that, quote, Apparently, the victim's fiancé, José Romero, said, Two people were shot in the same area one week earlier, including a 14-year-old.
	But they were sitting on St. Clair waiting for us to come under the bridge, and that's when she got shot.
	She had a three-year-old son, apparently.
	Two people were shot in the same area one week earlier, including a 14-year-old.
	That 14-year-old died in what the authorities deems an attempted armed robbery.
	So good things happening all across the country on crime.
	Thankfully, we have explanations, complex explanations for what's happening from geniuses, the likes of AOC.
	Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, obviously one of the very freshest of the faces, very fresh, very face.
	Here she was explaining the representative from New York exactly why people are shooting each other in mass numbers in New York.
	So why is this uptick in crime happening?
	Well, let's think about it.
	Do we think this has to do with the fact that there's record unemployment in the United States right now?
	The fact that people are at a level of economic desperation that we have not seen since the Great Recession.
	Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren't paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent.
	And so they go out and they need to feed their child and they don't have money.
	So you maybe have to, they're put in a position where they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night.
	Um, so, shoplifting is not the problem right now.
	I'm just gonna point that out.
	Larceny is actually down in New York City.
	Shoplifting is not the actual issue.
	Shooting people in minority areas is not a response to, I'm hungry.
	Like, that's not the way this works.
	It's not, okay, I'm missing bread tonight.
	Like, listen, I understand the argument that poverty drives crime.
	I do.
	I get it.
	But, let me tell you what poverty generally does not have to drive.
	Murdering other people who are impoverished.
	That is not correct.
	Okay, if you want to say that Jean Valjean has to steal the loaf of bread because he's hungry, all right, that's not what you're seeing.
	You're seeing people shoplift a TV because they're what?
	Hungry for a TV?
	You're seeing people shoot each other in huge numbers in New York City.
	Because why?
	Because of the uptick in COVID or something?
	I'm gonna go, this is a pretty easy answer.
	You withdraw the police from high crime areas and the crime goes back up.
	Very, very easy.
	But according to AOC, it's all because of bread lines.
	It's all because of bread.
	People aren't shooting bread.
	They're not.
	Okay, they're not shooting the bread.
	And they're not stealing the bread.
	That's not what's going on here.
	They're not going down to the local grocery store and just picking up a bag of veggies and then holding up the counter, Clark.
	That's not what's happening.
	People are being shot in mass numbers because you decided to remove the police.
	This is all genius, genius, galaxy brain kind of stuff here.
	Okay, what you're talking about here is just people who are acting like criminals.
	And I think it's fair to call a person who shoots a child a thug.
	I think that's fair, regardless of race.
	So if you do that, I have very little sympathy for the idea that you are doing this out of sheer desperation because you lost your job.
	I just, I don't think that that's the case.
	I don't think anybody goes and loses their job in the United States.
	You know what?
	I'm gonna go shoot the 13-year-old on the next block.
	That seems like a big miss there.
	But again, when your agenda is to tear down the entire system, then you go with it, I guess.
	Then you go with it.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content.
	Otherwise, we'll see you here tomorrow.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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