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Jan. 19, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show

49:51

Joe Biden Isn’t Healing Anything | Ep. 1176

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	As Joe Biden prepares for his inauguration, Democrats push radical policies and revenge.
	And we ask whether a worse authoritarian threat is around the corner.
	I'm Ben Shapiro.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
	Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
	Visit expressvpn.com slash Ben.
	We'll get to all of the news.
	This is, in fact, President Trump's last day in office.
	It is the day before Joe Biden's inauguration as president of the United States.
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	So, as we say, tomorrow is the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States.
	The inauguration is going to be kind of a weird ceremony because obviously the Washington Mall is completely blocked off.
	They've put out some 200,000 flags on the National Mall.
	They're supposed to represent people who would gather for the inauguration.
	They've also put up 56 pillars of light that are supposed to represent America's states and territories.
	And, you know, it's going to be an odd sight.
	Some of this is because of the pandemic.
	So Joe Biden had already announced it was going to be a very restrictive crowd, even if there had not been safety concerns about the inauguration.
	There are safety concerns about the inauguration.
	So there is heavy military presence in Washington, D.C.
	There is barbed wire that is blocking people off from places like the Capitol building, as well as the White House.
	We know that Joe Biden's inauguration is going to return the cavalcade of stars.
	We can see that one coming.
	So the cavalcade of stars for Joe Biden's inauguration, they are back because of course, Hollywood is fully in the tank for Joe Biden, as they always have been.
	This is supposed to include some of the people that we have come to know.
	And expect people like Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez and Bruce Springsteen, they will all be back.
	And the era of good feelings of Obama will return, which means the media is just not going to ask any tough questions of Joe Biden for the next four years.
	So they've earned their vacation, don't you think?
	I mean, they really just spent the last four years being as vicious and brutal to Trump as possible.
	And honestly, asking tough questions of politicians by the president, I don't have a problem with that.
	My problem is, it's extraordinarily selective.
	When it was Barack Obama, the entire job of the media was to walk around holding a drool cup for him.
	When it's Joe Biden, they will go around wiping his ass.
	But when it comes to Donald Trump, obviously, they are definitely on top of things.
	Well, now they've earned their vacation.
	They're going to go back to vacation as soon as humanly possible.
	Meanwhile, President Trump is planning a last spate of pardons and commutations today.
	He's expected to issue up to 100 of them.
	That is not expected to include any members of his family.
	It's not expected to include himself.
	In fact, there's a fairly solid legal case that one of the big problems with pardoning himself is it would actually cause the possibility of prosecution afterward because then, theoretically, he could be prosecuted for some form of corruption.
	It's not clear who exactly Trump is planning on pardoning.
	Trump is going to be leaving the Capitol.
	He is not going to be attending the inauguration.
	The Trumps will be the first president and first lady to skip the inauguration in more than 150 years, which is, in fact, a bad luck.
	They should attend the inauguration.
	The election law is not stolen.
	It would be a good thing for them to attend the inauguration, but he's not going to do that.
	Trump is not going to get a big military sendoff.
	He wanted these big military honors.
	Instead, he will have sort of a scaled back sendoff at 8 a.m.
	on Wednesday, and then he will head on over to Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
	Meanwhile, the Pentagon has authorized more than 25,000 National Guard troops to secure the inauguration.
	The FBI is currently vetting all National Guard members, which is a weird move.
	I guess the idea here is that there can be members of the National Guard who are sympathetic to Trump and may attempt to do some form of violence.
	There's not a lot of information to suggest that that is in fact the case.
	In fact, even the Democrats who are making this claim acknowledge that this is not in fact the case, that there is not a great deal of evidence to suggest that there is a threat emanating from within the National Guard or within the police forces.
	You can really chalk it up to a sort of systemic distrust of the police on the left side of the aisle.
	A Democratic congressman named Steve Cohen He's been suggesting for a long time that the National Guard is going to be risky.
	He went on CNN yesterday and suggested that he fears the National Guard.
	The Guard is 90 some odd percent, I believe, male.
	About 20% of white males voted for Biden.
	You've got to figure that in the Guard, which is predominantly more conservative, and I see that on my social media and we know it, they're probably not more than 25% of the people that are there protecting us who voted for Biden.
	The other 75% are in the class that would be the large class of folks who might want to do something.
	They're part of the large group of people who might want to do something.
	That's kind of an extraordinary accusation.
	So again, this is all part and parcel of the broader agenda for the Democratic Party, which is to suggest that every single person who voted for Trump or who did not support Joe Biden is a member of the Capitol riot brigade.
	They are criminal.
	If they are not criminal themselves, then they support the criminals.
	The fact that they're now vetting, I understand why they're doing it.
	They're doing it because obviously they don't want anything to go wrong or somebody gets blamed.
	But the basic notion that the National Guard is rife with people who are going to do violence on behalf of Donald Trump on the day of the inauguration, not a lot of evidence to suggest that's true.
	Even Steve Cohen acknowledges there's not a lot of evidence to suggest that is true.
	But as I mentioned, the great message going into the unity, the time of unity, renewed unity, is of course that half the country is evil.
	Half the country supported Trump.
	Half the country believes that the Democratic agenda is wrong.
	Half the country does not agree with what is coming next.
	Well, that means that they're bad.
	And the Capitol riots are just an excuse to highlight that fact.
	And what we really need, what we really need is to divide the country further.
	So Bill Maher got shellacked over the weekend because Bill Maher did a monologue in which he pointed out that there are about 5,000 rioters total, maybe.
	I mean, in terms of the number who actually broke into the Capitol, it's probably far smaller.
	There are 74 million Americans.
	Don't confuse the two.
	And this is coming from Bill Maher, a guy who is wildly non-Trumpy, a person who despises Trump.
	I mean, Bill Maher has suggested on his show that he wanted the economy to tank before the election just so Trump wouldn't be reelected.
	That's how much he dislikes Donald Trump.
	But Maher happens to be correct about this, that when you conflate 5,000 rioters with 74 million Americans, there might be something else at work here.
	Let's not confuse 5,000 people with 74 million.
	Excuse me.
	Yes, even supporting the insurrection in spirit is, well, deplorable.
	But there's a difference between holding illiberal beliefs and acting violently on them.
	At least, that's what they always told me about Islamic terrorism.
	I've preached, and still do, that you can hate Trump, but not all the people who like him.
	And as counterintuitive as it may seem, you can like something run by assholes without being one yourself.
	Okay, and he happens to be right about every word of that.
	This meant that Bill Maher was now on the poop list for people on the left.
	They were very angry at Bill Maher for pointing out this little fact, because the preferred vision of the left is that they themselves are the arbiters of virtue, and therefore they get to shut down everybody who is not on their side of the aisle.
	Far more typical.
	of the left than Bill Maher's reaction, which is what a true liberal would say, right?
	Bill Maher happens to be much more of the sort of old school liberal than he happens to be of the hard left.
	And the distinction that I've made on the show routinely, literally every day, I make the distinction between the left and liberals.
	I've made it every day for the past several weeks when I talk about this particular issue, is that liberals will say things like, we hate what happened at the Capitol riots.
	We don't agree with people on the right about nearly anything, but they have the right to say what they want to say.
	This has been a thing that Bill Maher has said many, many times.
	And good for Bill Maher on that.
	But the hardcore left doesn't want that.
	The hardcore left would like to push forward the propaganda that 74 million Americans are awful and terrible and therefore need to be silenced.
	So Don Winslow, who is a sort of action thriller author, I've recommended some of his books on the program.
	I like Don Winslow's I mean, they're very much to the left, but his writing is interesting.
	Well, his Twitter persona is far less interesting.
	So he put out a video.
	It was called Trump's Army.
	It currently has 2.5 million views, this video on Twitter.
	And the entire premise of the video is that when Trump leaves office, he's then going to weaponize and militarize a giant army of his supporters in order to do violence and do harm to others.
	And you need to be drafted into the counter army.
	Because the battle is going to happen online.
	So you need to be the person who monitors your neighbor.
	You need to be reporting on your neighbor.
	You need to make sure that your neighbor has good views.
	Here's a little bit of this video that has gone viral on the left.
	On January 20th, Donald Trump will become the commander in chief of a different army.
	This army.
	The greatest threat facing America today comes from within.
	Radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic terrorists, are proposing we form a citizen army.
	Our weapons will be computers and cell phones.
	We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and reporting their findings to authorities.
	And unfortunately, Don Winslow's view is not rare on the left.
	In fact, it has infused even people who used to be quote-unquote right-wing.
	And so you've got Max Boot, right?
	Max Boot is well-known as a sort of neoconservative voice, very interventionist during the Iraq War.
	And then he shifted to the left as Donald Trump rose to the nomination.
	And now he writes pieces like this for the Washington Post.
	So he is now calling for the full-on deplatforming of Fox News.
	I'll get to that in just one second.
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	Okay, so Max Boot, again, a guy who used to write for Commentary Magazine and the Wall Street Journal, now he is writing pieces for the Washington Post, openly declaring that the government should essentially ban Fox News, which is about as authoritarian a thought as has been expressed in recent memory.
	Okay, I mean, to be fair, we're still experiencing a peaceful transfer of power.
	state the enormity of what happened on January 6th, 2021, a date that will live in infamy alongside December 7th, 1941 and September 11th, 2000 and 2001.
	It is.
	This was the first time the US Capitol had been ransacked since the War of 1812, the first time ever that the United States has not experienced a peaceful transfer of power.
	Okay, I mean, to be fair, we're still experiencing a peaceful transfer of power.
	It is a peaceful transfer of power.
	Donald Trump will leave.
	Joe Biden will take place.
	The army was not used.
	This was not a coup.
	There was no official mechanism by which Donald Trump stayed in office.
	That is, in fact, a peaceful transfer of power.
	The fact that there was mob violence does not mean that it is not technically a peaceful — that's not to downplay the evil of the Capitol riot.
	It is to point out that that's still a peaceful transfer of power in which the military is not used to ensconce a quote-unquote dictator in office.
	And the fact is, for all of the talk about how the system broke down, the system didn't break down.
	See, that's the thing.
	The system actually withstood the pressure that Trump was putting on it.
	It even withstood the pressure that the rioters were putting on it.
	A Republican vice president, Trump's vice president, Right?
	He stood up to Trump and said, no, I am not going to violate my constitutional duty.
	The Congress of the United States did not violate its constitutional duty.
	The Senate of the United States did not violate its constitutional duty.
	State legislatures did not violate their constitutional duty.
	Secretaries of state across the land, most of them Republican in these battleground states, did not violate their constitutional duties.
	Governors did not violate their constitutional duties.
	So I'm just wondering, what is the evidence that the system broke down?
	Because this is the great lie of the moment, which is that Trump was such a threat to the system that the system itself was at risk.
	No, the system was never at risk.
	Okay, Donald Trump did very, very bad things over the past couple months.
	The rioters did something fully evil in invading the Capitol.
	Was the system itself, quote-unquote, at risk?
	Was there really any chance that Joe Biden was not going to be inaugurated on January 20th?
	No one serious believes that Joe Biden was not going to be inaugurated on January 20th.
	The minute the Electoral College voted in December, it was over.
	I said it at the time.
	I said it since.
	I said the night of the election.
	I didn't see evidence that the election had been fraudulent or stolen.
	I didn't believe it when Trump had said that he had won.
	Right?
	Okay, all of that.
	happens to be the reality.
	But the line from the media is that January 6th represented a serious attempt to foment insurrection in such a way that it would have been an actual coup.
	That's unreal.
	It is more akin to a terrorist attack than it is like anything else.
	I mean, you invade the Capitol building and then you go looking for blood.
	That looks more like a terrorist attack than an actual coup.
	But that does not mean that it's not a peaceful transfer of power.
	A peaceful transfer of power is happening.
	Trump is leaving.
	Biden is taking office.
	All of that is happening tomorrow.
	And the military is not intervening.
	In any case, Max Boot continues along these lines, because in order to push for what he's about to push for, you have to claim that the United States is on the brink of collapsing from within.
	He says, the seditionists assembled at the president's invitation.
	The Wall Street Journal reports that one social media post from the Proud Boys told their members, POTUS wants you in D.C.
	on January 6th at 21.
	Impeaching and convicting Trump is the least we can do, given his role in inciting the violent insurrection, but, and here's where we go, here's where it goes next, while holding Trump to account is necessary, it is also insufficient.
	There is a whole infrastructure of incitement that will remain intact even after Trump leaves office.
	Just as we do with foreign terrorist groups, so with domestic terrorists.
	We need to shut down the influencers who radicalize people and set them on the path toward violence and sedition.
	Even if you were to make the case that there are people who are encouraging violence or inciting violence, you'd then have to distinguish between those people and people who are just sort of mainstream conservatives who are willing to let the legal process play out, or even people who are saying things that weren't true about election stealing.
	That is not the same thing as suggesting that violence is the necessity.
	But Max Boot is encouraging now a full crackdown, right?
	This is violative of the First Amendment in the extreme.
	He says, some argue that trying to silence the voices of insurrection is a hopeless task that hate will always find a way to get through.
	And it's true that there is a danger that seditious plots will now move to encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, where they will be harder to track.
	But research from Zignal Labs found that online misinformation about election fraud fell 73% after Trump and key allies were suspended from social media.
	Well, you would imagine that if Trump was kicked off social media, he couldn't make those claims anymore.
	Does that mean that it is justified to shut down the mechanisms of free speech, even for people who are not telling the truth?
	But, says Max Boot, even that's not enough.
	He says, that's a good start.
	Anyone who cherishes our democracy should be grateful to the management of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites for their newfound sense of social responsibility.
	We should expect at least the same level of responsibility from broadcast media, and in particular from Fox News, which has the largest reach on the right.
	To its credit, Fox News acknowledged that Joe Biden won, but reports Media Matters, he's now quoting Media Matters, a partisan left-wing group whose sole goal in life is to get everybody on the right platform, get their advertisers canceled and destroy their lives, right?
	That's all Media Matters exists to do.
	It was a David Brock project created in combination with John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's deputy.
	It was designed as a weapons center for the Democratic Party.
	So now you got Max Boot, former conservative, neoconservative, ripping into, using media matters in order to attack Fox News.
	I mean, I guess when you go, you go all the way.
	He quotes them saying in the two weeks after Fox News called the election for Biden, Fox News cast doubts on the results of the election at least 774 times.
	Fox News host Mark Levin told viewers, if you don't fight January 6th on the floor of the Senate and the House, and that is the joint meeting of Congress on these electors, then we are done.
	The pro-Trump insurrectionists were listening.
	So it's Mark Levin's fault now.
	So Mark Levin suggested that people use means inside the Senate and the House in order to challenge electoral votes.
	I disagreed with Mark.
	I talked openly on the show about how I disagreed with Mark, with whom I'm friends and who I have a great deal of respect for.
	That does not change the fact that Mark did not call for violence.
	But Max Boot wants Mark Levin shut down.
	He wants Fox News shut down.
	He says Cumulus Media, one of America's largest talk radio companies, has ordered its hosts, who include some Fox News personalities, to stop spreading false claims of election fraud.
	If only Cumulus were doing a better job of enforcing its new policy.
	But Fox News itself has no such edict.
	James and Catherine Murdoch, part of the family that controls Fox News, just called on media property owners to stop propagating lies that have unleashed insidious and uncontrollable forces.
	If James' brother Loughlin and father Rupert won't listen, large cable companies such as Comcast and Charter, which carry Fox News and provide much of its revenue in the form of user feeds, need to step in and kick Fox News off.
	Well, we should expect better behavior from media executives who shouldn't count on it.
	CNN notes that the UK doesn't have its own version of Fox News because it has a government regulator that meets out heavy fines to broadcasters that violate minimal standards of impartiality and accuracy.
	The United States hasn't had that since the FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in the 1980s.
	As president, Biden needs to reinvigorate the FCC or domestic terrorism may be only the beginning rather than the end of the plot against America.
	So in other words, it is time for the government to forcibly step in and use the FCC to crack down on views that Max Boot does not That needs to happen.
	Authoritarianism is the only protection against supposed authoritarianism.
	That is the idea here.
	The threat of authoritarianism on the right is so grave, we were so close to the end of the republic on January 6th, that now you have to step in.
	In order to protect democracy, you have to shut down the mechanisms of individual rights.
	That is the point that Max Boot and others on the left are making.
	And they're going to voluntarily undergo a form of social ostracism to ensure that people cannot work.
	And people like Deborah Messing, the actress, who came out and said that she would not appear on any network that platforms McEnany.
	Well, big frickin' deal.
	Wow, what a threat.
	She says, If I ever see Kayleigh McEnany on a panel on a news show or hired by a network, I am immediately ceasing to support every single advertiser on that network.
	Retweet if you agree.
	Deplatform hate.
	And this is the goal.
	Go after the advertisers.
	Go after sources of revenue.
	Try and destroy any outlet that does a thing you don't like.
	And the folks who are doing this proclaim that they are advocates for freedom.
	Because after all, they are protecting freedom.
	In order to get to this logic, you have to assume that the threat to freedom was so widespread and so grave on January 6th that it necessitates the shutdowns of basic First Amendment freedoms.
	This is the argument that's been made in Germany.
	It's called Streitbereitdemokratie.
	The basic idea is that the mechanisms of free speech allowed the Nazis to rise.
	Nevermind that Hitler actually was barred from publication for a while after he was in jail for the Beer Hall Putsch.
	Didn't really help very much.
	Okay, the bottom line is that the Nazi party in Germany has been banned for a long time.
	Nazi symbols have been banned for a long time.
	The Stalemein Kampf has been banned for a long time.
	By the way, has that stopped the rising of the neo-Nazis in Germany?
	Not particularly much, but it doesn't matter.
	The idea is that you can ban those views because those views are anti-democracy, and so if you stop those views from being propagated, you protect democracy.
	Okay, maybe that's a fair argument when it comes to the Nazis.
	I tend to think that it's not particularly helpful.
	Me being the Orthodox Jew, not a fan of Nazis as it turns out.
	I still think that that may be bad policy by the Germans.
	That the best way to reject Nazism is to take it head on and explain why it is wrong.
	Okay, but even if you were to use that logic with regard to Nazis to label 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in that category, to suggest that Fox News is in that category, that in order to protect democracy, we have to shut down the First Amendment, that is authoritarianism.
	So in a second, we're gonna get to authoritarianism and where the threat of authoritarianism lies in the United States, because there's some authoritarianism on both sides, but I think on one side, it has some institutional control it does not have on the other side.
	We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, so the sort of authoritarian mindset of the left is being extended to virtually every area of American life.
	The attack on the social media companies from the left has been, how dare those social media companies value free speech?
	Now, on this show, I've been very critical of the social media companies for their arbitrary and opaque standards when it comes to censorship.
	They do not make clear why they are banning certain people.
	They do not make clear the consistent rationale, because there is no consistent rationale.
	They are reactionary in the extreme.
	The left's response to this is, well, they shouldn't be reactionary.
	They should just ban everybody I don't like.
	So Mika Brzezinski is now blaming Mark Zuckerberg, saying that Zuckerberg destroyed the country.
	She's saying this from her perch at MSNBC.
	Less than five years after spending oodles of time with Donald Trump, hanging out with him and mocking other presidential candidates.
	Here's Mika Brzezinski blaming social media and its free speech values for everything bad that is going on in the United States.
	Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg, you guys are pathetic.
	You make absolutely no reason about your actions.
	You could have done this a long time ago.
	You decided to do it now.
	Huh, I wonder who's going to be president now.
	Maybe this will make him happy.
	No, you've just shown him why you need to be shut down.
	You need to be shut down.
	Nobody needs what you have to offer.
	You have destroyed this country, and quite frankly, it's still happening right now.
	Okay, so again, the idea here from everybody on the left universally, not people, not liberals, people on the hard left, is that the big thing to blame here is freedom of speech itself.
	The right is to, not like the political right, rights are to blame for the misuse of rights.
	And so we have to shut down rights.
	And we have to make sure that the only informational dissemination takes place via us.
	It takes place via monopoly on the left.
	Okay, so there is a description of this sort of behavior.
	The description is authoritarianism.
	And so for a long time, there's been this idea that is prevalent on the political left that the only authoritarians are on the right.
	This springs, we're gonna do a little bit of a history and a political philosophy lesson here.
	This springs from a book from 1950 from a guy named Theodor Adorno.
	So Adorno was a Frankfurt School theorist.
	Frankfurt School theorists were people who came over just pre-war.
	They came from Weimar, Germany.
	They saw the Nazis rising and they came over to the United States.
	They were largely Marxist in orientation.
	Theodore Ardona was a really interesting sort of social critic and music critic.
	Very talented musician, actually.
	And he ended up at University of Berkeley, along with a bunch of other members of the Frankfurt School.
	And in 1950, he put out a book called The Authoritarian Personality.
	Now, the book is deeply flawed, right?
	It is based on faulty social science research, but it makes the basic argument that there are people who are sort of proto-fascists.
	And then America churns out these proto-fascists, right?
	That America creates a mindset that makes it ripe for fascism.
	Why?
	Because America, it turns out, was too conservative for Adorno.
	It turns out that the only way that you could really not be a fascist was to be on the left, was to be a Marxist.
	He created something called the so-called F-scale.
	F meaning pre-fascist personality.
	The authors of that study, this 1950 flawed study, they suggested, quote, So the basic idea is you have to remake all of American society so it stops churning out these proto-fascists.
	cannot be achieved by psychological means alone.
	The task is comparable to that of eliminating neurosis or delinquency or nationalism from the world.
	These are the products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed.
	Right, so the basic idea is you have to remake all of American society so it stops churning out these proto-fascists.
	Now, the way that these fascists were identified was with this scale, the so-called F-scale, which gave you a bunch of questions.
	And if you answered too many of the questions in a quote-unquote authoritarian way, this meant that you had a proto-fascist personality or a potential fascist personality.
	And the left took this up with alacrity, because essentially what it did was medicalize anybody who was conservative.
	The basic idea was that if you were on the right, you were an authoritarian.
	Okay, but in fact, it turns out that there's a grain of truth to the idea that people do have authoritarian personalities.
	Now, the left twist it for generations.
	The left suggested that only the right had authoritarian personalities.
	Right-wing authoritarianism does, in fact, exist.
	So there's a Harvard social scientist named Robert Altemeier.
	He created a right-wing authoritarianism scale, right?
	What characterized you as being a right-wing authoritarian?
	And he detected three character traits that he said made somebody a potential right-wing authoritarian.
	Here are the three character traits that exist on the right.
	And you see these in some of the capital rioters, right?
	These sort of authoritarianism here.
	One is authoritarian submission, willingness to submit to established and legitimate authorities, at least in their own minds.
	So for a lot of the people who believe that Donald Trump was telling them the truth, that Donald Trump could never be wrong, and that Donald Trump was the only legitimate authority in the United States, you see that sort of authoritarian, worshipful submission to Trump in, we're going to run into the Capitol building and try to overthrow the auspices of democracy.
	The second factor is authoritarian aggression.
	Aggressiveness approved by the authorities against a particular outgroup.
	So, again, if you're rushing into the Capitol building and you are attacking police officers and you're trying to attack Congress people because you believe that your leader, whether or not this is justified, you believe that your leader has ordered you to do so, that is, in fact, an indicator of authoritarian aggression, according to the right-wing authoritarianism scale developed by Harvard social scientist Robert Altemeier.
	The third characteristic is conventionalism, which is defined by adherence to approved social conventions.
	And so the basic idea there is that if you believe in sort of traditional values, then this makes you a right-wing authoritarian, and if combined with authoritarian submission and authoritarian aggression.
	Okay, so Altemeyer and other folks on the left found that there's nobody on the left who's authoritarian.
	Well, it turns out that was rather self-flattering because, like Adorno, Altemeyer is of the left, and so he created an incredibly faulty scale to try and measure left-wing authoritarianism.
	So left-wing authoritarianism, it turns out, does in fact exist.
	There's a University of Montana social psychologist.
	His name is Lucian Conway.
	He took Altemeyer's exact scale that was used to measure right-wing authoritarianism, and then he just substituted some words.
	Instead of, for example, saying that I submit to proper governmental and religious authorities, rather than listening to the rabble, Right, which was used as sort of a right-wing authoritarian mindset.
	He just said, instead of religious authorities, he said scientific authorities.
	Now, when you take that statement and you flip it to the left, obviously a huge swath of the left believes that.
	You have to listen to the governmental and scientific authorities.
	You cannot listen to anybody who descends from those authorities, right?
	That sounds very much like much of the left today.
	So, Lucian Conway simply took Altmeier's scale, and then he flipped some of the premises, and it turns out, not only does left-wing authoritarianism exist, it exists in huge numbers.
	Conway found that the highest score for authoritarianism was for liberals on left-wing authoritarianism.
	He says, our data suggests that average Americans on the political left are just as likely to be dogmatic authoritarians as those on the political right.
	And those left-wing authoritarians can be just as prejudiced, dogmatic, and extremist as right-wing authoritarians. It turns out that the content of the dogma is just different.
	So there's some sociologists who came up with character traits for left-wing authoritarianism.
	So remember, the right-wing authoritarianism character traits are authoritarian submission, where you submit to a great leader, authoritarian aggression, you do aggression at their behest, and conventionalism, meaning that you adhere to approved social conventions.
	Well, as you could predict, the left-wing authoritarianism scale, right, the character traits that you're looking for, are revolutionary aggression, designed to quote, forcefully overthrow the established hierarchy and punish those in power, top-down censorship, directed at wielding group authority as a means of regulating characteristically right-wing beliefs and behaviors,
	And anti-conventionalism, reflecting a moral absolutism concerning progressive values and concomitant dismissal of conservatives as inherently immoral, an intolerant desire for coercively imposing left-wing beliefs and values on others, and a need for social and ideological homogeneity in one's environment.
	Hey, does that sound familiar, any of that?
	Do you see that in American life?
	You see the revolutionary aggression?
	Do you see top-down censorship and a desire for top-down censorship on the left?
	Do you see anti-conventionalism, a moral absolutism that says that progressivism is true, conservatism is inherently immoral?
	And we need to coercively impose our left-wing beliefs and values on others, and we have to purge.
	Do you see that on the left today?
	And which is more prevalent?
	The sort of right-wing authoritarianism that you see on the right culminating in the Capitol riots, or the left-wing authoritarianism you see on the left?
	Which one is in the halls of power?
	Which one has taken over our university system?
	Which one has taken over our media?
	Which one has taken over our social media?
	So, Theodor Adorno, who originally came up with the idea of the authoritarian personality, and first wrote it up in that very flawed 1950 book, later in life, he was teaching at the Free University of Berlin, 1968, and there was a group called SDS, it was a German social democratic, kind of revolutionary group, And in Europe, much the same sort of stuff was happening in the late 1960s that was happening in the United States.
	You had students who were violent, aggressive, taking over universities.
	And Adorno, who had escaped Europe in order to avoid the Holocaust, he wrote to a fellow Frankfurt School theorist named Herbert Marcuse.
	Okay, and Adorno mentioned that a bunch of these revolutionary students had broken into his offices, they had then occupied his offices and treated him horribly, and he had to call the police.
	So he wrote to Herbert Marcuse, again another Marxist Frankfurt school theorist, he said, we had to call the police who then arrested all those they found in the room.
	They treated the students far more leniently than the students treated me.
	O'Dorno wrote that the students had displayed something of that thoughtless violence that once belonged to fascism. The response is what's interesting.
	So Herbert Marcuse was one of the most influential thinkers on the left for most of the 1960s.
	He was the author, the coiner of the slogan, Make Love Not War.
	And he was a proponent of what he called repressive tolerance, called liberating tolerance.
	So liberating tolerance was the idea that you could stop people on the right from speaking so as to prevent them from violating your tenets of tolerance, which sounds very much like left-wing authoritarianism.
	So Marcuse wrote back to Adorno and chided him for having called the cops.
	He said, our cause is better taken up by the rebellious students than by the police.
	And he argued that violence from the left was merely fresh air.
	So, again, Marcuse and other members of the left, they were perfectly willing to acknowledge right-wing authoritarianism, but left-wing authoritarianism does not exist.
	And this is the blind spot for America's political left.
	They do not see themselves clearly at all in the mirror.
	I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that there is a segment of the right, I think it is fairly small, that is authoritarian in nature, that seeks an idol, that follows that idol, that is willing to do aggressive violence on behalf of that idol.
	That does not tolerate dissent.
	I think it's fairly small.
	I think the evidence that it's fairly small is that 74 million Americans voted for Trump and like a few hundred morons decided to invade the Capitol and many of those were devotees of fringe QAnon conspiracy theory that is absurd in its basis and ridiculous in all of its implications.
	On the left, The description that I just gave of left-wing authoritarianism, how rife is that in our institutions?
	When I talk about revolutionary aggression approved by those in power, when I talk about top-down censorship sought by those in power, when I talk about anti-conventionalism, seeing your own morality as absolute, everybody else's morality is bad, and we need to coercively impose our beliefs on everybody else, and we need social and ideological homogeneity.
	We need to purge everybody.
	How prevalent is that?
	I think we all know the answer.
	The answer is, that is incredibly prevalent.
	If you look at the institutions of our society, the threat of authoritarianism, it exists on both sides, but it is predominant, predominant on the left.
	The threat of authoritarianism is fringe and dangerous when it comes to the right.
	It is mainstream when it comes to the left.
	The institutions of our society have decided to preemptively purge people who do not agree with them.
	The pages of the Washington Post have been... Can you imagine anybody on the right side of the aisle literally writing editorials for places like Daily Wire claiming that we should de-platform, that we should censor, that we should use the government to shut down CNN or MSNBC?
	I've never seen anything remotely like that.
	Have you?
	I have not.
	I've not seen that in the Wall Street Journal.
	I've not seen that at Daily Wire.
	I've not seen that at the Federalist.
	I've not seen that at the Washington Examiner.
	All evil right-wing outlets, according to the left.
	I've never seen it on Fox News, by the way.
	And yet, this is a commonplace assertion on the left.
	By what Max Boot argues, which is that the FCC should be cracking down and barring Fox News, that is not a fringe idea.
	That appeared in the pages of the Washington Post.
	The New York Times makes these sorts of contentions all the time.
	And then, speaking of ideological homogeneity and top-down censorship imposed from above, and speaking of approval for revolutionary aggression, the New York Times fires its own op-ed editor for printing an editorial from Tom Cotton, a sitting United States senator, suggesting that rioting and violence should be met by use of the Insurrection Act in order to call forth troops to quell it.
	This is not a fringe philosophy on the left.
	Left-wing authoritarianism is ripe on the left, and rife on the left.
	It is all over the damn place.
	When we talk about the perversion of our institutions, when we talk about the threat to the American way of life and the threat to your rights, when we talk about the social authoritarianism that eventually is going to percolate into governmental authoritarianism, the chief threat of that is not from the right.
	I know there are a lot of people on the left who look at Trump and they say, that's a guy who talks like an authoritarian.
	And a lot of the time, he does talk like that.
	Okay, Trump's language has been horrible along these lines.
	He says things that sound authoritarian all the time.
	And then you know what happens?
	The right doesn't let him do them.
	I understand that there is a line that is going around that the entire right approved Donald Trump for the last few months.
	Weirdly, again, every person in a position of power to actually do something did not go along with this.
	Donald Trump was never, for one moment, in serious possibility of remaining president on January 20th, once the Electoral College certified, and there was very little doubt that the Electoral College was going to certify, given that states all over the country, Republican and Democrat, with state officials who are Republican, under pressure from Trump directly, ignored him and did their constitutional duty.
	I have zero faith that that constitutional duty will be done by a bunch of people who inherently believe the Constitution is itself an obstacle to utopia and is evil.
	Who believe that their institutions should be militarized against people on the right.
	You wonder why people on the right feel this deep and abiding threat?
	It's because every institution of our society is now being militarized on behalf of a philosophy of left-wing authoritarianism.
	Nearly everyone.
	Hollywood purges.
	Hollywood bans.
	Your corporation will fire you if you don't post the proper square during Black Lives Matter.
	The government will force your children to learn things they ought not learn or threaten to defund your church.
	Get rid of its tax-exempt status if you refuse to do what the left-wing wants you to do.
	So when it comes to everyday life, it is a softer form.
	It is a nicer form.
	It comes with a smile.
	It doesn't come with a bunch of people dressed in buffalo horns invading the Capitol building.
	But it comes with a lot more power and a lot more threat to your daily life.
	We're gonna get to more of this in just one second.
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	Okay, we're going to get to more of this in just one second.
	What is coming next?
	Because the left-wing authoritarian threat, which is going to be crammed down by the government, but is present in our social lives, the authoritarian mindset, which is predominant across America right now, that's going to continue, full scale.
	A unity is only unity under Joe Biden if you acquiesce to that form of philosophical authoritarianism.
	First, remember last Thursday, it was a big day for The Daily Wire.
	We made our entrance into entertainment content with our very first feature film, Run, Hide, Fight.
	It's awesome.
	It's an awesome thriller.
	It has values that you will like.
	It doesn't slap you in the face.
	There is a reason that Rotten Tomatoes currently has given it like a 22% positive score from the critics and a 98% positive score from audiences.
	The feedback on it from our folks is unbelievable.
	If you missed the movie, if you missed Run, Hide, Fight, Head on over to Daily Wire.
	You can stream it on demand from our website, mobile or streaming apps on Apple TV and Roku.
	If you're not a member yet, use promo code RHF to get 25% off.
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	Again, there's a reason the critics hate it, and there's a reason that you love it.
	That's the kind of entertainment we want to provide to you.
	The film is not overtly political.
	It is intense.
	It is for mature audiences only.
	It stars Isabel May, who gives a terrific performance, and Thomas Chain and Radha Mitchell.
	Run, Hide, Fight!
	It follows Zoe Hull, a high school student, coping with the recent loss of her mother.
	All she wants to do is finish out her last few days of senior year in high school and then go to college.
	Instead, she has to fight her way through an attempted school massacre.
	So, if you saw the movie and, despite what the left thought, you actually have something good to say about it, please go and share it with the world.
	Go write a review online, go to Rotten Tomatoes, or post on your website.
	It's time that conservative opinions are heard in the world of entertainment.
	We're starting to see great reviews coming out.
	And, again, we're excited to continue to bring you excellent stories Hollywood refuses to tell.
	We're gonna fight back in the culture war against cultural authoritarians, and we need your help.
	Please head on over to dailywire.com.
	Remember, you get 25% off when you use promo code RHF.
	Again, that's 25% off when you use promo code RHF.
	Go check out the movie and become a member.
	We really appreciate your help.
	You're listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
	So when it comes to left-wing authoritarians taking over the reins of the government and taking over the reins of the institutions, you can see how this works.
	All unity will be quashed unless you agree with the left-wing authoritarian mindset.
	And that means a complete rethinking of the Constitution of the United States.
	Constitutional rights are bad because they effectuate the possibility of dissent winning.
	Well, we have to make sure that people view the Constitution in a horrible light.
	We have to make sure the Declaration of Independence is viewed in a horrible light.
	Instead, we have to suggest that there's a hierarchy of victimhood that allows you to speak, and that if you are not cognizant of that hierarchy of victimhood, then you must be barred from public life.
	I believe that the Constitution is a racist document.
	MSNBC and now in Washington Journal on C-SPAN.
	And he says the constitution is in its essence, a racist document.
	So any possibility, by the way, of a country in which we unify around founding principles is absolutely destroyed by people who wish to take the institutional reins and then use them against people they dislike.
	Here is Ellie Mistal suggesting that the constitution essentially needs to be thrown out because it's racist.
	I believe that the constitution is a racist document.
	I believe that it was written at a time when the people were racist.
	It was written to support a white supremacist state.
	And it's structurally still that document.
	I tend to think that the 14th Amendment, with its guarantee of equal protection and substantive due process for all, is enough that if applied to the rest of the document to save the Constitution from its original sins, to redeem the Constitution from the racism and bigotry and sexism of its founding.
	Okay, it's fun to see how he takes the 14th Amendment and then just inserts in there the phrase substantive due process.
	For those who are not fluent in legalese, what he is saying there essentially is that the Supreme Court of the United States is basically just supposed to overrule anything that Ellie Mistal doesn't like.
	That's what substantive due process means.
	It's a nonsense phrase that was inserted by the Supreme Court in order to achieve particular political ends.
	But again, this philosophy, which is that the Constitution is basically either a tool or an obstacle on behalf of left-wing viewpoints, that is now being promoted openly by CNN.
	Again, your objective name in news.
	They put out a report today.
	It's titled, Trump Administration Issues a Racist School Curriculum Report on Martin Luther King Jr.
	Day.
	First of all, this is part and parcel of a broader effort by the left to suggest that Republicans can never quote MLK.
	If you say that Martin Luther King's dream, which was that people be treated as individuals rather than as representatives of their race, if you say that that is a very good thing, and it's a good thing that America celebrates that ideal, The left will say, no, no, no, we need ideological homogeneity in order for you to quote MLK.
	Sonny Hostin is representative of this view on the left.
	If you want to cite MLK approvingly for that sentiment, you also have to buy into all left-wing tropes.
	And if you voted for Trump, you are simply not allowed to believe anything that MLK believed.
	Here's Sonny Hostin doing this routine on ABC's The View.
	I saw today, unbelievably, in my view, Ted Cruz, Kayleigh McEnany, Rona McDaniel, Melania Trump, quoting Dr. King, tweeting Dr. King.
	Those were the same people that were, like Melania Trump with this birther lie, but Ted Cruz with challenging, you know, the Electoral College, you know, Kayleigh McEnany.
	Just over and over again with her propaganda.
	How dare they, how dare they try to quote Dr. King on the celebration of his birthday when they enabled, enabled a racist president.
	Okay, so this is my favorite part, is that MLK Day was supposed to be a unifying moment around which all Americans could unify.
	And it would be good if all of your political opponents cited MLK approvingly.
	But if your political opponents cite MLK approvingly and they're political opponents and you're on the left, That's very bad.
	Then you're not allowed to talk about MLK ever, ever, ever again.
	So anyway, CNN has now come out against what is called the 1776 Report.
	Okay, so the president had an advisory committee.
	They put together the 1776 Report, which was designed to be a counter to the 1619 Project.
	And it is a fulsome explanation of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
	It talks about the greatness of the United States.
	It says things like this.
	Of course, neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice, and government by consent.
	No nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics.
	None has strived harder or done more to achieve them.
	That is the basis of the 1776 Commission.
	It's a report well worth reading with your kids.
	It talks about the value of the Declaration of Independence and the value of the Constitution of the United States.
	It quotes people ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass.
	It talks about race in the Constitution.
	It quotes Ronald Reagan, of course.
	And the basic idea is that there are a bunch of challenges to American principles that are now rife on the left.
	And this, of course, is exactly right.
	It talks about the evils of progressivism, which held that essentially the Declaration of Independence was irrelevant, and the evils of fascism, the evils of communism.
	And then it talks about racism and identity politics and points out that the Civil Rights Movement was a grand and glorious movement culminating in the 1960s with the passage of three major legislative reforms affecting segregation, voting, and housing rights.
	It presented itself and was understood by the American people as consistent with the principles of the founding.
	And Martin Luther King Jr.
	himself said, when the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the constitution and the declaration of independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. And then, says the report, the civil rights movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades. They distorted many ideas of areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of non-discrimination and equal opportunity in favor of group rights, not unlike those advanced by John C. Calhoun I've written about all of this.
	I've talked about it on the show.
	There's nothing racist about this report.
	CNN's headline is, quote, Trump administration issues a racist school curriculum report on Martin Luther King Jr.
	Day.
	So, you are now in direct opposition to Martin Luther King Jr.
	if you believe that America was gloriously founded, did not live up to its ideals, and progressively realized those ideals over time, and that identity politics strips away those ideals.
	Now you must be banned, right?
	You're ostracized.
	You're a racist, if you believe all of those things.
	We're going to purge our public schools of these sorts of ideas.
	We're going to cram down on American citizens ideas they do not agree with.
	We will use our institutional power outside government in order to do that.
	We will use the institutions of the media, of Hollywood, of social media.
	You'll see it in every area of your culture.
	You'll see it in your kids' schooling.
	This is what the left-wing authoritarians would like.
	Hey, and then they would like to do it using government itself.
	And then they would like to formalize this arrangement.
	They would like to use the powers of the executive in order to push all of this stuff forward.
	They want to weaponize every element of the government in order to push forward a left-wing viewpoint.
	This is why James Clyburn is now openly saying, Joe Biden, you should just use executive orders, right?
	You know what?
	I love this.
	All the institutionalists.
	Donald Trump's a threat to the institutions.
	Here's James Clyburn openly saying, if Congress won't do something Joe Biden wants to do, Joe Biden should just ignore the Constitution and do what he wants to do, which, by the way, is kind of authoritarian, is it not?
	And like a governmental level, the takeover of legislative powers by the executive is an authoritarian leaning.
	Here's James Clyburn.
	I have said to Joe Biden, That I do feel that when he lay out his agenda and fight participation from the other side, if they're going to be recalcitrant, if they're going to throw up roadblocks, go on without them.
	Use your executive authority if they refuse to cooperate.
	That is what Abraham Lincoln did to start dismantling slavery.
	That is what Harry Truman did to start the integration of the armed services.
	All these things were done by executive order.
	Okay, I mean, that is some wild stuff there from James Clyburn.
	But remember, the real authoritarian threat is a bunch of droogs and idiots invading the Capitol and then not achieving any of their goals or purposes.
	Okay, that was dangerous.
	That was evil.
	And that was wrong.
	The authoritarian threat that's gonna come for you and your rights is not gonna come from morons dressed up as Buffalo inside the Capitol building.
	It's gonna come from people who are coming with a smile and with institutional power in order to cram down their viewpoint in the name of their own virtue.
	Alrighty, we'll be back here today with an additional hour of The Ben Shapiro Show coming up soon.
	The Matt Walsh Show airing at 1.30 p.m.
	Eastern.
	Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
	I'm Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
	Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
	Copyright 2021.
	On the Matt Wall Show, we talk about the things that matter.
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