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June 8, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
47:20
For Biden, Being Transgender Is The New Storming The Beaches of Normandy | Ep. 1271
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President Biden salutes the bravery of transgender people, but not the veterans of D-Day.
On D-Day, the ACLU rejects freedom of speech, and the Coalition of the Woke mobilizes against Senator Joe Manchin.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Alrighty, so.
This weekend marked the anniversary of D-Day, of course, June 6th, 1944, during which Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy to finally take back Europe from the Nazi predations that had taken over the entire continent, effectively, starting in 1939 and onwards.
It's a day that pretty much every president has paid tribute to on the day.
Donald Trump did so.
Barack Obama did so.
George W. Bush did so.
But Joe Biden did not do so.
In fact, according to the New York Post, Biden omits mention of D-Day on 77th anniversary of Normandy invasion.
President Biden seemed to have forgotten about the anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of Northwestern Europe that turned the tide against Nazi Germany in World War II.
He didn't reference the 77th anniversary of Operation Overlord on either his personal Twitter account or his official President of the United States account on Sunday, the date of the invasion.
He didn't mention it yesterday either.
The president did highlight his remarks in Tulsa, Oklahoma last week that marked the 100th anniversary of that city's 1921 race massacre.
So there was mention of, of course, the evils of racism in the United States, his case being that those evils persisted today and require a complete remaking of the American bargain.
And of course, we're going to put tremendous focus on the evils of American history, but not the great deeds done by Americans in American history, including D-Day.
He tweeted, The White House did not put out a statement referencing D-Day or any statement at all on Sunday.
It did note the 40th anniversary of the known beginning of the AIDS epidemic the previous day.
So it's pretty obvious where the Biden administration is putting its focus.
VP Harris did actually tweet something out.
She tweeted out, on the 77th anniversary of D-Day, we honor the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and liberated a continent.
We'll never forget their courage and sacrifice.
Joe Biden also did the same.
But the fact that the President of the United States did not, but we did get tributes to the beginning of the AIDS crisis, as well as the 1921 Tulsa massacre, is telling as to what the priorities of this administration are.
And more importantly, There's something else that's going on in American life that is sort of fundamental to understand, and that is the transformation of the words that we use to describe things as good.
Those words have changed tremendously.
So, perfect example.
The President of the United States still has not tweeted anything out about D-Day, which of course is this week, the 77th anniversary.
But Joe Biden did, in fact, tweet out about the bravery of young trans people.
So no tweets about the bravery of young men, 18-year-old, sometimes younger, who are storming the beaches of Normandy and getting killed in the process in order to fight for the freedom of the West.
Nothing about that, but true bravery apparently is declaring that you are a member of the opposite sex.
So President Biden tweeted out yesterday to transgender Americans across the country, especially the young people who are so brave.
I want you to know your president has your back during Pride Month and all the time.
So brave.
Okay, so Let's talk for a second about the concept of bravery.
I mean, first, let's just make clear that there is no good reason why the White House decided to ignore D-Day.
I mean, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, was directly asked why Joe Biden didn't bother to pay tribute to D-Day, and her answer was sufficiently nonsensical.
Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump all commemorated D-Day anniversaries on D-Day, the D-Day anniversary.
Why didn't President Biden?
Well, I can tell you that certainly his value for the role that the men who served on D-Day and the memory of them, the families who have kept their memories alive over the course of years on this day is something the President has spoke to many, many times in the past.
It's close to his heart.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's more we would have to say on it.
Okay, so no good reason why exactly the administration decided to ignore D-Day.
But it's the definition of bravery I want to focus in on here.
Because according to Joe Biden, the bravery of the men of D-Day was not worthy of note this year, but the bravery of young trans people is worthy of note.
So this does require us to actually ask what definition of bravery we're using.
I mean, for years, I've joked publicly that our definition of bravery has changed rather radically since Normandy.
Because it seems that the old definition of bravery was a more classical definition of bravery.
The new definition of bravery is, I'm living my truth and I demand your applause.
That is the new definition of bravery.
My truth, your applause.
And if you don't applaud, then I guess that just makes me even more brave, because one day I will force you to applaud.
So to understand how the notion of truth and courage has morphed over time, I think we first have to understand the classical definition of bravery.
There's no better place to go for a classical definition of courage than back to Aristotle.
And I know it sounds pedantic, but these words do demand definition because the change in fundamental terms in our society demands some sort of explanation.
I mean, we're redefining terms willy-nilly.
We're redefining terms like man and woman.
And now we're redefining basic human attributes and virtues like courage.
So Aristotle spends an inordinate amount of time in Nicomachean Ethics talking specifically about the definition of courage.
What makes a person courageous or not?
First of all, there's a certain irony to the fact that the word used in Greek to describe courage, andria, is actually Literally manliness, right?
The idea of courage is connected with being a man because the idea is that men are the ones who are supposed to put themselves at physical risk in order to protect something higher.
The Aristotelian definition of courage involves a few things.
First of all, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.
It's a book about virtue.
It's sort of different.
Aristotle's definition of what makes a good person, and even the biblical definition.
The biblical definition suggests that there's a bunch of rules, and if you follow these rules, then this means at the end of your life you have been a good person.
Aristotle's idea of a good person, later adopted by both Thomas Aquinas and Maimonides, his basic idea is instead that the way you become a good person is you cultivate virtues within you.
You cultivate character traits.
And the way you cultivate those character traits is by practicing at those character traits in a wide variety of scenarios.
So one of the virtues that he puts a lot of focus on is courage, right?
Manliness in the original Gris.
So what is that?
According to Aristotle, virtually every virtue is supposed to be the mean between two wide variants.
And so courage, for example, is a mean between fear and confidence, right?
It's the it's the average.
It's supposed to be right in the middle, right?
The goal is to find that golden mean and then to stick to that golden mean.
So you're not supposed to be too fearful, but you're also not to be you're not to be foolhardy.
You're not supposed to just rush into the middle of traffic or something and call yourself courageous on on behalf of that.
So what exactly does courage constitute?
Courage constitutes acts performed with knowledge of violence or risk or pain that are on behalf of a higher goal, right?
They're on behalf of what he would term a final purpose, right?
A telos, right?
The idea would be that you're defending something higher and you do something at personal risk in order to achieve that something higher.
So the most obvious example that Aristotle talks about is, of course, soldiers doing battle in order to defend family and friends and homeland.
The idea there, of course, is that you are putting yourself at risk to protect something higher.
It is almost a sort of self-abnegation.
Yes, you're doing something noble.
And yes, you're doing something honorable.
And Aristotle even says, But there are certain types of fear.
As I say, courage is supposed to be somewhere between fear and confidence.
There are certain types of fear that are perfectly OK.
For example, Aristotle specifically says, fear of shame does not make you a coward.
Fear of shame is actually a good thing because it drives you to do things that are not shameful, which is an amazing thing, because in our society, the idea is somehow that courage lies in rejection of shame completely.
You're never supposed to be ashamed of anything you do.
You're not supposed to be worried about what anybody else thinks of you.
True courage is standing up to everybody and ignoring their words about you.
OK, and this Definition of courage was the definition of courage in most of the West for most of time And now we have sort of a new definition of courage and the new definition of courage is complete self-involvement You are courageous if you live your truth, if you're authentic.
Because identity itself, like who you are as a human being, in the ancient world, and again, throughout most of human history, was, identity lay in your relationship with a system outside, how you adjust to the rules of your society.
In fact, we are brought up as human beings to be civilized into the rules of our society.
This is what civilization means.
You take young children, who are perfectly authentic, I have little kids, they're authentic all the time.
Whatever goes through their head, comes out their mouth.
That is just the way it works.
There is no filter.
There is no brain mouth filter in kids.
They are 100% authentic all of the time and they are little monsters.
I love my kids.
Kids are not civilized.
The whole purpose of civilization is to civilize them to the rules of a society.
And even folks on the left who praise authenticity, they don't really want full authenticity for everybody because that leads to conflict.
If a religious person is authentic, they might be judgmental.
So we can't allow that level of authenticity.
But they lie and they say it's all about authenticity.
Okay, well, if it's all about authenticity, this cuts directly against civilization.
But the way we have now defined courage is that authenticity is courage.
You're living your truth.
You're living your life, no matter what anybody else says.
And this is because identity itself has shifted.
It used to be, again, that you found your identity in adjusting yourself to your sort of place in civilization and to the rules of civilization.
You found happiness in living by the natural law in the view of the ancient Greeks, or living by the morality of the Bible in Judeo-Christian ethics, or living by both in sort of the merger of the two.
Which I talk about in my book, The Right Side of History.
Now, identity is found instead within.
True courage is finding who you are within, in the same way that a small child would.
Authenticity is where everything is.
There's no higher cause.
It's just about you.
And so true bravery, in this new definition, is expressing yourself.
If you express yourself, it doesn't matter what the rules of society are.
It doesn't matter whether you're doing any good for the world.
Expressing yourself is the truest form of bravery.
Being authentically you is the truest form of bravery, no matter the consequences to anyone else, no matter the consequences to society.
That's a pretty wild redefinition of what courage means.
In fact, it's almost a complete reversal of what courage means.
You're acting out of almost a pure sense of self-involvement without any reference to a higher cause or higher purpose.
But I was thinking about this yesterday, and I thought, you know what?
Maybe I'm selling the new definition of courage short.
Maybe I'm selling it a little bit short.
And I'll explain what I mean in just one second about selling the new definition of courage short.
I'll explain in a second.
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Okay, so.
Maybe my new definition, or the new definition that I think the left is using with regard to courage, which is self-proclamation and authenticity.
Maybe I'm selling it a little bit short.
Maybe there is some sort of world-changing thing happening when you decide that you're going to buck all convention and you're going to redefine basic terms like man or woman.
That makes you courageous.
That makes you brave.
Even in an older sense, all that requires is a complete rejection Of the telos, of the final goal.
So if the final goal was that you recognize nature for what it is, and then you live in accordance with nature's laws, which again is the point that Aristotle was making throughout Nicomachean ethics.
It's a point that was made by Plato as well.
And then it was a point that was adopted by most of the Judeo-Christian world.
And by the way, early on in the Islamic world as well, the Everos and Al-Farabi.
If you reject all of those final goals and you decide there are new final goals in which your personal self-definition is supposed to be projected out onto the world to change the world.
Then, I suppose, according to this point of view, that is an almost classical definition of courage.
You're putting yourself at quote-unquote risk in order to change the entire system, in order to change the entire society.
Right?
And in this case, the personal is political.
When you declare that your sense of the authentic you is that you are a member of the opposite sex, what you are actually declaring is war, On the idea of sex, biologically.
What you're actually declaring is that the entire society is wrong and you are right and the entire society has to change.
You're putting yourself supposedly at personal risk, although in our society I can't say that you're putting yourself at personal risk when you declare that you are not heterosexual, for example.
It seems more like the media is going to celebrate you tremendously, as demonstrated by Elliot Page or Demi Lovato, but If you are, the idea is that you're putting yourself at personal, the personal is political.
Your sense of the authentic now must be projected out into the world to change all of the standards.
So what exactly is the higher cause?
The higher cause is changing all the standards.
The higher cause is tearing down all the definitions.
And this is how you get to the point where the president of the United States is ignoring soldiers on the battlefield 77 years ago, fighting actual Nazi fascists and getting killed for their efforts.
He's ignoring that in favor of the idea that if you declare yourself a member of the opposite sex, you, in fact, are acting in accordance with some virtue called courage or some virtue called bravery.
All that takes is a reorientation or redefinition of what your end goal is, and that is to tear down the system as a whole.
And your very act of self-definition is a is a personal act of defiance at those definitions, which, of course, have to be torn down.
And this, of course, according to the left, makes you a hero.
And you can see this happening right throughout American life now.
The complete redefinition of courage based on not merely a sort of self-involvement, but based on a deep abiding desire to build a coalition to tear down all of the systems of definition The heterosexual patriarchy, the cisgender patriarchy, all of the systems and hierarchies of power that have been imbued in our society, all those have to be torn down.
And the minute you declare yourself not living in accordance with those things, you are a person who is brave.
You're a person who is courageous.
That is, I think, the deeper philosophical point that is being made, that is buried well underneath the sort of tweets that Joe Biden is sending out.
And you can see this play out in every area of American life.
Because here's the thing, when you look at the sort of woke coalition that's been built, and all these members of the woke are patting each other on the back for their bravery and their courage, even though they don't actually get along inside their own halls of power, right?
They have serious disagreements.
There are serious disagreements, for example, in the LGBT community between the L's and the T's.
There's serious disagreement.
You have trad feminists and traditional lesbians, people like Martina Navratilova, who is in open battle with transgender rights advocates, who of course argue that there is no definition of man and woman, that is not absolutely malleable.
Lesbians argue that there is such a thing as a woman, and we are women who are sexually attracted to women, and then you have transgender rights advocates who argue that a man who identifies as a woman is now a woman, so there is no such thing as a woman.
And if you're a woman who is not attracted to a trans woman, then this means that you are in some way sexist.
Right?
There's all sorts of internal schisms and battles that are going on inside the woke community, but if everybody pats each other on the back for their courage in taking on the higher goal, which is tearing down the system as a whole, then we are ushered into a new utopian vision.
And that coalition, it is almost hysterically funny how fragmentary this coalition is.
And how clear it is that the goal is to cobble together a coalition of people who disagree about nearly everything under a rubric of resistance.
So I have to take just the most obvious visual manifestation of this that I've ever seen.
So yesterday on pinknews.co.uk, they had a story about the progress pride flag.
Here's their story.
The Progress pride flag has been redesigned by an intersex activist to include intersex people.
A yellow triangle with a purple circle in it has been added to represent intersex people, community, and rights.
The new pride flag was designed by Valentino Vichetti of Intersex Equality Rights UK, who is an intersex activist and Diva magazine columnist, continuing a tradition of pride flags being updated and reimagined.
So usually the goal of a flag is, of course, to unify.
Right?
We all look at a symbol, and we all recognize our shared humanity in that particular symbol.
You look at the American flag, and it represents the states, and it represents the original colonies, and you say, wow, that's our history.
That's my flag.
Right?
If you're in Canada, and you see the maple leaf, this has some sort of resonant emotional meaning for you.
You see the Union Jack, you're in Britain, same sort of thing.
The new Progress Pride flag is not about the idea that there's any sort of shared values.
The idea here is that you have your individual stripe in the flag, right, as a coalitional flag.
And if your coalition doesn't appear on the flag, the flag ain't for you.
So does a cobbled together agglomeration of people who disagree on nearly everything, but this flag exists in opposition to other unified ideas.
I mean, the flag looks, frankly, like a cat vomited and then you looked at it through a kaleidoscope.
I mean, it's the ugliest flag that anybody's ever seen.
At least the original Pride flag is something visually pretty to look at, right?
I mean, it's just a rainbow flag.
Here you have, apparently, some sort of invasion from the left side of the screen.
Like, it looks like a military movement from the left side of the screen.
It's black, brown, blue, pink, white, yellow, with a purple circle.
I mean, it's just visually incoherent.
But that's sort of the idea, is that every single... Eventually, we're going to reach the point We're in opposition to the unified flags that are provided by countries.
We're going to end up with flags in which every single human has their own little dot.
We're going to have pixelated flags with 330 million dots, one to represent you.
And if your dot isn't represented in the flag, the flag doesn't represent you anymore.
The idea is we can only be unified in opposition to something else because we don't share any values.
We can only be unified in opposition to another thing.
Which is why it is kind of important that the Department of Defense is refusing to fly the pride flag.
So there is a big uproar inside the Biden administration.
The State Department decided they were going to fly the pride flag at the State Department.
First of all, this is insipid.
The only flag that should fly at the American State Department is, in fact, the American flag.
That is the only unifying flag in American life.
We shouldn't have flags with a giant cross on it.
We should not have a gay pride flag.
We should not have any of those flags.
Because again, the American flag is non-sectarian.
The American flag is supposed to represent all of us because we are all Americans.
Nonetheless, Joe Biden has decided that all Americans are apparently in support of the entire LGBTQ plus 2 AAIZ agenda.
And therefore, we're going to fly this at the State Department, but only in countries where nobody's going to do anything about it.
We're definitely not going to do that in like Malaysia.
We're certainly not going to do it in Saudi Arabia.
We're not going to do it anywhere in the Middle East, actually.
Well, the Defense Department announced yesterday that they are not going to be flying the pride flag over military bases.
First of all, the fact that this was even an issue, the fact that we were even having the discussion about flying pride flags over military bases is somewhat insane.
Why exactly would we fly a pride flag over a military base?
The reason that we, like, why?
Literally the people who are fighting, unless you're willing to put soldiers in battle with the pride flag on their sleeve, right?
So they're living and dying on behalf of the LGBT agenda, apparently.
Like, what is, why?
Why?
It is sectarian by nature.
By nature.
There's open debate about the extent to which Americans support every aspect of the agenda promoted by radical activists.
Some people are supportive of some, some are supportive of others, some are supportive of none.
But the idea that this is representative of some sort of unified body of opinion in the United States is kind of crazy.
Okay, so the Department of Defense rejected this, but here's what they announced.
They said the reason that they are rejecting this is not because they're reflecting any lack of respect or admiration for people of the LGBTQ plus community.
Instead, they were afraid that if they made an exception, then people might want to fly other flags, like the don't tread on me flag.
Fairly incredible.
So they've decided to ban all flags except the American flag because you might want to fly like a don't tread on me flag and that would be super duper duper bad.
Again, these things matter because when we talk about what unifies us as a country, or what unifies us as a society, shared ideas of what courage is, or shared ideas of what the good is, or shared idea of what represents the good life for Americans, these are basic ideas we should share but we no longer share them and so we're falling apart as a country.
We'll get to more of this depressing notion in just one second.
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Alrighty, so as I've been talking about here, What you can see is a sort of woke coalition that is mobilizing against symbols of unity.
That's the reason why we're even having a discussion about why we should put up LGBT flags at Defense Department bases.
It's a wild idea from the very beginning.
It's also the reason why, for example, the Democratic Party has decided that they are no longer going to call mothers mothers.
I used to every joke that I used to tell is now a reality.
So I for years I was telling the joke because this is what Democrats apparently think about the nature of sex and gender, that every Mother's Day is actually primary legal guardian of unspecified gender day.
And every Father's Day is secondary legal guardian of unspecified gender day.
Well now, it's not even a joke anymore.
This is stuff they are literally writing into legislation.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, President Joe Biden embraced the woke terminology favored by radical left-wing activists in his 2022 budget proposal.
It refers to mothers as birthing people.
Birthing people.
Yes, we used to call those women.
Birthing people.
Now, men can also have babies, which of course is a lie and one of the stupider ideas ever posited by anybody who has even a half-functional prefrontal cortex.
Birthing people.
Birthing people?
Like, really?
Impenised people?
What is this nonsense?
The text of Biden's record-breaking $6 trillion budget unveiled last month includes a section highlighting more than $200 million in health care spending aimed at reducing the quote, high rate of maternal mortality and race-based disparities in outcomes among birthing people.
So first of all, even this is gendered language.
Why maternal mortality?
Why not just mortality?
Maternal mortality.
I mean, maternal means motherly.
So I mean, they got to get rid of that.
But again, the whole goal here is to tear down definitions and true courage is tearing down those definitions and tearing down your rights in the process.
Because this is broader than merely tearing away definitions or redefining things.
It is the militarization of this approach.
It's not enough to redefine things.
It's not enough to tear down the hierarchies.
In order for those hierarchies to be torn down, your fundamental rights must be abridged.
Your right to freedom of speech must be abridged.
Your right to freedom of religion must be abridged.
For the last again, the true courage today is in identifying how you want internally and forcing the rest of society to shift its entire perspective on life in order to account for your perspective.
The rest of society has to adjust.
And what that means is that their rights must be abridged.
This is the reason why there's a case that's going to the Supreme Court right now about whether Catholic charities ought to be able to engage in foster decisions, whether they ought to be able to have foster homes and whether they ought to have foster agencies.
And the case being made is that because Catholics Actually believe in one man, one woman as the standard for marriage and believe that man, woman, child is the model for a traditional and healthy family that they have to be discriminated against because if they were allowed to actually go forward with their foster agencies, what they would be doing is acting in discriminatory fashion in reinstituting the hierarchy that the truly brave, courageous people are fighting to tear down.
Freedom of religion has to be abridged.
The basic notion of children having a mother and a father has to be abridged in deference to a redefinition.
And every time you fight the patriarchy by identifying in a way that runs contrary to biology, this means that you are a brave person.
Braver, even, than the people who stormed the beaches of Normandy, who, of course, were fighting on behalf of a bad cause.
I mean, they were fighting truly on behalf of a reinstitution of hierarchies, just slightly better hierarchies than the hierarchies that were being pushed by America's fascist enemies at the time.
And you're seeing America's quote unquote liberal institutions fall to exactly this.
They have joined the woke coalition, which again is oriented toward the destruction of all systems of power.
Despite the fact that the American systems of power, which have been gradually broadened to include more people over time in great and good ways.
Despite the fact that those systems have provided more health, more prosperity, more freedom than any systems in the history of man.
By a long shot, by the way, those systems have to be torn down and the ACLU is now on the side of the tearing down.
So the American Civil Liberties Union, you may notice the words civil liberties in the middle of their title.
The American Civil Liberties Union has now decided that civil liberties are of no consequence whatsoever.
Michael Powell has a piece in the New York Times titled Once a Bastion of Free Speech.
The ACLU faces an identity crisis.
It was supposed to be the celebration of a grand career, as the American Civil Liberties Union presented a prestigious award to the longtime lawyer David Goldberger.
He had argued one of its most famous cases defending the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s to march in Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors.
Mr. Goldberger, now 79, adored the ACLU.
But at his celebratory luncheon in 2017, he listened to one speaker after another and felt a growing unease.
A law professor argued that the free speech rights of the far right were not worthy of defense by the ACLU, and that black people experienced defensive speech far more viscerally than white allies.
In the hallway outside, an ACLU official argued it was perfectly legitimate for his lawyers to decline to defend hate speech.
Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.
I got the sense it was more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle, he said in a recent interview.
Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.
Now, here's the thing.
They are standing on principle.
Their principles are just not your principles.
Their principles are not even tolerant of your principles.
Their principles are about tearing down the systems.
They have to have the ACLU stripe and that bizarre flag that we saw earlier in which everybody has their stripe so as to create a coalition against the presumed systems of power.
According to the New York Times, the ACLU-America's high temple of free speech and civil liberties has emerged as a muscular and richly funded progressive powerhouse in recent years, taking on the Trump administration in more than 400 lawsuits.
But the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from founding principle, unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.
Its national and state staff members debate often hotly whether defense of speech conflicts with advocacy for a growing number of progressive causes, including voting rights reparations, transgender rights, and defunding the police.
So, for example, the New York Times points out that Chase Strangio, the lawyer for the transgender wing of the ACLU, openly pushed for censorship of a book by Abigail Schreier.
Now, the New York Times is so unbelievably gutless that they wouldn't even mention Abigail Schreier's book here.
I kid you not.
Like, they literally will not mention Abigail Schreier's book anywhere in the article because they, too, are cowards when it comes to defense of free speech.
The New York Times.
But it is truly incredible how the ACLU is in excellent bellwether for the movement of the left, which at least used to agree on certain basic principles, but no longer.
Now the basic principle is tear down the system.
And you have to be complicit in this.
It is required that you be complicit in this.
You have to shout.
Your true bravery is, again, in supposedly risking, but mostly on behalf of a higher goal.
And the higher goal is tearing down.
So you have a letter from the editor of the of the National Geographic talking about the so-called race card project.
Again, this is National Geographic, a magazine dedicated to human diversity and differences in thought and all sorts and nature.
It's literally called National Geographic.
Right.
And National Geographic instead issues a letter from the editor about the history of race in America, in which she asks everybody to literally carry around a race card.
I'm not kidding you.
More than a decade ago, writer Michelle Norris began the Race Card Project, in which she asked people to think about the word race, and boil their thoughts down to six words.
She expected few would respond.
She was wrong.
So far, more than 500,000 people have written six-word micro-essays about race, hailing from every state in about 100 countries and territories.
Michelle recently has brought the race card project to the National Geographic Society as a storytelling fellow.
We'll support Norris in using a wealth of tools, audio, video, animation, cartography, photography, art technology, to bring the project's archived stories to life.
These aren't just binary conversations about black and white people.
This quote, as she describes it, pulls at all manners of cultural threads from Latinos and indigenous people to Asians and Iranians.
So, what's my race card?
Writes Susan Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of National Geographic.
This is a hard exercise, but reflecting on the difficult past year, on our fraught politics, and so many frank conversations I've had with friends and colleagues, for now, I'll leave it at this.
White.
Privileged.
With much to learn.
Okay, now, some of us would call this cowardice.
Some of us would say that you are attempting to avoid the cancellation of the woke mob because, after all, it sounds, from your name, as though you're a Jewish woman who is editing a major magazine.
And anytime you want, you could theoretically give up that slot to a person of color if you are so dedicated to the proposition that systems of power in the United States are biased toward white people and Jews.
But you're not going to do that, so instead you're going to virtue signal.
But according to the left, this is in an attempt... She's expressing her authentic fears, her authentic wants, and that authenticity is directed at tearing down the system.
This is the new form of courage.
And this form of courage is going to be taught in America's public schools.
This is what critical race theory effectively is.
It's teaching you that true bravery lies in taking on... This is the anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi.
It is the critical race theory of Derrick Bell that true bravery lies in speaking truth to power and speaking truth to power means tearing down all the systems.
And this sort of new redefinition of courage, this sort of new redefinition of national mission is being promoted by none other than Barack Obama, one of the most divisive political figures of my lifetime.
I think maybe the most divisive political figure of my lifetime.
And yes, I'm including President Trump in there because President Trump followed Obama.
And there was a reason for that.
Barack Obama deliberately decided he could have been a unifying president.
In 2008, he came along and said, And then, he immediately proceeded to polarize Americans along racial lines, along gender lines, along lines of sexual orientation, and he proceeded to try to cobble together a coalition to take down the systems of power and enshrine himself in power at the exact same time.
And now, of course, What is he pushing for?
He's pushing for critical race theory, which is not a shock considering that he was a proponent of critical race theory back in the 1980s.
He was literally hugging Derrick Bell, right?
One of the founders and promoters of critical race theory in the 1980s when Derrick Bell was denied tenure at Harvard Law School.
So here's Barack Obama complaining that Republicans have noticed what he is doing.
You would think with all the public policy debates that are taking place right now that, you know, the Republican Party would be engaged in a Significant debate about how are we going to deal with the economy and what are we going to do about climate change and what are we going to do about Lo and behold, the single most important issue to them apparently right now is critical race theory.
Who knew that that was the threat to our republic?
Um, we did.
Because you were the one who started promoting it, Mr. President.
You were the one who decided that it was very important to polarize Americans along racial lines and suggest that all the systems of power of America were significantly infused, and indeed irredeemably infused, with white supremacy.
And again, the goal here for the left is continue to form that coalition.
It's all about the coalition, which is, of course, why Barack Obama is blaming a rise of anti-Semitism.
On not his own party, not his own actions, by the way, in supporting the Iranian regime or supporting the Palestinian regime?
No.
Instead, Barack Obama is blaming Donald Trump and Republicans, despite the fact that the radical uptick in anti-Semitism we have seen over the past couple of years is deeply tied into the left-wing ideologies that are associated with Black Lives Matter, that are associated with the pro-Palestinian cause.
that are associated with his own sort of conspiratorial viewpoint on hierarchies of power in the United States.
I've noticed that Barack Obama isn't spending any time condemning, for example, Ilhan Omar, who's out there comparing Israel to Hamas.
He's only condemning Trump, suggesting that Trump is responsible for anti-Semitism.
Again, this is courage, according to the left, because courage is dependent on the final goal in the Aristotelian notion.
This is why Barack Obama... Why are you paying attention?
It's a critical race theory.
Why do you care if we're indoctrinating your kids in the idea that true bravery lies in authentically identifying as less if they are a member of a particular race?
Also, I'm going to stand up for the most radical members of my coalition.
Okay, now.
What this is going to lead to, of course, is eventually a breakdown in the coalition.
We're going to get to that in just one second.
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So, if the chief goal here is keeping the coalition operative, that it's all just about the coalition, and it's got to be a woke coalition that is designed at tearing down the system, this naturally means that enemies must atone.
All who defend any aspect of the system must be destroyed, from the most minor to the most grave violations of the system.
This is why Ellie Kemper has to be forced to apologize for being in a beauty pageant in, like, 1999 that had nothing to do with racism at the time.
And now she's being forced to apologize.
You'll remember her from The Office and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Well, now she has apologized.
She says, Hi guys, when I was 19 years old, I decided to participate in a debutante ball in my hometown.
The century old organization that hosted the debutante ball had an unquestionably racist, sexist and elitist past.
I was not aware of this history at the time, but ignorance is no excuse.
I was old enough to have educated myself before getting involved.
Well, she's now done her mea culpa and she can she can be allowed back into the halls She says, I unequivocally deplore, denounce, and reject white supremacy.
Who suggested she had not?
At the same time, I acknowledge that because of my race and my privilege, I am the beneficiary of a system that has dispensed unequal justice and unequal rewards.
Now, again, most of us, in the traditional sense, would call this cowardice.
Because all this is, is just fear that she is going to be rejected by a group of people who are bullies and totalitarians.
But according to the left, this is true courage, because true courage, again, lies in joining the mob to tear down the system.
They're an army on behalf of a higher good.
And this means, when you're an army on behalf of a higher good, that anyone who is a threat has to go.
And right now, who is the highest threat?
The highest threat is Joe Manchin, because Joe Manchin is an obstacle.
Joe Manchin has now refused to go along with the Democratic dream of completely remaking the way we vote in the United States, federalizing all election procedures, allowing ballot harvesting, getting rid of voter ID laws.
He said, I'm not going to kill the filibuster, which is in fact a check and balance on mob rule.
It is a check and balance against the predation of the mob against individual rights, which is exactly, of course, what the left is looking for.
They don't like individual rights.
They want individual rights tossed out the window the same way the ACLU does on behalf of progressive causes.
And Joe Manchin is like, no, we're not doing any of that.
So this means that Joe Manchin is now the enemy because you're either with the woke or you are against the woke.
And right now, Joe Manchin is not on the side of the woke.
And this means that inside his own party, they have decided the strongest move here is to attack Joe Manchin.
Now, this makes perfect sense from an ideological perspective, right?
From an ideological perspective, they have dedicated themselves to the proposition that institutions of American power are bad.
They are bad.
Unless you can weaponize those institutions of American power and use them on behalf of woke causes, right?
Then they're good, right?
The filibuster used by Chuck Schumer is good.
The filibuster used by the right is bad and should be nuked.
And Joe Manchin is standing in the way of all of this.
And so now his own party is going to war with Joe Manchin.
We'll see how far this gets them, by the way.
Because it turns out that you generate a lot of resistance to yourself and to your agenda when you decide that it's a battle of all against all.
When you decide that it is your coalition versus the prevailing systems of power.
And anybody who stands in the way and argues for like neutral principles like maybe the filibuster should stay even if it hurts our side this time.
Which by the way Republicans did a couple of years ago.
Hilarious to watch all the members of the journalistic Yes, now do the Democrats.
You know who kept the filibuster the whole time?
Mitch McConnell, who was in the majority.
the filibuster to remain. Yes, now do the Democrats. You know who kept the filibuster the whole time? Mitch McConnell, who was in the majority.
Anyway, Joe Manchin has become persona non grata inside the Democratic Party.
James Clyburn of South Carolina, who is in fact a pretty radical politician, not quite Bernie Sanders openly, but a very radical, and says very inflammatory things on the issue of race on a fairly regular basis.
He decided to go after Joe Manchin yesterday.
Again, it's a bold strategy to go after a senator from a state that voted 40 percentage point gap in favor of Donald Trump.
Really brave move here.
And by the way, we've had senators switch parties before.
Richard Shelby did it.
Jim Jeffords do it the other way back in the early 2000s.
This is a bold move, Cotton.
We'll see how it works out for them.
Here's James Clyburn going after Joe Manchin.
I would say to Senator Manchin, you've told us what you are against.
How about put forth the legislation that you would like to see pass?
Let us see your bill.
The fact of the matter is, the greatest empires in the world came down because of decadence and a lot of avoidance of issues.
It's a whole theory that Nero played his fiddle as Rome burned.
But what we have is a modern day fiddling around in the Senate, and this democracy is on fire.
OK, what's hilarious about the argument that he's making right now is that the Senate is ineffective, so we should just overrule it.
He's like, the fall of Rome, the fall of the Roman Republic was like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
Okay, so there are two separate falls, the fall of the Roman Republic and also the fall of the Roman Empire, two separate things.
The fall of the Roman Republic Was people making arguments like James Clyburn, right?
The Senate is a bunch of elderly, white, privileged people who are arguing with each other all the time.
And if they would just stop that, we need a dictator.
We need somebody to solve this problem.
Julius, want to step in?
Right?
That was the basic idea.
The dictatorship in Rome began because people were making the argument that the legislative process in Rome was ineffective.
That's exactly the argument that James Clyburn is making right now.
Kill the filibuster because we're not getting what we want.
And then invoking the fall of Rome.
I mean, the ignorance truly is sort of on display there with regard to just basic Roman history is fairly incredible.
But the strategic move here, again, it's an ideological move, but once you're committed, you're committed.
And there's no such thing as being insufficiently committed.
Once you're committed to the fight, You gotta be committed to the fight.
Jamaal Bowman, who is a radical congressperson from New York, again from a very blue district, he is out there ripping Joe Manchin as well.
Joe Manchin has become the new Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell, during Obama's presidency, said he would do everything in his power to stop Obama.
He's also repeated that now during the Biden presidency by saying he would do everything in his power to stop President Biden.
And now Joe Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and to stop our work for the people, the work that the people sent us here to do.
No dissent will be brooked, institutions must be torn down, and Joe Manchin is in the way.
I mean, it's fairly incredible.
You have members of the Democratic—like, where's Pelosi?
Right, Pelosi's the head of her party in the House.
She's the Speaker of the House.
Why isn't she saying to her people, guys, you know, we kind of need Joe.
Joe is the swing vote.
Instead, she's like, you know what, go on TV, Jamal, and just rip him up.
James Clyburn, too.
That's pretty incredible.
Jamel Hill, meanwhile, can always be counted on for the stupidest and most radical take.
She tweeted out, This is such a self-contradictory tweet.
Let us count the ways.
country, record number of black voters show up to save this democracy only for white supremacy to be upheld by a cowardly power hungry white dude. Joe Manchin is a clown. Okay, this is such a self contradictory tweet. Let us count the ways. First of all, when you say record number of black voters show up to save this democracy and the white supremacy is upheld. Um, what if a record number of black voters showed up to save the democracy and we're not suppressed? That would suggest that there is not massive voter suppression when a record number of black voters show up.
That is pretty much definitionally not voter suppression.
And when you say that they voted up to show up to save this democracy, which, by the way, is the argument the left was making about how Trump was a threat to the democracy, only for white supremacy to be upheld by a cowardly, power-hungry white dude, I have a question.
He was the Democrat.
Okay, that guy is in the party that you presumably voted for.
The party of democracy.
So you're just unhappy that, so basically this falls under the rubric of everything I like is democracy in action, anything I don't like is white supremacy.
Jemele Hill's a clown, I mean really, just clownish, clownish stuff from Jemele Hill.
But Joy Reid is there to support it?
She said, is this what folks on the right are so mad about?
Let's unpack.
Hasn't the filibuster been used from post-Civil War era straight through the 1950s and 60s to uphold white supremacy?
Isn't Manchin literally caping for that?
I have a question.
Barack Obama upheld the filibuster and bragged about upholding the filibuster and how important it was.
Joe Biden bragged about upholding the filibuster.
But in pursuit of utopia, true courage is doing anything you can to join the coalition of the woke.
And the personal is political in this battle.
The redefinition of courage is deeply intertwined with the attempt to tear down all of the systems that have made America great.
I'm not talking about systems of discrimination.
I'm talking about systems of freedom, individual rights, checks and balances in government, federalism.
All these things have to be torn down.
And if you join that cause, And if you join that cause by joining the coalition against traditional definitions of things ranging from sex to marriage, then this means that you are doing something good for the world.
And that is why Joe Biden is paying tribute to you today and not the people who died on D-Day.
All righty.
We'll be back here tomorrow with much, much more.
Also 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.
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