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June 29, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
45:54
The Cold Civil War | Ep. 1286
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California extends its travel ban on state employees to red states with 105 million citizens.
Gwen Berry milks her anti-American moment for all it's worth.
And the Supreme Court decides to leave girls unprotected in their locker rooms.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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What we are watching in the United States is a slow motion breakup.
Now, that does not mean that there is going to be like a hot civil war in which American citizens are shooting at each other or firing mortars at each other or something.
What it does mean is that the states are coming apart.
We have two separate countries and they are becoming more red and more blue, respectively, over time.
And that is why federal politics are so unbelievably unworkable right now, because there is just a different set of priorities on each side of the ledger.
Now normally the solution to that, if you wish to maintain a country, would be to have a small federal government whose job it is to basically enforce only the most important and rudimentary of individual rights.
It would not be the job of the federal government to get involved in each and every decision in your life, because obviously California lives differently than Florida.
Instead, the blue states will not allow that to happen.
The blue states wish to cram down their lifestyle on the red states.
Understand that we are living in a time of rising authoritarianism and the great authoritarian threat is not relegated solely to the extreme right.
In fact, it has taken over the mainstream left.
The mainstream left would love to control the lives of the people who live under its auspices.
They would love to control the federal government and cram down those federal standards on states that disagree with them.
And decentralization and federalism would be an excellent solution to this, but the left will not abide that.
So look at California and understand that if you live in a red state, it's not just that California wants to separate off from you.
It's that California wishes you to live as they live.
California is not merely saying we don't want to do business with the state of Florida, for example.
California is saying we also would love to run the federal government and make sure that Florida cannot act like Florida acts.
So here's the story from Politico today.
California has now added Florida and four other states to its official travel ban list after Attorney General Rob Bonta said on Monday the states passed anti-LGBTQ laws that are quote-unquote directly targeting transgender youth.
So in other words, if you work for the state of California and you need to travel to Florida on business, you no longer can on the state dime because Florida passed a law saying that boys should not go in girls' locker rooms.
This is how polarized our political debate has become.
We've become two countries on nearly every issue of the day, from the most major to the most minor.
And it is most true, culturally speaking.
Economically speaking, there's a fair bit of crossover between people who want bigger spending programs or who want higher taxes.
There are people on the populist right who want bigger spending programs, just directed at their constituents, and people on the left who want the same sort of thing.
Economically, shockingly, there are disagreements, but there's more sort of common ground for possible consensus when it comes to economics than there is with regard to cultural issues.
Which is why California is now launching this travel ban on the basis of laws that are supposedly quote-unquote anti-transgender when what they are really doing is enshrining the ability for women to have their own locker rooms, for example.
The announcement, which came at a press conference on the 52nd anniversary of the Stonewall riots, means that California is now banning state-funded travel to 17 states based on a 2016 law.
Bonta announced that Arkansas, Montana, North Dakota, and West Virginia have now joined Florida as the newest states on the list.
Bonta said California must take action to avoid supporting or financing discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
Now, if California wished to take this to its logical extreme, California would stop investing in any company that does business in these states.
You'd get full-scale boycott and divestment.
from companies that exist in these other states.
Maybe tariffs against those other states, right?
Which, of course, would violate the Privileges and Immunities Clause of the United States Constitution, which leaves all of this in federal hands.
Five years ago, California prohibited most taxpayer-funded travel to states deemed to have passed laws that discriminate against LGBTQ people.
Assembly Bill 1887 was prompted by an outrage in California over a North Carolina law that required people to use public bathrooms based on the sex shown on their birth certificate.
Now you may ask yourself, what exactly does California have to say about that?
That's the whole point.
California doesn't merely wish to live as California wishes to live.
California wishes North Carolina to do what it wants or there will be consequences.
You notice that North Carolina has not banned travel to California.
Florida has not banned travel to California.
The discrimination and the authoritarianism only run one way.
Before Bonta's announcement on Monday, 12 other states were already on the California ban list.
Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.
You may notice something that these states have in common.
They're all red.
The law has limited exemptions, such as travel necessary to enforce California laws, participate in litigation, or protect public health.
The Human Rights Campaign has been pushing this.
to use private funding in order to travel to these states to participate in athletic competition.
And so if UCLA wants to play University of Alabama, well then they have to somehow get private donations in order to travel. The Human Rights Campaign has been pushing this.
The Human Rights Campaign is a radical pro-LGBTQ group.
They say that 2021 has been a record-breaking year for anti-LGBTQ and anti-transgender legislation.
Okay, understand.
The legislation that is being passed is not anti-LGBTQ.
It's not anti-transgender.
It protects women who are biologically women.
End of story.
But again, California has been engaged in this battle against red states for quite a while.
And you know what's happening?
Red citizens in blue states are just leaving.
They are realizing that the next target is going to be them.
They are realizing, as I realized with my family, that we didn't just move because of the taxes from California.
We moved from California to Florida because we don't want to live under the purview of authoritarian, small-minded bigots who believe that religious lifestyles need to be banned in order to facilitate the great social left-wing movement.
Which is what is going to happen in California.
If you believe that the sort of discrimination they are now attempting to push down on Oklahoma and North Carolina and Florida doesn't apply to their citizens within their own borders, you got another thing coming.
Assemblymember Evan Lowe, Democrat of Campbell, chair of the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, said it's important for our state to send a strong message.
He said the list's expansion also sends a message to state workers that will not be required to travel to states discriminating against LGBTQ and trans youth, where our quote, opponents are motivated by fear and hate.
So the country is pretty obviously coming apart at the seams.
We are engaged in what I will call a cold civil war.
But it's not a hot civil war, because again, nobody's firing guns at each other.
But it is a cold civil war.
And it is a cold civil war only because the federal government has not been able to actually use its power to cram down California on Florida.
And that's going to be the great battle of the future.
There's a sort of bumper sticker that's been going around in Florida, because Governor Ron DeSantis is very popular here.
Florida has gotten a lot redder, even it has gotten demographically browner, which is kind of an amazing rebuttal to the left-wing notion that demographics are destiny.
So there's this bumper sticker that's been going around, which is, Make America Florida.
There's another one going around, Don't California my Florida.
Well, if America were more like Florida, what that would mean is that Californians get to live as they wish to live.
It would also mean that Floridians get to live as they wish to live.
Florida would become more like California.
That would be because the federal government is cramming down a particular set of standards and practices on Floridians that they do not want.
Only one direction is it's authoritarian.
I saw yesterday that there are a lot of people on the left who are bizarrely surprised at the fact that Clarence Thomas, the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court, had made statements about how the federal government really should not be in the business of regulating marijuana.
I'm not sure why they're so surprised by that.
That's been Clarence Thomas's position for quite a while.
I'm not sure why there are so many people surprised by this.
National Review has been in favor of decriminalizing marijuana use for decades at this point.
Why?
Because if you are on the right, one of the things that you rely upon to maintain the ability to live a liberty-driven lifestyle is a more libertarian perspective on government.
The left does not have any such compunction.
The left deeply desires to cram down its own worldview on everybody else.
So understand, when we talk about a cold civil war, this is not an even-handed civil war in which both sides want similar things from the other side.
Very much the opposite.
The right typically wants to be left alone, and the left does not want to leave the right alone.
And you can see this.
You can see the country coming apart on every major and minor issue of the day, particularly on social issues.
If you see the map getting more polarized, that is because the social left has been on the march.
It's not the economic left.
Yes, Obamacare made a difference, but Obamacare was not the great breaking point in the United States.
The great breaking point in the United States was the recapitulation of American politics in terms of radical social policy that alienated the entire middle of the country.
And it continues to pace.
So when the left says, why are you paying attention to social issues?
The answer is because we see what you are coming to do.
We see what you want from us.
Okay, so to take an example, now let's talk about the issue of race in the United States.
Okay, so in order for us to live in a common polity, we have to understand certain basic agreements, right?
Even if you believe in a sort of federalist perspective, in a libertarian perspective, there have to be certain basic premises, which is that we all share a country for a reason, and that the country is rooted in some fundamental good.
If you believe that the country is fundamentally bad and wrong, and it needs to be completely remade, particularly along authoritarian lines, well, that is going to lead to conflict.
Well, half the country cheers that second perspective at this point.
Right?
Which is why you see Gwen Berry making national news.
We now live in a country where you become more rich and more famous for boycotting the national anthem than you do for simply standing up for the national anthem.
In baseball in the 1970s, there was this very famous circumstance where Rick Monday, who was in outfields at the time for the Chicago Cubs, It was at Wrigley Field, and Rick Monday went and grabbed, there was a guy trying to, he ran onto the field, he was trying to burn an American flag.
Rick Monday came over and grabbed the American flag away from him, and he was cheered for this.
Today, the player himself would be lighting the American flag on fire in the outfield, and the media would be cheering for him.
So Gwenberry has made international headlines because at the Olympic trials she decided to turn her face away from the flag and to make faces during the national anthem and then to post about what a courageous fighter she was.
The reason why we are all paying attention to you, Gwenberry, is because you want us to pay attention to you.
You want the attention.
The quick path to fame and riches in the United States is to crap all over the flag, not to pay attention to the flag.
Being patriotic is considered rote and hackneyed.
Burning the flag is considered forward-thinking and wonderful by at least half the country, which means there can't be any sort of unified polity.
There have to be some things that we agree on, on a broad level.
And by the way, if you're representing the United States in, for example, the Pan American Games, as Gwen Berry did, right?
She did in 2019, and she got in hot water with the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee, specifically because she decided that she was going to raise her fist during the national anthem in protest of something or other.
And then the New York Times gave her space, right?
Because that is how this works.
So she's been attempting to get attention for this sort of stuff for quite a while, despite the fact that Gwenberry has lived a pretty amazing life in the United States, as it turns out.
Gwenberry grew up in her grandparents' home.
There were 13 people in the home.
In her grandmother's home.
And then she had a baby out of wedlock at the age of 15, got a scholarship to go to Southern Illinois University, and she's made a career ever since throwing a hammer.
That's kind of an amazing thing in the United States, right?
You don't hear a lot of stories like that in other places, but the utter ingratitude is the point.
So here is Gwen Berry speaking to the New York Times just about a year ago, talking about how cruel it was that people were angry at her for protesting the American flag and the national anthem.
Again, while voluntarily joining a team to represent the United States, we're not talking about a regular, even Colin Kaepernick playing for an NFL team and deciding he doesn't like the national anthem like a dolt.
We're talking about somebody whose overt job is to represent the United States and we're supposed to cheer them when they crap all over the United States.
And the New York Times thinks that this is great.
Here was Gwenberry talking about this just last year.
So last summer at the Pan American Games, I threw 74 meters and I won gold.
I remember the medal was so heavy and so real.
I was excited.
I was nervous.
In that moment when the national anthem was playing, I knew that that national anthem did not speak for people like me in America.
The freedom, liberty, and justice for all, it is not for black people.
Something came over me.
I raised my fist.
I felt like I was not at peace with myself if I had not said something or did something in that moment.
Okay, let's point out something.
She says that the national anthem and the flag are not for her.
She is literally sitting there wearing a shirt that says United States Pan American team with the American flag on it.
Weird.
Weird how you're very happy to take the notoriety associated with representing the United States and then to crap all over the national anthem and the American flag.
But this has become mainstream thinking on the left.
They cannot offend people who wish to tear away any common symbol of the United States.
Again, I'm all for diversity of viewpoint.
She has a right to protest.
She does.
She doesn't have a right to protest while representing the United States, per se, because that's a weird thing.
It's like, as Charles Cook of the National Review suggested, it's like saying that you're going to play for the New York Yankees, you get signed by the New York Yankees, you sign the contract, and the first thing you say is, I'm never wearing pinstripes.
I'm only wearing a red uniform.
Like, well, no, that's not how any of this works.
But, in the United States, free country, she can say whatever she wants.
If we are to have a common polity, however, there has to be certain basic agreements on certain things.
Like, you don't get to invade.
Other people's individual rights, so her rights are not being invaded.
Also, we should have a baseline level of social agreement that there are some common symbols that carry some sort of sacred unity representing those rights.
But we don't want to unify over all that.
So you have Jen Psaki from the White House defending this sort of stuff.
I haven't spoken to the President specifically about this, but I know he's incredibly proud to be an American and has great respect for the anthem and all that it represents, especially for our men and women serving in uniform all around the world.
He would also say, of course, that part of that pride in our country means recognizing there are moments where we as a country haven't lived up to our highest ideals, and it means respecting the right of people granted to them in the Constitution to peacefully protest.
Well, of course we respect the right of people to peacefully protest.
It doesn't mean you're not an idiot, depending on how you protest.
But again, Gwenberry knows what the math is here.
She knows that she's going to get rich and famous off of this.
Nobody heard of her yesterday.
Everybody's heard of her today.
It's that simple.
An unhealthy country is one that celebrates people who spend their day tearing down the country while purportedly representing the country.
That is not a particularly good thing.
All these cultural issues matter.
They do.
Especially because the kind of idea that America is inherently bad will be crammed down on your kids, right?
It's not as though this is a... everybody has their own perspective game.
People in the United States government right now, in the educational system, wish to push you to believe all the same sort of stuff.
They wish to teach the 1619 Project in schools.
They wish your kids to be indoctrinated in this sort of nonsense ideology in college.
Corporations mirror this sort of stuff.
That is a dangerous thing in the United States.
Because this is a battle for power.
It is.
And it turns out the people who respect the American flag the most are also the ones who are basically going to be okay with people in the private sphere doing what exactly Gwenberry does.
And again, I'm fine with that on a basic kind of dissent level.
But the people who do what Gwenberry does in control of power are going to be very intolerant of anybody having a pro-America viewpoint.
There's a bit of a zero-sum game going on here.
We'll get to more of this with regard to race in just one second.
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Okay, so it is not just Gwen Berry and her silly idiocy with regard to protesting the national anthem while representing the United States that is indicative of the cultural battle we find ourselves in.
It is the fact that, again, institutions of power agree with Gwen Berry.
Institutions of power are cramming down their notions of America as an evil country on the rest of the country, which is why you have Princeton University declaring itself racist and now boasting that their new class is 68% people of color after waiving their SAT score requirement.
According to Daily Wire, Now, the problem is that this, to them, is the only metric as to whether they have done something good or bad.
1500 students for the class of 2025, a full 22% of admitted students are first generation college students, 68% self-identify as quote unquote people of color.
Now the problem is that this to them is the only metric as to whether they have done something good or bad.
In order to achieve 68% people of color apparently they had to get rid of all of their objective metrics of academic performance.
The record number of racial minority admittees comes after the school removed its standardized testing requirement citing a quote-unquote lack of access to testing sites.
Students were allowed to submit their standardized test scores although they allegedly played a limited role in the admissions process.
It is not a coincidence that literally the year you got rid of all the standardized testing, suddenly 68% of the incoming class is minority.
I still want to know how many of those people are Asian because according to the admissions officials, Asians don't count as minorities for purposes of college admissions.
But the zero-sum game that is a college admission slot, How that gets put out, how that gets filled, is largely dependent on whether you believe in individual rights and individual performance or whether you believe in quote-unquote social justice and groupthink.
And it is pretty clear that the institutions of our society have decided, once again, to cram down on the American people particular perceptions of how things should work.
And this is happening at the federal government level too, right?
This is why you have the Federal Department of Justice now telling Georgia that it cannot construct its voting laws how Georgia wishes to construct its voting laws, and calling them racist in the process.
Again, this is all part and parcel of the left attempting to seize the commanding heights of power in authoritarian fashion and shut down opposition.
Meanwhile, claiming that it's the right trying to shut down opposition.
There is a difference in kind between the Department of Justice, for example, attempting to shut down Georgia's voting laws and people criticizing, with no real effect, Gwen Berry.
Not the same thing at all.
Okay, and yet, that is exactly what the Department of Justice is doing.
The Department of Justice is now suing Georgia.
The Georgia Attorney General, a guy named Christopher Carey, says this is blatantly political, which of course it is.
This is just a blatantly political lawsuit.
In fact, I've said it's not a lawsuit.
It's a campaign flyer.
The Department of Justice is simply playing politics.
They are not upholding the rule of law.
And this blatantly political action taken by the United States Department of Justice is factually, legally, and constitutionally wrong.
Anybody who will actually read the Georgia law sees it strengthens security.
It expands access and it improves transparency.
And that's why we will be successful defending this particular action as we will the other seven.
Okay, and again, what this is indicative of is that we are two countries in terms of our mentality with regard to race.
On the one side, we have people who believe that race is a characteristic that really ought to make no difference in how we treat people individually.
On the other side, there's a group of people who believe race is the only important thing in how we treat people both individually and institutionally.
And the people on the second side wish to militarize all the weapons of the United States government and our institutional culture in order to cram down that point of view on everyone who disagrees.
That is just one indicator of our cultural civil war.
Okay, meanwhile, another part of our cultural civil war remains sexual politics.
So remember, we have one half of the country that believes with regard to race in this sort of racially radical viewpoint that we get to cram down on you social justice woke prescriptions for inequality of outcome.
Another group of people who say, let's hold true to certain founding ideals that everybody ought to be treated as an individual, as the Declaration of Independence suggests.
And then when it comes to sexual politics, there's a group of people who say that unless you abide by our sexual standards, we are going to shut it down.
Unless you abide by our sexual standards, we are going to use the power of the government to shut you down.
It's a new woke puritanism.
And it is indicated by the, again, state of California banning travel to states that do not think like the state of California does.
That men can be women and women can be men.
And now you have the greatest institutions of our society promoting this idea.
Right?
Down to the most minor institutions in our society promoting the ideals of sexual liberationism from the 1960s as the new dominant culture.
So for example, the Supreme Court just refused to take a case, refused to take a case with regard to whether a trans student must be allowed to use the opposite sex bathroom.
So you have a boy who says he's a girl, can he now use the girl's bathroom?
Thanks to Justice Gorsuch and his ridiculous decision in Bostock, thanks to that particularly idiotic decision, which suggested the Civil Rights Act of 1964 somehow magically covers people who believe they are members of the other sex, which is just an absurdity on its face.
I mean, it's an absurdity on its face.
Because of that, the Supreme Court has now declined to take up whether or not women are allowed to have separate spaces.
Whether women can, for example, have their own locker rooms, free of a male walking in and dangling his junk.
Half the country thinks it is absolutely unthinkable that you should have any regulations protecting biological women, whether it is in sports, whether it is in locker rooms, or whether it is in any other area of American life.
And the predictable effect of this, of course, is discrimination against women.
Now, there's a case to be made, again, on a libertarian level, that if you, a private business owner, want to have single-sex bathrooms, or if you want to have these policies in your locker room, then you can have those policies in your locker room.
Freedom for all.
But there is very little case that you should be able to use the commanding heights of institutional and cultural power in order to leverage Americans who disagree with you into being discriminated against in places that they frequent.
Which is exactly what is happening.
Take, for example, what is going on in LA.
You want to know why exactly there are people in Florida who are worried about social issues in LA?
It's because they know that California would like to extend the dominance of this ideology into Florida.
So, for example, this is a locker room controversy at a spa in LA, in Los Angeles.
There's a Los Angeles spa, it's called the Wii Spa, and an outraged woman, a biological woman, who happens to be minority apparently, she walks up to the desk and she says, I'm in there with young little girls in the spa and there's a man walking around with his junk hanging out.
And the spa insists that this is no problem because of course the man identifies as a woman.
Here's a little bit of the video.
I just want to be clear with you.
It's okay, it's okay for a man to go into the women's section, show his penis around the other women, young little girls, underage.
Your spa, we spa, condone that.
Is that what you're saying?
Like I asked.
So he can stay there?
He can stay there?
What sexual orientation?
It lets me know he's a man.
He's a man.
Okay, but there's an entire wing of American public life that says not only is he not a man, this woman is a bigot for saying that a man walking around a spa with his junk hanging out is a woman.
Right?
If you say that that man is not a woman, you are the bigot.
She's the bigot.
I mean, these are social issues that have dramatic ramifications because it is coming for you.
It is coming for your business.
It is coming for your religious life.
It is coming for your school.
The left has made this absolutely apparent.
And not just on the governmental level, right?
Using anti-discrimination laws in order to cram down this bizarre version of human logic in which men can become women and women can become men.
An unprecedented notion in all of human logic or history or biology or physics or any other field of human endeavor.
It is institutions who have socially taken up the cause because they understand that the left is pushing for control.
And the right has been back-footed on this stuff.
They've been wrong-footed.
For years and years and years, the right has been told, you know, why are you focusing on those social issues?
If you just leave the social issues off the table, because that's the contentious stuff, then focus in on economics.
That's where you guys are going to win.
You're going to win supporters when it comes to lower taxes and lower spending.
It is precisely the opposite.
If you look at the Trump coalition, the Trump coalition was largely rooted in cultural concerns, not in economic concerns.
And those cultural concerns grow more grave every single day.
Because there is one group that is on the march and one group that simply seeks to preserve its own perspective on life, which happens to be rooted in reality and biology and natural law.
Again, people on the right are not making the case, per se, that a private business in Los Angeles doesn't have the ability to have single-sex locker rooms.
They're saying, you don't get to leverage that idea on me.
The left has no such limitations on its own ambitions here.
And the cultural institutions of our day are seeking to cram down values that have literally nothing to do with their core businesses on everybody else.
Remember, we don't just live in a governmental sphere or laws and regulations, we live in a cultural sphere.
So it does make a difference what your kids watch on TV.
It does make a difference what major corporations are attempting to leverage down on your kids.
When you walk into a Target and Froot Loops is selling Gay Pride Month paraphernalia to your five-year-old, And that's what it's directed at.
Well, that has an impact on how your kid thinks.
And to pretend that it doesn't is to ignore what time it is.
It is to ignore what is going on in the world.
This is why parents are attempting to guard their children.
It's why parents are saying, you know, we just want to be left alone, but you will not leave us alone.
And by the way, if forced to it, if forced to the confrontation, the cold civil war that is currently happening, Will continue to heat up.
There will just be a struggle for who gets to control everybody else.
There will not be any broad-based agreement on classical liberalism where you get to do what you want to do and I get to do what I want to do.
If the left pushes too hard, they're not going to get classical liberals in response.
They're going to get people on the right who react by saying, okay, well, we will take control of the commanding heights and now we will use our leverage to press our own political viewpoint into law.
We will attempt to cram down on you what it is that we want.
Not even on a state or local level.
And not even with regard to public funded enterprise.
We'll do it with regard to private funded enterprise.
The left's radicalism and deep willingness to renormalize institutions, to weaponize against people they don't like, is going to result in a backlash that is going to be far uglier than what the left thinks is going to happen next.
And it does come down to things like what you see in your daily life pissing you off.
It does come down to things like the NFL, for example, putting out full-scale commercials saying football is gay.
Now, let's be real about this.
Football is football.
It's not gay.
It's not straight.
Football is just football.
The hell does the NFL have to say about sexual politics?
When you turn on a game, typically it's because you wish to watch people play football, not because you wish to watch the NFL socially message about any particular social issue.
Whether you're talking about hands up, don't shoot, which was a lie, or whether you're talking about homosexuality in politics.
And yet this is what the NFL is pushing because they feel the cultural momentum from the left.
What they don't understand is sooner or later there's going to be a backlash and it's going to be quite ugly against a lot of the same institutions that have been re-normalized on behalf of radicals.
Most Americans have been apathetic about these sorts of issues.
The harder the left pushes, the more the backlash is going to be.
The greater the backlash, the more polarized the country becomes.
There is no apathetic middle anymore.
You will not be allowed to be apathetic.
You will not be allowed to say things like, I don't care what the NFL sexual politics is, I just want to watch football.
That in and of itself will be evidence of your discriminatory nature.
Here's the NFL ad.
It says, football is Gay.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Football is lesbian.
Football is beautiful.
Football is queer.
It's life is exciting.
It's transgender.
It's bisexual.
Football is freedom.
Football is American.
Football is accepting.
Football is everything.
Well, it isn't.
Football is everything for everyone except if you happen not to believe in the morality of particular sexual behavior.
If you believe in traditional natural law morality with regard to sex, football is apparently not for you.
If you believe in going to church and you actually read the Bible, apparently football is not for you.
When they say football is for everyone, they mean everyone will be forced to agree with us and then football will be for everyone in the same way that Joe Biden suggested that he was going to pursue a new unity.
And I said at the time, does he mean unity while acknowledging the possibility that people disagree with him?
Or does he mean unity in that he is going to cram down a unified agenda on everyone, regardless of whether they agree?
And it became pretty obvious, pretty clearly and pretty fast that he meant the latter.
Okay, and you can see it, all of this is manifesting in every area of American life simultaneously.
Every area of American life has become polarized in our new Cold Civil War.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Alrighty, in just one second, we'll get to more on our polarized Cold Civil War.
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America isn't just coming apart around very contentious issues like sexual behavior or race.
America's coming apart around issues that theoretically should be apolitical.
I mean, the simple fact of the matter is that COVID should have been a very apolitical space, right?
It is a basic health issue.
And it should have been apolitical.
It quickly became political, and it became political because opposing Donald Trump became a sign of absolute virtue.
And this continues today, to the point where people are just delusional.
I mean, it's absolutely wild.
You have a poll out today, okay?
And the poll shows that 57% of Republicans think the pandemic is over, compared to 4% of Democrats.
4% of Democrats.
Now, the answer to whether the pandemic is over is whether it is over for you.
If you are vaccinated, the pandemic is over.
If you are 20, the pandemic was never really a thing that you had to worry about too much because you were 20 and you weren't going to die.
If you were 65 or over, the pandemic remains a thing if you are unvaccinated.
It is not a thing if you are vaccinated.
In other words, if what you mean is should the United States be engaging in broad-based public policy rooted in the notion that this pandemic represents a threat to the American way of life, absolutely not.
We are past that.
Everyone, every adult in the United States, all the way down to teenagers, has now had the ability and the opportunity to get a vaccine.
If you don't get a vaccine, that one's on you.
So, is the pandemic over?
The answer, on a public policy level, is pretty obviously yes.
Okay, but Democrats, 4% of Democrats think it's over.
Four percent.
Four.
Okay, as opposed to 57% of Republicans.
Why did it break down this way?
And the answer is, there's a group of people in the United States who largely populate the coast who believe that they feel more secure in the swaddling blanket of a government that tells them what to do.
This is why the right is worried, guys.
Because you, who are very comfortable with the swaddling blankets of government, don't just wish to swaddle yourselves in that blanket.
You wish to mandate that everybody else swaddle in the blanket as well.
You wish to mandate that your level of comfort and social acceptability be promoted by governments and corporations.
That's what you want.
People on the right... I've always been a little bit bewildered by the fact that there are some people on the right who are deeply upset when people continue to wear masks.
If you want to wear a mask, that's your problem.
If you're suggesting That you are more virtuous because you're wearing a mask, now you're just being an idiot.
Okay, because the reality is if you're masked and you're outdoors and you're vaccinated, you're like a triple idiot.
Okay, so first, thanks for getting the vaccine.
Also, you shouldn't be masked anywhere, let alone outdoors, let alone thinking you're more virtuous for doing all those things.
And yet, the left has full-scale embraced all of this.
The left continues to embrace the idea that the swaddling blankets of government are not only necessary, but you should be mandated to follow what the government tells you to do, even after you've had the opportunity to get the vaccine.
Now, I'm a big fan of vaccines.
I'm not objecting to public schools suggesting that kids have to have MMR vaccines before they go to school.
I get it.
Because the reality is that the deadliness of MMR is fairly significant for children.
And not only that, it is highly contagious.
I get all of that.
And yet we have this notion now that COVID ought to be treated the same way that MMR is.
That's ridiculous, especially because unlike measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, for example, unlike those particular diseases, the vaccines with regard to COVID are so unbelievably effective that once you have had the vaccine, your chances of dying from COVID are basically nil.
I mean, we're talking like infinitesimally small.
And yet 4% of Democrats think that the pandemic is over.
The rest, 96% of Democrats still think not only that the pandemic is on, but presumably that it's a public policy issue.
Over the span of the pandemic, according to Newsweek, more Republicans than Democrats have questioned the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus, likely following the lead of former President Donald Trump.
But this, of course, is the point.
OK, all the stats were available from the very beginning.
We read you stat on stat, day on day.
We took the pandemic very seriously here on the show.
I would read you the death statistics every day.
I would read you the infection statistics every day.
I would read you the infection fatality rate every day, which differentiated from the case fatality rate because a lot of cases were not, in fact, being diagnosed.
We talked with scientists.
We talked to epidemiologists.
We talked to doctors.
We talked to all those people throughout the show.
You were getting the best information.
You are, if you listen to the show.
And we were very realistic about what the risks were and how they differentiated based on pre-existing health condition and age.
So when I say that everyone's had the opportunity to get the vaccine, understand this is not coming from somebody who never believed that COVID was a threat.
We were very clear on what COVID was and to whom it was a threat.
Four percent?
And not only four percent.
They want the cram down.
That's the key.
You want to live in a bubble the rest of your life?
That would be your problem.
Except it is not just your problem.
You are making it everyone's problem.
In the same way that the left with regard to sexual politics, if you want as an adult to identify as a member of the opposite sex, you can do whatever you want.
It's a free country.
You don't have the ability to cram down on me what I ought to think of you because that's a violation of free thought and free speech and free association.
But You can live however you want and bear the consequences of that, but it's not enough.
The idea is that if I want to live in a certain way, everybody has to live in that way.
This is the authoritarian left at work.
I have a book, The Authoritarian Moment, about the renormalization of America's institutions on this basis.
That is what we are watching.
And it's particularly obvious when it comes to COVID because you can see people weaponizing the government against people who disagree.
Again, what's amazing about that is that Joe Biden has been saying basically the pandemic is over.
Joe Biden can't even buy it back.
It's too late for Joe Biden.
He tried to buy it back.
He kept saying the pandemic was still on.
And now when the pandemic is pretty clearly over for the vast majority of the United States, except for some unvaccinated areas, where again, it's over in the sense that it's your job to get a vaccine.
If you don't want it, your problem now.
People still refuse to accept.
It's unreal.
And so, for example, you have the inspector of Los Angeles' County Health Department saying that everyone, regardless of vaccination status, should mask up in indoor public spaces right now.
Right now.
In LA.
Hey, two weeks ago, California lifted its mask mandate for vaccinated people in accordance with the CDC guidelines.
The vaunted CDC.
But now, L.A.
County is saying, no, no, no, because of the Delta variant, we want you to re-mask up in public places.
I mean, this is insanity.
People are addicted to government control.
They like the government control.
Why?
Because it allows for the possibility that you are going to be able to control other people.
You are a virtuous person because you are now one of the government's choice associates, and you get to cram down on everybody else.
The allure of power is pretty striking.
By the way, how many cases were diagnosed?
Here's the seven-day average of L.A.
County.
The population of L.A.
County at last count is 10 million people.
Okay, that is the population of L.A.
County.
The seven-day running average of diagnosed COVID-19 cases, according to the New York Times, is 243.
Out of 10 million people, 10 million people, okay, at the height of this thing in L.A.
County, like in December, you were getting seven-day rolling averages of 14, 15,000 cases a day.
You are down to 243 cases, the lowest essentially since the beginning of the pandemic.
And yet, LA County's like, you know what?
Delta variant, mask up again.
And people love it!
They want it!
Because in the end, they don't just want to control themselves.
You can control yourself easily.
Just put on a mask and do what you want.
You want to control other people.
This is why the New York Times has a piece by Aaron Carroll suggesting it's time for the United States to now engage in vaccine mandates.
It doesn't matter that vaccines are extraordinarily effective and that once you have been vaccinated, you pretty much don't have to worry whether anybody else has.
It is your business now.
Dr. Carroll is the Chief Health Officer for Indiana University.
And he says that now it's time to create a stick to compel people to get the vaccine.
Now, again, I'm a huge fan of the vaccine.
But the notion here is that the government gets to cram down on you whether or not to get a vaccine that, again, if you get it, ensures you, and if you don't, is your problem.
It's pretty wild.
And it does come down to an ideology of control.
Says Dr. Carroll, the mRNA vaccines, made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, will likely get full approval for use from the FDA soon, which may be necessary for broader vaccine mandates.
Although the vaccines are already known to be safe and effective, after being given to hundreds of millions of people with full approval, more groups will begin mandating their employees get vaccinated.
It's unlikely the United States can overcome the pandemic without such action.
Really, he- It's unlikely that we can overcome the pandemic without such actions?
Very strange, because I am looking at the United States COVID numbers as of, like, right now.
Okay, the number of new cases diagnosed in the United States yesterday was 6,771.
In a population of 330 million people.
171 in a population of 330 million people.
We didn't have mandates, so what the hell happened?
Again, it is it is astonishing the level to which people not only want to exercise control, but control others.
OK, the country.
When we say that the country is now engaged in a great split, this is what we mean.
And the split is not even-handed.
There are people who want to live how they want, and then there are people who want to control how other people live.
And this is completely reversed.
The left's case in the 1960s is that these evil right-wing theocrats wanted to control what you did in your bedroom, and what kind of drugs you took, and how you lived your life.
The people who are now interested in controlling every aspect of your life?
How your workplace is?
Whom you associate with?
What kind of church you go to?
How your children are raised?
Whether you ought to be a parent or not, these people exist on the left, and they wish to cram down that vision on everybody else.
And the more they cram it down, again, I keep saying it, but it's real, the harsher the blowback's gonna be.
The response is not going to be the classically liberal response of, everybody go his own way, wave your fist, unless he had somebody else in the face.
The response is gonna be, if you insist on grabbing that gun, I will grab the gun from you, and I will use it against you.
That will be the response, and it will be quite ugly.
And that does bring us, To a fairly incredible story.
So Tucker Carlson mentioned last night on his show that a whistleblower at the NSA is saying that the federal government is now spying on him.
Now I've noticed that the media are very upset when Republicans spy on Democrats as well they should be.
They seem far less upset when Tucker Carlson is targeted apparently by the NSA.
I mean at the very least wouldn't this require further investigation?
Here was Tucker last night.
But it's not just political protesters the government is spying on.
Yesterday we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S.
government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take the show off the air.
Now that's a shocking claim, and ordinarily we'd be skeptical of it.
It's illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens.
It's a crime.
It's not a third world country.
Things like that should not happen in America.
But unfortunately they do happen, and in this case they did happen.
Okay, so should there be a congressional investigation on that?
Of course.
And should there be bipartisan support for the notion that the NSA doesn't get to spy on political opponents?
Of course.
I have a feeling the left, which is very, very upset at any criticism of left-wing journalists and threats to journalism as a whole.
We'll see how many of them are actually interested or concerned about all of this, even if it turns out that Tucker is absolutely right.
All righty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content coming up soon.
Is The Matt Walsh Show airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern?
Be sure to check it out over at dailyware.com.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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