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July 26, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
57:16
Why A Leftist Just Yelled At Tucker Carlson In Front Of His Child | Ep. 1304
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An activist screams at Tucker Carlson in front of his daughter at a fishing store and the Democrats can't let America go back to normal.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Alrighty, so over the weekend, there was this viral video that was going around.
There's a video of a person named Dan Bailey, who's I guess a fly fishing guide in Montana.
And he posted this video himself, which means this was not taken really by a third party who then posted it.
This is a person who is very, very proud of himself.
He saw Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host in Montana at a fly fishing shop, and he just started berating him.
And apparently Tucker's daughter was there.
And this guy doesn't care.
And the left, on Twitter particularly, but also in the media, seem to believe that this guy is committing an act of heroism.
That this guy has done something wonderful and good for the country by confronting Tucker Carlson and frankly acting like a jerk.
Here is a little bit of the tape.
I don't care, man.
Dude, you are the worst human being known to mankind.
I want you to do something to this state, to the United States, to everything else in this world.
I don't care that your daughter's here. What you've done to people's families, what you've done to everybody else in this society is not enough.
Don't call me son, please.
Okay, so what he's actually saying, if you can't hear it, is that he is, he's telling him he doesn't care if his daughter is there.
He says, dude, you are the worst human being known to mankind.
I want you to know that, what you've done to the States, to the United States, to everything else in the world.
I don't care your daughter's here.
What you've done to people's families, what you've done to everyone else in the world.
And Tucker tries to defuse it.
If you've seen Tucker in these sorts of situations, Tucker is pretty calm.
Tucker's been confronted many times in public.
At this point, he handles it really well.
And as somebody who's been confronted a couple of times in public, I can say it's not always the easiest thing in the world.
I remember one time I was at a public park and I was holding my then five-year-old daughter in my arms and somebody came up and said, how do you sleep at night?
I was like, you know what?
I'm not going to do this.
And I sort of walked away.
That's sort of what Tucker does here, right?
He handles this pretty well.
But the point here is that this person believes that they did something good.
In fact, this person, Bailey, actually put up a note online saying, quote, ambushing Tucker Carlson while he is in a store with his family.
He sorry, he says he put up a note in which he explained how wonderful he was for having done this in the first place on his Instagram.
Right, saying that it's not often that you get a chance to do something like this.
It's not every day you get to tell someone they are the worst person in the world and really mean it.
What an a-hole.
This man has killed more people with vaccine misinformation.
He has supported extreme racism.
He is a fascist and does more to rip this country apart than anyone that calls themselves an American.
So I have a question.
Let's try and get in his head for a second.
The person who ambushes Tucker Carlson in public air.
What does he think he's accomplishing?
Like really, does he think that if he ambushes Tucker Carlson and yells at him in front of his daughter, that somehow Tucker is going to stop doing what he does on the air on a nightly basis?
Does he think that he is going to achieve some sort of magical illumination for Tucker, where Tucker suddenly switches all of his positions and becomes a rabid Joe Biden supporter?
Or start supporting all of the various talking points that this fly-fishing guide wants him to mirror.
Of course not.
It's not about convincing Tucker Carlson.
What it is, is about the performative.
It's about performing for the people online.
It's about performing for the left-wing, which sees this sort of stuff as heroism.
And people ranging from Jamel Bouie at the New York Times to half the establishment media were putting up headlines Treating this as not only newsworthy, but praiseworthy.
Because this guy is a hero.
He has stood up to power, and he has said what so many people, unleft, want him to say.
And what this really is, is a mentality that is endangering America.
Not what Tucker says.
You may disagree with what Tucker says.
You may think that Tucker's wrong some of the time.
As an independent human being, I think Tucker is wrong sometimes.
We did an entire hour-long interview maybe a couple of years ago in which he and I disagreed strenuously on everything from economics to sometimes even social policy.
But that's not the same thing.
Disagreeing with somebody's political point of view is not the same thing as what you're seeing here.
What you are seeing here It's an authoritarian mindset.
It really is.
The idea that you get to go up to people and treat them terribly in front of their children because they are so politically wrong and then performatively post that online and then have all of your political allies tell you what a wonderful person you are for doing this.
Right?
Again, you're not confronting somebody in a public setting.
This isn't Tucker Carlson on his show.
It's not even Tucker Carlson.
Walking on the street by himself, which would still not be wonderful.
But this is him eating with- and you've seen this sort of thing before.
He's in a fishing- fly store- a fly fishing store with his family.
You saw this with Sarah Huckabee Sanders when she was working for the Trump administration.
She was eating at a restaurant.
You saw people at the restaurant starting to harass her and the people throwing her out of the restaurant.
You've seen this with the Black Lives Matter protesters literally going down the street to restaurants in Washington, D.C.
and berating people who are sitting there eating their dinner.
Authoritarianism comes in a couple of forms.
There's the sort of traditional authoritarianism, which is a centralized government power that crams down its viewpoint on you without regard to your individual rights.
And then there is what Theodore Adorno once suggested was the authoritarian mindset, right?
The authoritarian mind.
Now, Dorno was a Marxist, and so his suggestion about what constituted authoritarianism really more just looked like conventional conservatism.
But there is such a thing as authoritarianism, and it does exist on the left, and it does exist on the right, and it includes the idea that you get to yell at people and tell them what to do, that your viewpoint is the only viewpoint, and not only that, that all the institutions surrounding a person and protecting a person, those have to be torn down in order to benefit the people.
When I see what happened to Tucker, I think that that mindset is extraordinarily prevalent in today's society.
And you see it by polling data, by the way.
If you look on college campuses, the number of kids who believe that it is okay to shout down a speaker, not to go and ask questions, not to protest outside, to go into an event and shut down a speaker is very high.
The number of students who say that it's okay to report a professor for saying something quote-unquote controversial, in many cases, is a majority.
And people feel this, right?
People can feel this.
I have a brand new book out.
It comes out tomorrow.
It's called The Authoritarian Moment.
And this is something that I talk about, is this new mindset that is predominant on the left, but that has institutional support.
Because again, the mindset that you get to tell everybody else what to do, and that everybody else who disagrees with you ought to be excised from polite society, that exists on all sides of the aisle.
The question is, where is the institutional support?
And the answer is, the institutional support for this exists on the left.
It exists on the left.
This is not.
Remember, Joe the Plumber was ripped up and down, his life investigated and he was torn apart by the left-wing media for the sin of Barack Obama walking onto his driveway and him asking Barack Obama about tax policy.
Remember this.
That was treated by the media the way that this really should be treated by the media, which is you don't get to go out into the public sphere and then find a private person who happens to be walking around with their family and then harass the living crap out of them.
You don't get to do that. It's a bad thing for the country. The villain in this case is Dan Bailey.
The villain in this case is not Tucker Carlson, even if you disagree with Tucker Carlson. And people can feel this. So there's an excerpt from my book that was posted in the New York Post, and it's called The Authoritarian Moment.
It comes out tomorrow. You should go pre-order a copy today because it's a good run out.
It is that popular, thank God.
Here is what I write in the book.
More than six in 10 Americans say they fear saying what they think, including a majority of liberals, 64% moderates, fully 77% of conservatives.
Only self-described strong liberals feel confident in saying what they believe these days.
To be a left-wing authoritarian is to feel the certainty of the anti-conventionalism, which means you believe that your viewpoint is the only moral viewpoint because you are anti-conventional, you are ripping down the conventional.
The passion of top-down censorship, the belief that you should be able to shut people up using all the institutional powers that be, and the thrill of revolutionary aggression, a feeling like you get to confront, like you get to tear down the Maxine Waters, get in their face, yell at them, make their life miserable phenomenon.
Tomorrow belongs to the far-left authoritarians, to the rest of us.
A society run by left-wing authoritarians is extraordinarily burdensome.
It's to be surrounded by institutional hatred.
If you're conservative or merely non-leftist in America, the hatred is palpable.
They hate you in academia.
They hate you in the media.
They hate you on the sports field, in the movies, on Facebook and Twitter.
Your boss hates you.
Your colleagues hate you.
At least, they have been told that they should.
And they hate you because you think the wrong way.
This is what so many Americans are feeling, and it's not people who are just thinking like Tucker.
It is people all the way up to and including mainstream liberals.
Perhaps the problem is that you attend church regularly.
Perhaps it's that you want to run your business and be left alone.
Perhaps it's that you want to raise your kids with traditional social values.
It could be that you believe that men and women exist, or that the police are not generally racist, or that children deserve a mother and a father, or that hard work pays off, or that the American flag stands for freedom rather than oppression, or that people should be judged based on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Maybe it's that you haven't put your preferred pronouns in your Twitter profile, or hashtagged with the latest pride symbol for the latest cause, or used the proper emoji in your text messages.
Or maybe it's that you have friends or family members or even acquaintances who have violated any of the thicket of cultural regulations placed upon us by our supposed moral betters.
Guilt by association is just as damning as guilt through action or inaction.
This is what I write in my new book, The Authoritarian Moment.
This is true.
If you watch Tucker Carlson, you could be confronted the same way as Tucker Carlson was confronted in this fly fishing store and the blue checks on Twitter who are of the far left disproportionately.
They will cheer.
They will think that you are the bad guy and the person confronting you and yelling at you is the good guy.
The reasons they hate you, I write, are legion.
They change day to day.
One day, you might be a ballyhooed champion of justice for standing up for gay rights or feminist ideals.
The next day, you might be told you have been banished for your refusal to acknowledge that a man calling himself a woman is not in fact a woman.
Martina Navratilova or J.K.
Rowling.
One day, you might find yourself a hero of the intelligentsia for your cynicism about religion.
The next, you might find yourself a villain for the great sin of suggesting that cancel culture breeds radicalization, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker.
This is not a question of Democrat or Republican.
Not one figure named above would identify as a Republican, let alone a conservative.
There's only one thing, in the end, that unites the disparate figures deemed worthy of the gulag in our ongoing culture war.
Refusal.
The standards matter less than the simple message, you will comply and you will like it.
And that is the feeling that so many people have.
There are a lot of everyday Americans who are not powerful in the media the way that Tucker Carlson is powerful in the media who feel that they are at risk of the same sort of ostracization socially and treatment publicly that Tucker was subjected to when he just went to a fly-fishing store in Montana of all places.
And this has been a long time It's boiling under the sort of veneer of American society.
Always, social disapproval has incredible consequences for people.
But when social disapproval becomes not only something that you use when somebody is way outside the boundaries of the Overton window, but it's something that is used frequently, routinely, it's encouraged, it's good.
You have to be part of the social ostracizing crowd or be its target.
Once that happens, the society is in deep trouble.
There are a lot of people on the left and some people who consider themselves on the so-called moderate right who say that really this is not a problem.
Cultural authoritarianism this way?
You're exaggerating.
It's not a big deal.
There's no such thing as cancel culture.
This is what woke rulers assure us while busily hunting down our most embarrassing political faux pas.
There's nothing wrong, they say, with calling your boss to try to get you fired.
After all, that's the free market working.
Why are you whining about social media censorship or about social ostracism?
People have a right to tear you to shreds, to end your career, to malign your character.
It's all free speech.
And in a certain sense, they're not wrong.
Your boss does have the right to fire you.
Your friends and family do have a right to cut you off.
None of that amounts to a violation of the First Amendment.
As I write in my book, it simply amounts to the end of the Republic.
Free speech and free exchange of ideas die when the attitude of philosophical tolerance withers.
Writing in 1831, the greatest observer of America and democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, sums up the threat of democratic despotism in terms that sound shockingly and eerily prescient.
Quote, If you crave the vote of your fellow citizens, they will not grant it to you.
If you demand only their esteem, they will still pretend to refuse it to you.
You shall remain among men, but you shall lose your rights of humanity.
When you approach those like you, they shall flee you as being impure.
Those who believe in your innocence, even they shall abandon you, for one would flee them in their turn.
This is the problem.
What happened to Tucker is indicative of something broader that's happening in American society, and that is, for political gain, the attempt to run roughshod over your fellow citizen and treat them not as an individual worthy of dignity and human rights, but treat them as an opponent to be crushed in front of their children.
You can't have a country this way.
You really cannot, regardless of what you think, of anything that Tucker has to say.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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OK, so here's the thing.
Once you start targeting, Tucker.
Publicly, you can see how this quickly moves into the realm of targeting officially.
There is a bleed up that happens in American politics.
Things that start at a societal level eventually crystallize and become government policy.
Because if it's okay to target somebody socially, pretty soon there are a lot of people nodding and giggling when somebody is targeted governmentally.
So you remember that Tucker Carlson went on the air, maybe a month ago, six weeks ago, and he said that the NSA had been reading his texts and his emails.
And a lot of people poo-pooed that.
They were like, oh, that's not happening, that's silly.
He said that the NSA was targeting him.
Now, what I suggested is that the NSA may not have been, quote-unquote, targeting him.
What they may have done is they may have caught up his communications in a sweep, but that if they unmasked him, meaning they looked for his identity, which you're not supposed to do with domestic American citizens, then we would have a problem.
And it appears that that is what is going on.
According to the New York Post, the National Security Agency has quietly admitted that the identity of Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson was, quote-unquote, unmasked and leaked, as he alleged earlier this month, according to a report.
For the NSA to unmask Tucker Carlson or any journalist attempting to secure a newsworthy interview is entirely unacceptable and raises serious questions about their activities, as well as their original denial, which was wildly misleading.
A Fox News spokesperson told The Record, a cybersecurity news site.
Two sources told The Record on Friday that according to an internal NSA investigation, Carlson's name was revealed after it was mentioned in communications between two parties who were under surveillance.
But the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight was neither a direct nor an incidental target of the agency, the sources said.
So that means that they were not actually targeting him, but they were unmasking his identity.
Now typically, you only unmask somebody's identity if they're a domestic American.
Citizen, if that person is suspected of being involved in illegal activity or if you need to know their identity in order to prosecute and pursue foreign illegal activity.
Typically, you don't unmask American citizens.
You remember that this was something that happened with regard to Michael Flynn.
And Michael Flynn was unmasked by the Obama administration for no apparent reason.
The use of the intelligence apparatus in order to unmask American citizens who really are posing no national security threat is a serious problem.
But you're not seeing anybody scream and shout about any of this in the left-wing media.
I promise you, if the Trump administration were busily unmasking everybody who'd ever booked an interview with a foreign actor while Trump was president, this, of course, would have been a problem.
But Tucker, it's okay.
It's not a big deal.
And by the way, it's the same thing with regard to all... It's not just with regard to people like Tucker.
It's also true with regard to, for example, ProPublica releasing IRS records on a wide bevy of rich Americans.
Rich people are bad.
Therefore, it's okay that ProPublica is illegally obtaining records and then publishing them.
None of this is okay.
A functioning republic has to have neutral rules of equal applicability.
You cannot have a republic where some people are treated as social outcasts to the point not only where them expressing kind of normal political opinions means that they are treated as lepers in social society and yelled at publicly, but also that the government targets them and everybody just goes, eh, eh.
If you're a good American citizen, you need to defend the rights of your opponents just as much as you defend your own rights.
This used to be like a normal thing that we all believed, but now I guess this has gone completely by the wayside.
And I think the reason for that is that politics has become expressive rather than about problem solving.
You can see this in the way that people talk about politics generally in the United States.
No longer are we worried about problem solving.
Now we are worried about whether politicians express sympathy.
We have an empathetic president, President Joe Biden, and that matters much more than all of the bad policy that he's pursuing.
We are looking for people in politics and politics is really about expressing your feeling of solidarity with people.
It is not about whether the policy is good or bad.
It is not about whether policy is helpful or harmful.
In my own marriage, we have a rule in my marriage that we try to cue to.
And this rule is pretty simple.
When my wife and I start a conversation and she brings up a problem, I will ask her, is this a problem where you want me to offer solutions or is this a problem where you just want me to hear how you're feeling?
And thankfully, my wife is rational enough to go along with that.
And the reason this is useful is because if you're married, if you're in a relationship, you know that very often these two conversations get conflated.
And that if you offer a solution in a feelings conversation, you are now considered unfeeling.
This happens in marriage all the time, right?
Your wife comes home, she had a bad day at work, and she says, you know, I want to tell you about all these problems I'm having at work.
You say, you know, all you could do is this, this, and this.
And she says, that's not what I, I don't want to hear your solutions.
I don't need your solutions.
I know I can do those things.
What I want is for you to just hear me.
I just want you to hear.
Now, politics is not supposed to be like that.
If politics is supposed to be here as a problem, now let's figure out a solution.
But politics is no longer about that.
Because we are such an expressive society, and because we have wrapped up our own personal identities in our politics, this means that if somebody offers you a solution to your problem that fails to recognize your emotional state, that person is now a problem.
That person is now an enemy.
If that person engages in solutions talk rather than feelings talk, that person ought to be ostracized.
That person is the problem.
You can see this in a wide variety of areas in American life.
It's particularly true when it comes to areas like race, for example.
Our great racial reckoning is not about coming up with solutions that actually boost the performance of, for example, black schoolchildren.
It is not about that.
It is not about coming up with policies that are best geared toward rectifying historic imbalances.
It's not about that.
What it is about is expressing the belief that the United States is bad, expressing solidarity with the belief that the United States is bad.
And if you refuse to express that solidarity, then you're the problem.
In fact, if you refuse to go along with the policy agenda, that is really just empathy in terms of policy.
If you refuse to go along with that, then you're a bad person.
The conflation of empathy with policy is one of the worst things that can happen in our political sphere, and it is happening each and every day.
Because that means that people for whom you are empathetic deserve your help, and people for whom you are not empathetic do not.
It also means that policy is simply supposed to be interpreted as a sign of empathy rather than as a measure of success or problem solving.
And that is a real, real problem in American society.
Okay, so let's talk about race for a second.
So over the weekend, there were a couple of interviews about race and racial reckoning that were quite telling and kind of fascinating.
And again, policy has now been conflated with empathy, which creates two separate problems.
One is that if your policy solves problems, but is not rooted in a belief that the person's feelings are justified, then you are unempathetic and bad.
The policy itself is bad.
So we judge policy by whether it is empathetic.
Also, we judge whether you are empathetic by the policy you choose.
So, if you choose a policy that is not rooted in empathy, you are bad.
So there are two separate problems with conflating empathy and policy.
One is bad policy, and one is the targeting of people who disagree with you on policy as non-empathetic.
And both of these things are now a routine part of American politics, and it helps explain why so many Americans hate other Americans based on their political viewpoint.
Because you might think to yourself, wait a second, there are usually more than one way to skin a deer here.
There are a couple of different ways to approach this problem.
I'm offering a solution.
You offer another solution.
We don't seem to be able to come to an agreement about that, but why don't we try and see whose solution is better?
That's not how politics is done anymore.
The overt conflation of empathy and policymaking.
It's the worst thing for both empathy and policymaking.
It makes you less empathetic to people who think not like you, and it makes your policy worse because your policy is now just an expression of how much you care.
So when it comes to race, you can see this most of all, because there are certain policies that are likely to facilitate, for example, better performance.
Those policies include things like standardized testing.
Standardized testing is an incentive structure that causes people to try to perform up to tests.
Treating people as individuals is an excellent way of rectifying social imbalances.
Why?
Because if you treat people as individuals, then everybody is held to the same standard.
And then I'm not judging you based on your race or group identity.
I'm judging you based on whether you hit these objective metrics.
How do we know that these sorts of neutral policies are excellent for the country and excellent for people who have historically been dispossessed in the United States?
Because for a wide variety of minority groups, these have been the ladders to success.
It's neutrality that has provided the ladders to success for Jews, for example, who are not treated as a group.
We're originally treated as a group, but no longer are, right?
Are treated as individuals based on performance.
We judge whether you've done well in American society.
The same thing is true of Asian Americans.
But when it comes to the divides between black and white, because America does have a history of treating black people as a group and treating them horribly up through the end of Jim Crow.
Because of that, there's this idea that even that going back to the same tools that have worked for every minority group gaining power, gaining financial success, gaining educational success, that it just doesn't apply to black people. Now, you have to explain why it wouldn't apply to black people, and there are only two explanations. One is, you are unempathetic, right?
This is the explanation of the left.
You're not empathetic to the experience of black Americans, and this is why you don't understand that the ladder that's been used by every single minority group in the United States does not apply to black people.
It just doesn't apply.
This is the argument of Robin DiAngelo and Abraham X. Kennedy.
If you use neutral rules, then you are actually doing something to harm black Americans because you are unempathetic.
That is one of the arguments that is made.
And the other is that you refuse to acknowledge your own racism.
It's really about you.
It's not about trying to solve the problem.
It's about you and your lack of empathy.
And your lack of empathy is because you don't understand the problem or you wish not to understand the problem.
Again, policy is now secondary.
Empathy is key.
In politics, empathy should never be key.
Policy should always be key.
Because how you feel on the inside has no bearing on whether your policy is good or not.
There's not a single human being who has ever implemented a policy on planet Earth who believed they were implementing an evil policy.
The most evil people on the planet, right now, today, believe they are implementing policy that quote-unquote helps people.
It is not about intent.
It is not about empathy.
It is about whether the policy is in effect good and whether the policy can be morally justified on the basis of respecting individual human beings.
But we've lost that in the United States.
So on race, particularly, we've lost this.
Because, again, the left's agenda with regard to race and the left's quote-unquote empathy with regard to race requires you to think of people as member of groups rather than as individuals.
And so what this ends with is we need to teach your kids in school that they're a member of a different group from black people and that they are, in fact, the subjugators of black people.
And if they call for things like neutral rules or treating people like individuals, that is merely re-enshrining hierarchies of power.
And if you refuse to go along with this kind of garbage indoctrination that is immoral in its essence, this means that you are a racist.
So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said this pretty openly over the weekend.
It's funny, you have all these critical race theorists out there saying, no, no, no, it's more sophisticated than that.
We're not teaching your kids that they're racist.
It's not about that.
We're teaching them that the structures of power are racist.
Okay, but here's Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who's basically letting the cat out of the bag.
She's like, no, no, no, we're teaching your kids that they're racist.
And if they refuse to acknowledge that they're racist, this is just demonstrative of the fact that they are unempathetic and therefore racist.
So why don't Republicans want us to learn how to not be racist?
Why don't Republicans want kids to know how to not be racist?
Why don't Republicans want us to know how to not be racist?
Because your definition of racist is not about individual intent.
Your definition of racist isn't even about whether black people are better off or worse off under your policies.
Your definition of racist is, do they mirror my policy preferences, which are the only empathetic policy preferences, because my policy preferences are a substitute for success.
Politics is not the game of empathy, but it has become the game of empathy.
And this can be applied broadly.
Robin DiAngelo, who's made an amazing living being just an unbelievable racial grifter, over the weekend, she says that even comedy is an excuse to be racist.
Because, again, if everything is about empathy, then we can't have things like, you can make fun of everybody.
That's unempathetic.
Now, that makes us less free.
Free human beings make jokes about lots of people, including people of other groups.
People make Jewish jokes?
Honestly, it really doesn't bother me.
As a general rule, it really does not bother me.
Because human beings make fun of each other all the time.
That is just an aspect.
It's one of the more joyful aspects of being human, by the way.
A lot of group jokes I find, you know, inappropriate and ugly.
But when I quash the ability of people to tell jokes, I mean, Robin DiAngelo would.
It's a humorless society they're creating here.
So comedy is, um, I think it's an excuse to get to be racist, right?
Like irony.
And I think TV shows like Family Guy and South Park and maybe a little bit The Simpsons, right, allowed white people to be racist self-consciously.
And there is a concept in comedy called punching up, not down.
So, you know, you want to punch up, there's very different power dynamics and it doesn't hurt in the same way.
It doesn't invoke a deep, deep centuries-long history of oppression when you poke fun at, say, white people.
But it's very, very different when you poke fun at people of color.
So the only people you're allowed to make fun of are people who are white, right?
You have to think of each other in terms of groups.
This demonstrates your empathy.
And this is how we determine policy now.
Policy is not about whether it accomplishes its effect.
It's about whether you're empathetic.
Now, there are people who I generally, like, there are people who I'm friends with, who I think have fallen into this trap of conflating policymaking and empathy, as though these are the same thing.
One of those people is David French.
I consider myself a pretty good friend with David French.
I talk to David fairly frequently, although not as much recently.
He has a piece that I think is worthy of consideration under this rubric, because I think that you are seeing moderate America slide into this morass whereby empathy and policymaking are considered one and the same, and this is particularly true on the issue of race.
So he has a piece in the Dispatch called, Structural Racism Isn't Wokeness, It's Reality.
Now, it depends how you define structural racism.
As I've said many, many times, when we talk about institutional racism, or white privilege, or structural racism, what are we talking about?
Are we talking about the structures of America perpetuate racism today?
Or are we talking about history has consequences, and for all of human history, you have inherited problems that your parents had, and then you've had to deal with those problems.
This has been true literally for all time and will always continue to be true.
History has consequences.
We all know that.
So which are we talking about?
The conflation of the two is really dangerous, because if the idea is that history has created imbalances, but that the institutions of society have to be changed on a fundamental level now, even though they are not racist, in order to rectify those historic problems, the institutions now must be made unequal and discriminatory in order to rectify those historic problems, What you are doing is perpetuating a new problem.
Now you have made the institutions themselves discriminatory as a substitute for empathy.
You have made the policy geared not toward equality under the law, not at individual freedoms and human rights.
Instead, you have geared the policy toward quote-unquote fixing problems of the past based on group empathy.
You can have empathy for people who have been members of groups.
You can have empathy for individuals who have had to live with the burden of, for example, not inheriting as much wealth from their parents or grandparents.
That's worthy of empathy.
But does that mean that the way to rectify that is to treat people of particular racial groups as inherent victims of the society today?
It seems not.
Empathy and policymaking, again, are not the same thing.
But David French goes further than that.
And I find this bewildering because if you read David's writing from even three or four years ago, it was almost completely converse to this.
You can recognize the problems of historic injustice without suggesting that the systems need to be torn down.
So here's what David writes today.
He says, he's talking about a problem within major churches.
The Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, for example, basically all these major churches are now having problems in which there are sort of leaders of these churches who have started to mimic and mirror many of the policy viewpoints and philosophical descriptions of the critical race theory movement.
He says, this is David French, the congregants object to what they perceive as a pastoral embrace of critical race theory.
They assert that the Bible alone contains teachings sufficient to address America's race problems.
You can read the comprehensive complaint against a guy named David Platt and his team here, and the allegations of teaching or advocating CRT in another place.
Without restating, all the contents of these lengthy documents include complaints that Platt and his MBC colleague, Pastor Mike Kelsey, MBC is the McLean Bible Church, March in a Christian Black Lives Matter march and that Kelsey has endorsed the CRT concepts of systemic racism and white privilege.
They also condemn Platt for this comment, which argues that the absence of over prejudice does not absolve one of the problems of racism and racialization.
Quote, a disparity exists.
We can't deny this.
These are not opinions.
They're facts.
It matters in our country whether one is white or black.
Now, we don't want it to matter, which is why I think we try to convince ourselves it doesn't matter.
We think to ourselves, I don't hold prejudice toward black or white people, so racism is not my problem.
But this is where we need to see that racialization is our problem.
It's all of our problem.
We subtly, almost unknowingly, contribute to it.
Okay, well, there are many problems with this statement that are put forward here by, again, Mike Kelsey.
Or rather, David Platt.
Okay, so the mere fact of a disparity does not imply that discrimination is responsible solely for the disparity.
It could be that discrimination is it.
Could be historic discrimination is it.
Or it could be that people make different decisions.
Those different decisions have different consequences and we need to incentivize better decision making thus to ensure better consequences.
It could be that.
It could also be that while there is undoubtedly imbalances, there are undoubtedly imbalances that have been inherited from the past, it could be.
It could also be And the solution to that is not to get rid of, again, neutral laws of equal applicability.
Right?
The solution to that is to acknowledge that that is just the way that life works.
That that is unfairness.
And that the best way to rectify the unfairness is not to perpetuate new unfairness.
But David, I think, slides here and gets into some pretty dicey territory.
He says, the dissenters argue that the solution to the race problem in America is more Bible, not more sociology books.
It is not the Bible plus a secular reading list, but solo scriptura.
It's not just unwise to rely on secular scholarship to address American racism.
They argue it's unbiblical.
Now, there's some truth to this.
And when people say that the solution to what ails us is treating people well individually, they are correct about this.
They are correct, especially in a country where legal discrimination is actively forbidden by the federal, state, and local government.
Yes, we need more God.
Yes, we need more Bible.
And yes, we need to treat each other as individual human beings better.
Recently, I was talking to a group of liberal folks and they were talking about polarization in the society and how can we solve it together.
I said, I have a very simple solution.
Really, it's very, very simple.
Every one of you, because you're some prominent folks on the left, I said, every one of you, go online tonight on Twitter, find somebody who voted for Trump who you know and personally like and say, I know this person voted for Trump.
I disagree.
They're a good person and I respect them as a human.
Say that!
Polarization goes away overnight.
But that is not the point.
They won't do it.
That's unempathetic.
The empathy is unempathetic.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So we're talking again about the equation of empathy and policymaking in politics and how this has led to the idea that if somebody disagrees with you on policy, you can confront them at a fly fishing store and yell at them to the wild cheers of the blue check media.
And again, there's a piece from my friend David French over at the Dispatch that I think is actually not a good piece and actually quite telling as to how people fall into the ideological trap of conflating empathy and policymaking.
It's all about race.
And he is talking about how in the Christian community, there's been a pushback against He says...
That under this mode of thinking, the critics of critical race theory, the concept of equality under the law as mandated by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act is both necessary and largely sufficient to address the causes and consequences of centuries of slavery followed by generations of Jim Crow.
No, that's not the argument.
The argument is not that the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act, the 14th Amendment, and equality under law, that those are sufficient to address the consequences of history, because nothing will ever be sufficient to address the consequences of history.
I mean, truthfully, there is no way That you can repay people for their great-great-great-grandparents being enslaved.
How exactly do you repay that?
There's no way.
I mean, how do you, like, the notion of reparations is in and of itself, the concept, is somewhat insulting in the sense that there is no way to actively repair the kinds of damages that have been done to people over time.
When people talk about Holocaust reparations, if the German government signs somebody 80 grand, like their grandkid, 80 grand, because grandma got gassed at the age of 14, Or grandma got gassed at the age of 20?
Okay, then sorry, that is not a reparation, right?
That may be a payoff, and it may be something that is an attempt at reparation, but it is not an actual reparation.
And no one is arguing that equality under law is the thing that makes up for the past.
All we're saying is it's the only ladder to success in American society.
And it's the only ladder back to anything remotely approaching civility and political consonants.
There's only one way the country comes back together, and that's if the same rules apply to all of us.
But, says David French, no, that's wrong.
This is on the core issues of American racism.
This pastor, David Platt, is biblically and historically right.
It's his detractors who are biblically and historically wrong.
These conservatives have placed a secular political frame around an issue with profound religious significance.
They've thus not just abandoned the whole counsel of scripture, they've even contradicted a core component of the secular conservatism they claim to uphold.
And then he cites the Bible and he talks about the fact that in the Bible there are certain soul situations where there is blood guilt on particular people.
Now, there are a couple of contradictory verses in the Bible, seemingly contradictory verses.
One is that God revisits payment on the third and fourth generations.
Now, to my ears, what that sounds like is God recognizing that history has consequences in the Bible.
That if you do something, there will be consequences to the third and fourth generation.
But the Bible, unlike, for example, old Mesopotamian law, like the Code of Hammurabi, says that you are not allowed to punish a child for the sins of their father.
You're not allowed to do that by the law.
There is a difference between how God judges the universe and how we are supposed to judge the children of people who sinned in the past.
And the only way we can have a society moving forward is to treat everyone by the exact same rules.
But David seems to be straying from that here.
Right?
He says that we have to confess our sins.
So he says it's our job to confess the sins of the past.
Because, for example, in the book of 2 Kings, Josiah tore his clothes and wept when the high priest found the book of the law neglected in the temple.
Why?
Josiah said, quote, because our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book.
And in the book of Nehemiah, the Israelites confessed the sins and iniquities of their fathers.
In the book of Leviticus, God commanded the Israelites to confess the iniquity and iniquity of their fathers.
Okay, so I can confess the sins of people who have come before me in the United States.
That does not mean that you get to subject my children to disparate treatment.
Or me.
That's not how any of that works.
Again, this is the conflation of empathy with policy.
I can have full empathy for people who suffer because in the past, their family was victimized.
That does not change the fact that if they wish to rise to any level of success in American society, they have to use the exact same ladder that has been provided and is provided to every individual in the United States.
And that's been particularly true for the last half century.
But again, once you get to the point where the policy is the empathy, you get into really ugly territory because the converse is, if you disagree with me on policy, you deserve no empathy.
And if you deserve no empathy, we can target you as much as we could possibly want.
And this lies behind so much of our politics these days.
It's not about problem solving.
It's about othering people.
It is not about problem solving and getting to yes.
It is about treating people who disagree with you as though they are the problem, as though they are not only Okay, so this has consequences for a lot of various issues in our society.
It has consequences, for example, when it comes to COVID.
So...
Let's say that you wish to convince people that they ought to get vaccinated.
So I found out recently that a lot of people in our office, people I work with, are not vaccinated.
As you know, I'm a very large-scale proponent of vaccination.
I've been a proponent of vaccination since the beginning.
I've been a proponent of vaccination since way before COVID.
It's one of my more controversial views among conservatives.
I'm very pro-vaccination.
Okay, but a lot of people in this office didn't get vaccinated.
They're independent, free human beings.
If I wanted to get them vaccinated, I would treat them as independent, free human beings.
I would mention the fact that COVID has higher risk factors than getting the vaccine by all available data for people who are above the age of 18, for sure.
For people who are above the age of 12, that seems to be the case as well.
Okay, and that being the case, you now get to make an independent and free decision.
But this is not how people of the left are approaching the problem.
The way they're approaching the problem is that if you didn't get the vaccine, it's not because you made a differential risk-reward calculation for which you ought to bear the consequences.
Notice, my solution also not only encompasses treating people as individual free human beings, it also suggests that you ought to bear the consequences of the risk you are taking.
If you choose to take a risk, Bear the consequences.
Same rules for everybody.
Same exact rules for everybody.
I got the vaccine.
My wife got the vaccine.
My parents got the vaccine.
And now we bear the risk of the vaccine.
And if you don't get the vaccine, you bear the risk of the vaccine.
Same rule for every single human being.
And you get to make that decision yourself because you're a free, independent human being.
But the way the left treats this is you're morally inferior if you didn't get the vaccine, Not just that you're an idiot, but you're endangering other people's lives.
You're a bad person.
Now, even if you believe that that's the case, is that the way to treat fellow human beings?
Really, like on a serious level, is that the way that you think you're going to convince them to do things?
Remember, the guy who shouted at Tucker Carlson was not interested in convincing Tucker Carlson to change his opinion.
He was interested in virtue signaling to all of his friends.
This is the same thing in the media today.
It's the same thing from, for example, Anthony Fauci.
So Anthony Fauci, the great and sainted, second greatest doctor in America after Dr. Joe Biden, he says, you know, maybe we should blame people.
Maybe that will work.
Or maybe it won't.
Maybe it won't.
Maybe you should look inward a little bit, use a little bit of introspection and realize the reason that nobody trusts Anthony Fauci is because he has been institutionally wrong at nearly every level of this pandemic repeatedly.
I generally don't like to get involved in blaming people because I think that would maybe push them back even more rather than... I mean, I could totally understand the governor's frustration, so I don't have any problem with that.
She has every right to be frustrated, but what I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated.
I don't want to blame people, but if they get blamed, well, you know.
That's the way they- Don Lemon is even- is way worse, obviously.
Don Lemon is the worst at all of this on CNN.
He says that everyone who's not getting vaccinated, they're idiotic.
They're nonsensical.
Okay, here's the thing.
Even if you believe that, is that gonna convince anybody?
Or is that really much more about- Treating somebody as morally lesser.
The people who are the greatest proponents of empathy, it turns out, are really non-empathetic for anybody who disagrees with them.
And here's the thing.
When we're talking about vaccines that have this high level of efficacy, and when we are living in a time where people are bearing the consequences of their own decision-making, it seems to me that now would be an excellent time to say, listen, right now we're having a pandemic.
The pandemic continues among the unvaccinated.
The unvaccinated have exactly the same risk factors they had when they were dying by the thousands back in January.
And so if you choose to make that decision, you bear the risk.
You do.
If you're vaccinated, you're doing pretty well these days.
If you're unvaccinated, you're probably not doing nearly as well.
So probably you should get vaccinated.
But, your decision.
Wouldn't that be a better way to convince people than shouting at them that they're idiots?
But here is Don Lemon shouting at people that they're idiots.
I've heard over the last couple of days that, you know, you shouldn't be, um, don't say bad things about people who don't get the vaccine because then they'll feel like you're attacking them or whatever.
But Michael, how much more?
You've got to call it what it is.
Behavior is idiotic.
and nonsensical, I think that you need to tell people that their behavior is idiotic and nonsensical.
It doesn't mean that they are idiots, it's just that their behavior on this particular point, that is not making sense.
Just going to note here that according to Don Lemon medically speaking, it is fully idiotic and nonsensical for a 20 year old to consider the risk reward calculation with regard to a vaccine.
You can't say that anything is idiotic and nonsensical about a 20-year-old trying to completely mutilate their body to look like a member of the opposite gender and then calling themselves a member of the opposite gender.
No, that's medically appropriate.
And if you doubt that that's medically appropriate, then it's because you're a bigot.
Just a quick note there on medicine, circa CNN 2021.
But here's the broader point with regard to all of this.
When politics becomes just a game of treating the other person as though they are undeserving of empathy on an individual level, and that policy is just an expression of that empathy, you end up in some pretty bad territory.
And again, the reverse is true as well.
It is an excuse for bad policymaking.
One of the things that we've seen with regard to the pandemic right now, and we are seeing it right now, is that we actually have a solution to the pandemic.
And the solution to the pandemic is you learn to live with it.
It's a solution that's always been available.
The problem is that the left rejected that solution.
So now, when the pandemic is rearing its ugly head again, they have to control people.
Because, in the beginning, they, in authoritarian fashion, shut down everything.
They shut down businesses.
They maintained the shutdown on businesses when it became clear that this was very age-stratified.
And striated when it became perfectly clear that people who are 20 were at very little risk of dying of the virus, but people who are 70 were at very high risk of dying of the virus.
They knew this very early on.
They still know that kids are exorbitantly low risk of dying from the virus, but they're treating it as though kids are at high risk of dying from the virus.
Why?
Because again, it's about empathy, right?
My empathy for society is demonstrated by the amount of control that I lavish upon you.
It's helicopter politicking.
The more attention I lavish on you, the more I control you top down, the more I'm demonstrating my empathy.
Well, the problem with that is that Joe Biden had basically declared the pandemic was going to be over July 4th, right?
It's now the end of July, and the pandemic is not in fact over.
People on the right are saying, but it is.
And when we say it is, we don't mean that people aren't dying of the virus.
We mean that the end of a pandemic can logically be charted to when everybody in a particular country has the opportunity to take a cure, which is the vaccine, or Or not, and then we're done.
The government literally has no more role to play here.
Once you have the ability to get a problem fixed and you are not passing that problem on to other people, meaning that you yourself can protect yourself.
Once you can protect yourself, then this becomes very much like you eat too much and you're obese and you get heart disease.
It looks a lot more like that because it's preventable, right?
In this particular case, why are you worried about people, seriously, who are making free decisions of their own accord not to get vaccinated?
In a free country, normally, you would say, okay, well, it's a free country, and if people decide that they are going to do things that I disagree with, I may think it's dumb, I may think it's wrong-headed, but they have a right to do that.
The problem is that we could have made that solution last year.
Ron DeSantis was very bad in Florida for having engaged in that solution.
Sweden was a terrible country for having engaged in that solution, for saying, listen, you're a young person, You're not a very high risk.
You can go out.
You can live your life.
If you're older, you should protect yourself and we should protect you.
This is what Ron DeSantis said.
He was ripped up and down.
Because again, the height of empathy was we lock you in your home for months at a time.
That was empathetic.
It didn't matter whether it worked or not.
It didn't matter that Andrew Cuomo killed all the olds in New York.
He was empathetic, right?
He got on TV every night and he said things very confidently that were completely wrong, but he was empathetic and that was the key.
Okay, well now, The Biden administration is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Because on the one hand, they have done the thing that technically ends the pandemic.
Namely, they have helped, because they used the Trump vaccine and the Trump rollout plan, they have been able to tranche out hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine across the United States.
160 million adults in the United States have taken the vaccine.
And meaning that the vast majority of the adult population above the age of 18, more than 60% of the population above the age of 18 in the United States has now taken the vaccine.
And which means that technically he should be done, right?
But he can't be done.
He can't be done.
Because to be done would mean that he's unempathetic.
Because the policy which started out empathy was locked down to save every life.
Then it became, okay, well, normally you'd say, well, no, empathy is providing people with the solutions that they can use in order to preserve their own lives while preserving their freedom.
That to me looks a lot more empathetic and provides a neutral standard by which we can allow people to live their own lives.
But if empathy is just top-down control, if empathy is I am most empathetic because government action is the empathetic thing.
Then you can't end the pandemic.
It can never end.
There can never be any end.
The only way the pandemic ends is when we have zero COVID.
Zero COVID is never happening.
And so, instead of the Biden administration just saying, listen, you've all had the opportunity to do what you're doing.
We're going to learn to live with the virus now.
If you choose not to get it, disagree.
Think it's bad.
You should go get the vaccine.
That's on you.
Instead of doing that, he can't do that.
Because to do that would be to implicitly acknowledge that the policies that were pursued last year were not empathetic and were not good and were not smart.
He can't do that.
It's zero COVID or nothing for this administration.
And so they're stuck.
Because on the one hand, they want to say, look at our magical success in fighting the virus.
On the other hand, they can't actually point to their magical success in fighting the virus until they reach the actual end goal, which is we lock down so hard everywhere in the United States that the virus completely goes away as a sign of our empathy.
I keep looking.
I'm looking at the same stats that you are.
And what I come up with is...
The number of deaths in the United States right now on a daily basis is so significantly lower than it was even a few months ago.
Right now, if you look at the chart, the average daily death rate, according to the New York Times, I'm looking it up on Google right now, as of July 25th, the seven-day average of deaths, 269.
When we were at the height of the pandemic, we were talking about 3,000.
3,300 seven-day running average of deaths.
We are down tenfold from that.
And yet we are treating this as though it's a crisis.
The reason we're treating this as though it's a crisis, even though, again, the solution is widely available, is because empathy is politics and politics is empathy.
That's all.
And if you disagree with the policy, you're non-empathetic.
It's why the media are focusing in right now on Florida.
They're saying, oh, look at this hotspot of Florida.
So many cases here.
Right.
People who are unvaccinated are getting it.
And?
And?
True empathy looks like I treat you as a full, independent, individual human being.
But we're not going to do that.
So here's Dr. Anthony Fauci saying, maybe we will reconsider forcing the vaccinated to mask, which it's hard to think of something less empathetic than, we told you to get the vaccine, you did, you did the responsible thing, and now we are going to mask you.
And we're gonna mask you, not because you're gonna pass it on to somebody who, through no fault of their own, could get the virus.
We're going to mask you to the adult down the road, who is also a free, individual human being, is protected from a virus for which they are not protecting themselves.
That does not sound empathetic to me or the person who's unvaccinated, who's obviously made an independent human decision that Dr. Fauci, and by the way, I, disagree with.
Here is Dr. Fauci, though, talking about how true empathy is authoritarian cram-downs.
Do you think masks should be brought back for vaccinated Americans?
You know, Jake, this is under active consideration.
The CDC agrees with that ability and discretion capability to say, you know, you're in a situation where we're having a lot of dynamics of infection.
So even if you are vaccinated, you should wear a mask.
That's a local decision.
That's not incompatible with the CDC's overall recommendations that give a lot of discretion to the locals.
Okay, again, the fact that we are now talking about more masking, more lockdowns, more of this stuff when the solution is already on the table, to me it's a demonstration of non-empathy.
But the way we have defined empathy is, empathy is, we are going to tell you what to do, and if you don't like it, I guess that you lack empathy.
And by the way, the solutions now being proposed by the left are exactly along these lines.
You've got the New York Times pushing very hard on the idea that the only way to stop the pandemic is to fight quote-unquote misinformation, which is to crack down on free speech.
We saw NPR do this last week.
It was by Noah Weiland saying, in Louisiana, vaccine misinformation has public health workers feeling quote-unquote stuck.
So the only solution there, obviously, is top-down censorship.
You have to censor the misinformation.
And we're going to define misinformation as anything that the New York Times agrees with.
If the New York Times disagrees with anything, it is now misinformation.
And so, obviously, we need to crack down on the misinformation.
Or maybe the problem is the Washington Post.
The Washington Post says, the big problem here is that the GOP is moving to limit public health powers.
Right, that what we need to do is more lockdowns.
And if you don't wish to see lockdowns, you're unempathetic.
You want more people to die.
Okay, well, once you get to the point where you believe that your political opposition wants more people to die, and the only solution is to silence them, right, no more misinformation.
We've got to stop these GOP lawmakers from, you know, giving people individual freedoms.
We need to stop that.
That needs to end right now.
Well, then the solution is only one-party rule forever.
Right, this is how authoritarianism bleeds up from attitude toward actual policy.
And it's very ugly stuff.
Alrighty, we will be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show today.
He discusses the Olympics flopping in the ratings.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show.
That's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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On today's episode, the Biden administration signals a push for renewed mask mandates and vaccine boosters, Australia erupts in protest after another round of lockdowns, and the NFL experiences blowback to its new vaccine rules.
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