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Oct. 4, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:41
Is A New Civil War Coming? | Ep. 1346
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A new poll from the University of Virginia shows that huge swaths of Americans despise each other.
But does that matter?
Plus, Anthony Fauci continues to preach utter panic and the Democrats stumble toward an agreement on blowout spending.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, it's very difficult to look at the current political situation in the United States and not see that the country seems to be falling apart.
There have been a lot of reasons that have been proposed for this.
In The Right Side of History, my book from a couple of years ago, I proposed that essentially we had lost a lot of common threads that bound us together in the social fabric.
We've lost a lot of the institutions.
Churches no longer have the same pull that they once did.
Social organizations no longer have the same pull that they once did.
And we don't have the same sort of foundational principles.
And we need to rebuild those foundational principles.
And then there are those who have suggested that it's due to purely Obama or purely due to Trump.
Or maybe it's just due to the fact that capitalism has isolated us, right?
That's the argument of both the left and sort of the nationalist populist movement.
There are a lot of answers that have been provided.
But one thing is pretty clear to everyone and that is political polarization is now at a modern high.
We've not been this polarized as a society since at least the 1960s and maybe more so since the 1960s.
Which would mean that we haven't been this polarized probably since the Civil War, if you actually look at it statistically, in terms of how many Americans really, really, really despise each other.
And that is what a new poll out of the University of Virginia Center for Politics says.
According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics, the new poll shows that majorities of both Trump and Biden voters express support for several different elements of the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills being debated in Congress.
More importantly, majorities, often large majorities, of both Biden and Trump voters express some form of distrust for voters, elected officials, and media sources they associate with the other side.
A strong majority of Trump voters see no real difference between Democrats and Socialists.
A strong majority of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that there is no difference between Republicans and Fascists.
That's sort of a problem.
And so the reality is that many of the things that the Democrats are proposing are not necessarily socialist.
They're just big spending social Democrat kind of stuff from Northern Europe.
That is not quite the same thing as complete nationalization of all resources.
Social democracy essentially posits that capitalism ought to provide the basis for the economy, but that we ought to redistribute a lot of the gains of capitalism.
And that in certain areas, we ought to nationalize, right?
In certain areas, they are socialistic.
In certain areas, they are not.
It's sort of a sliding scale, in other words.
But the notion that Democrats are like full out and out nationalized all industry socialists, that's true for some of them, like Bernie Sanders, but it probably isn't true for the majority of Democrats who at least pay lip service to the notion that you have a right to private property and that you should enjoy most of your rights to private property.
And most, I would say, Democrats other than the squad.
are still in line with the notion you should be able to own a business and you should be able to reap the benefits of that business, at least to a certain extent.
And the arguments are over to what extent and how strong the regulation should be.
Now, the momentum inside the Democratic Party is certainly toward the far left.
There's no question about that.
And the continuous growth of regulation and government has drawn us ever closer to, as Frederick Hayek would say, the road to serfdom.
But that does not mean that all Democrats, particularly Democratic voters, many Democratic politicians maybe, most Democratic voters are not socialists.
And for those on the left who think that all Republicans are fascists, Again, you'd have to point to who you think is a fascist on the right side of the aisle, like an out-and-out fascist.
So what the poll shows is that policy wise, there's some commonality between Trump and Biden voters, but people look at each other and they really hate each other, which suggests that more than anything else, this is a culture war.
And this really has less to do with policy than it has to do with culture.
And this is something that I've been saying for a long time.
When you have some of the country that believes the other half of the country is a bunch of religious rubes who are obsessed with their sex lives and who want to control all aspects of their boudoir.
Those people tend to treat other people with a lot of disdain.
And that's what you see with the Barack Obama bitter clingers comments from 2008 or the Hillary Clinton deplorables comments from 2016.
That there's just this wide swath of evil, racist, xenophobic Americans who live in the middle of the country and they're really, really terrible, awful people.
And then on the right, you have people saying, well, if those people look at me like that, well, I don't want to hang out with those people at all.
And there is somewhat of an imbalance in terms of what people think the true threat to the country is.
And that imbalance is now kind of moving into balance.
What do I mean by that?
Is that if you look at a poll a couple of years ago from my friend Kristen Soltis-Henderson, what it showed is that Democrats believe the number one threat to America is not an economic threat.
It's not a foreign policy threat.
It's Trump voters.
And you're starting to see Trump voters respond by saying, OK, well, if you perceive me as a threat, this now makes you a threat to me.
And so what this poll shows is that a huge percentage of Americans on both sides of the aisle really don't like people on the other side of the aisle.
So to the statement, I've come to view elected officials from the opposing party as presenting a clear and present danger to American democracy.
80% of Biden voters at least somewhat agree that elected officials from the Republican Party present a clear and present danger to American democracy.
84% of Trump voters feel the same way.
Are you concerned that you or someone close to you might experience personal loss or suffering due to the effects of the opposing party?
80% of Biden voters say yes.
82% of Trump voters say yes.
Despite the U.S.
Constitution's First Amendment protection of free speech, some media sources on the extreme left or right have become so untruthful they should be censored.
78% of Democrats say at least they have some sympathy for the idea of censorship.
Some 73% of Republicans say the same about left-wing sources.
78% of Democrats say that Republicans want to eliminate the influence of progressive values in American life and culture.
87% of Republicans feel the same way about Democrats.
Some 77% of Democrats say that the mainstream media might as well be a part of the Republican Party.
77% of Democrats believe the media is biased toward the Republican Party, which is totally crazy.
88% of Republicans believe that the mainstream media is part of the Democratic Party, which is significantly more accurate.
And of course, 56% of Democrats believe there's no real difference between Republicans and fascists.
76% of Republicans believe there's no difference between Democrats and socialists.
Now, again, I'm not going to pretend that there is a complete equation here, because there is not.
The Democrats are much warmer toward socialism than the Republicans are toward fascism.
There's just no question about this.
Just on a base root level, the Democratic Party has a lot more crossover with socialistic ideas about redistribution of income, for example, or restrictions placed on use of private property, or even the family, than Republicans have with the idea that there ought to be complete top-down control of government in every aspect of your life, which is really the essence of fascism.
Fascism tends more toward the left in that particular iteration.
But it's very clear that Americans' bottom line here are polarized and see people on the other side of the political aisle as a real threat to them.
Now, in a second, we're going to ask the question whether that matters, because I think everybody sees that and they go, OK, well, that's why the country is falling apart.
But there's some new data suggesting that's not really why the country is falling apart.
And it's kind of fascinating and worth going into, because all of this is root level stuff in American politics.
What's driving?
The polarization.
What's driving the fact that people are having these fraught battles over sometimes very fringe issues?
Like what's driving all that?
We're going to get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, we see this poll from University of Virginia and it shows, again, massive polarization in the American public.
Democrats think Republicans are fascists.
Republicans think Democrats are socialists and all the rest.
So the question is, What sort of difference does this make in our politics?
Now, the rote answer is huge difference, right?
If we don't like each other, it's going to be very difficult for us to live together.
However, there is a new study that is out from, quoted by Thomas Edsel, who does a really interesting column for the New York Times.
I know, there really is an interesting columnist at the New York Times.
And he quotes a study titled, Political Sectarianism in America, published by 15 important scholars in Science Magazine in November 2020.
The Science Essay argued the political sectarianism of the public incentivizes politicians to adopt anti-democratic tactics when pursuing electoral or political victories.
A recent experiment shows that today a majority party candidate in most U.S.
House districts, Democrat or Republican, could get elected despite openly violating democratic principles like electoral fairness, checks and balances, or civil liberties, right?
So there's this study from last year suggesting that most Americans are electing people who don't really care about the checks and balances of American life.
However, David Brookman, Joshua Kala, and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Berkeley, Yale, and Dartmouth, challenged that Science Magazine article.
Instead, they make the case in their December 2020 paper, Does Effective Polarization Undermine Democratic Norms or Accountability?
Maybe not.
That partisan hostility may be destructive, but attempts to moderate it will not diminish party loyalty or tolerance for anti-democratic changes in election law or the decline in political accountability.
In other words, It's true that partisan hostility may be bad, but even if we got rid of partisan hostility, that actually would not solve the underlying problem, which is that many, many, many Americans, of all stripes, seem to be willing to use the government as a club to cudgel somebody else.
Brookman and his co-authors agree with a lot of the prior research that found that effective polarization has been growing worldwide.
But what they differ with is those who take the growing partisan hostility argument a step further to contend that if citizens were less effectively polarized, they would be less likely to endorse norm violation, overlook co-partisan politicians' shortcomings, oppose compromise, adopt their party's views, or misperceive economic conditions.
In other words, this really is not being driven by polarization.
The polarization is being driven in turn by something else.
And Brookman and his co-authors write, quote, we find no evidence that an exogenous decrease in effective polarization causes a downstream decrease in opposition to democratic norms.
In other words, even if we get less polarized, people still don't like democracy anymore.
We investigate the causal effects of effective polarization on a variety of downstream incomes in five political domains, electoral accountability, adopting one party's policy positions, support for legislative bipartisanship, support for democratic norms, and perception of objective conditions.
So in other words, it seems like reducing polarization between people, making people feel better about one another, is not necessarily the answer to the real political problem that we have right now, which is the subjection of our political norms to withering fire.
There's another article from May 2021 from a sociologist at Stanford named Jan Volkl and eight colleagues.
in which they write, there is widespread concern that rising effective polarization, disliked for members of the opposing party, is exacerbating a range of anti-democratic attitudes.
Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions and successfully promising interventions that have been identified that successfully reduce effective polarization.
These efforts have mixed results.
We find that the depolarization interventions reliably reduce effective polarization, but this reduction does not reliably translate into reduced support for undemocratic practices, undemocratic candidates, or partisan violence.
They conclude, our findings suggest effective polarization may not be as problematic for democratic societies as is widely assumed.
In sum, the research shows interventions can reduce both attitudinal and behavioral indicators of effective polarization without reducing anti-democratic attitudes.
So people could still be anti-democracy even while they kind of like their neighbors, as it turns out.
This calls into question the commonly held assumptions that anti-democratic attitudes are downstream consequences of effective polarization.
This is really quite fascinating research and suggests something deeper has been going on here.
So what is the deeper thing?
If you don't dislike your neighbors, then why are so many of us abandoning democratic norms?
Why are so many people abandoning, for example, checks and balances, which is clearly happening.
More and more Americans on both sides of the aisle seem to look at federalism and say, well, Yeah, but if we can grab the brass ring, if we can grab the top of government, why shouldn't we use that to cram down our perspectives on a multiplicity of other Americans?
Now, the normal explanation might be, yeah, I disagree with those other Americans so much, and they're such a threat to me, that I need to use the brass ring to cram down my policies to prevent them from threatening me, right?
It's a battle for all, right?
This is a war over the government gun, and if they get it, they're gonna shoot us, and if we get it, we better shoot them.
So that would be the suggestion that has been made before, that polarization is what is driving the anti-democratic tendencies.
And these new studies are suggesting, no, that's not correct.
That even if the differences are somewhat relatively minor, people are still willing to grab the government gun and use them to cram down their own political points of view.
And just one second, we'll get to why I think this is happening.
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Okay, so why is it that if what's causing all of this movement away from checks and balances and democratic norms and respect for outcomes, if what's driving that is not effective polarization, right?
How much we feel threatened by each other.
What is driving that?
The answer is, I think a broad perspective shift on human nature that has happened in the United States and across its parties, though not to equal extent.
And a broad shift in what we think the government was constructed for.
I think people no longer understand why the United States government was constructed the way it was.
The United States government was constructed the way that it was by the Founding Fathers because they had a certain perception of human nature.
That perception of human nature is that human beings were inherently limited.
Human beings had a great capacity for reason, sure, but they also, human beings, had the unfortunate tendency to be venal and self-serving and extraordinarily ambitious.
And to grab the brass ring, the human tendency was to grab the brass ring and then to use that power against somebody else.
That was the human tendency.
And if you wish to share a polity with other people, regardless of who the other people are, whether you like them or you don't like them, you are going to have to restrict your own ability to use power to do what is good.
See, here's the thing.
There are two ways to view power.
And there are flip sides of the same coin.
One way is that you are grabbing power in order to do something good.
And this has been how most fascists throughout history have justified what they're doing.
They're doing something good.
Now, the flip side of that is the people who get the raw end of the deal, the people with the short end of the stick, to them, when somebody says, I'm grabbing power to do something good, very often what that means is you're grabbing power to do something bad to me.
You want to do something good for your friends, something good on behalf of quote-unquote society, but for me individually, that's a bad thing.
The use of power inherently means that there is somebody who is going to be the target of the power.
And so if you are grabbing power, inherently somebody else is going to be worse off.
Power is, in fact, a zero-sum game.
There are very rare circumstances in which power is not a zero-sum game.
But in most political circumstances, power is a zero-sum game.
It's only not a zero-sum game when you have like overt aggression, right?
This is why the sort of libertarian perspective on government is the government ought to be used only in order to maintain certain basic legal norms, to prevent violence, for example, because that is a non-zero-sum game, right?
If there's no violence for anybody, we all live better lives.
Including the people who theoretically would be doing violence and then would be the victim of somebody else doing violence to them.
But for most of the things that we do as a government, somebody is going to get the short end of the stick.
Somebody is going to pay the price.
Somebody is going to foot the bill.
So what the founder said is, if that's the case, then we better have overwhelming support for anything that we do, as a federal government particularly, in order for us to make a move.
Right?
We would have subsidiarity at very local levels where you and your friends really agree on a lot of stuff.
Well, then you have more ability as a local government to do what it is that you want, because everybody else who doesn't want to live there can simply move.
Right?
If you have a very local community, you know everybody in the town, everybody in the town knows you, you want to preserve your way of life.
Well, then you have a little bit more power under the federal constitution, you know, barring sort of certain fundamental violations of rights like fascistic non-voting, right?
The federal government does guarantee to the states a Republican form of government.
But barring extraordinarily basic rights violations, local governments can do a lot of stuff.
And then as you kind of move out, as you zoom out from the very local level to the broader and broader level, the federal government was supposed to do less and less because we agree on less and less.
And so in order for us to do anything, we need to overcome a bunch of obstacles and burdens in order to prove that what we were doing was so vastly important that it was worthy of the use of power.
So this, again, springs from a vision of human nature that the Founders were grounding in both a Judeo-Christian value system, which suggests that man is inherently sinful, and that man is inherently flawed, and that man also has the capacity to be an angel, but also the capacity to be a devil, right?
I mean, this is directly from Federalist 51, where James Madison talks about the capacity of man to be both angel and devil.
The notion was that if men were angels, no government would be necessary, and if men were devils, no government would be sufficient.
So there was that view of human nature.
And then over time, it seems that the view of human nature itself shifted.
And in accordance with that, the view of government shifted.
So in the late 19th century, mid to late 19th century, there was this movement away from a vision of human nature as bounded to a view of human nature as unbounded, completely malleable.
That all human limits were essentially products of their environment, and if we could just shift the environment in any direction, then human nature would inherently change.
This is one of the key components of Marxism, is that human nature would change as the economic system under which we live changed.
Inevitably.
And that was the kind of vision of the progressive view of the United States in the early 20th century.
If we can just shift the circumstances under which people live, we will create a better form of human being.
There was an innate malleability to human beings.
And therefore, human beings could be angels.
And if human beings could be angels, why would you have to fear the government?
Why would you have to fear a vast, broad national government doing exactly what it is that it wanted to do?
Why would you need democracy anymore?
You just, like really, there would be no need for voting.
All you would need is the right person at the top.
And if that right person at the top was doing the right thing, well then liberty would be of no consequence because liberty, of course, we all pay homage to liberty.
Liberty only exists when liberty means that something you disagree with is allowed to happen.
If you believe that liberty only extends to the things you want to happen, that's not actual liberty.
That's just you being your own little dictator.
The notion of liberty is that liberty allows for innovation, liberty allows for experimentation, liberty allows for the possibility of pluralism as the famous philosopher Isaiah Berlin used to say.
The basic notion here is that liberty was not only a tool but it was a virtue.
The core of liberty is disagreement.
The core of liberty is that you don't have all the answers.
We don't know all of the most virtuous things.
Yes, there are certain baseline things that we all sort of agree are virtuous, and those can be encoded in law.
Now, as a society, we've broken down even those things, right?
The argument against liberty is that liberty has become libertinism.
That is the argument from the right, is that liberty went so far that it basically tore down all of the institutions that we all used to agree upon, and now we have nothing we agree upon, and so we're all falling apart.
in order to reinstill a sense of commonality, we need to use the power of government.
That's the argument from the right.
But that's the polarization argument.
The real argument that I'm suggesting is more kind of broadly based than that argument.
There's some virtue to that argument, although the virtues don't go all that far because the reality is that aside from kind of resetting very, very basic notions of virtue in American life, and those virtues really are sort of relegated to the amendments that are made to the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, that aside from those specific virtues, the government should not really be involved.
What most people have fallen into is this idea that the government itself is our friend.
The government is quote-unquote us, as Barack Obama suggested in 2012.
The founders never would have thought the government was us.
We're individuals, we're families, we're local communities.
The government is not us.
But here's the thing.
The minute that we as a society, I mean like pretty much everyone across the aisle, decides that the federal government is the answer to all of our problems, all of our questions, And the federal government ought to be the power doing the virtuous thing, not preserving liberty, not preserving the possibility of other people disagreeing, not pursuing subsidiarity.
Once that happens, the polarization doesn't matter anymore.
All you want is the right person in charge of the government.
And this is going to lead to an enormous amount of inherent dissatisfaction because here's the thing, all of that's a lie.
It doesn't matter who's at the top of government.
It's never going to be the greatest person.
It could be the greatest person and it still wouldn't matter because we would still have disagreements in this country.
The sort of longing for an authoritarian monarch to lead us forward out of whatever morass we have found ourselves in, and this exists on nearly all sides of the political aisle, is extraordinarily dangerous, but it is an outgrowth of a failure to understand basic human nature in the way the founders understood basic human nature.
They believed in checks and balances because even they, who were blessed with some of the great leadership of all time and people like George Washington or John Adams or Thomas Jefferson, right?
Even they understood that all of these people are inherently limited and flawed and you can't give them absolute and ultimate power.
We seem to have lost that capacity to understand innate human flaw.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay.
If your hope, if your great hope, is that electing the right people to positions of power is going to fix everything, then you are likely to be disappointed.
You're likely to be disappointed because this has never been the case.
It has never been the case throughout human history that the person with absolute power, the enlightened monarch, has ever pleased the people in any serious way where a feedback loop was possible.
It was easy to say that they were a great monarch from the perspective of history, but you never got a poll of the people they were ruling.
The reality is that checks and balances were specifically designed in order to preserve the innovation possible through liberty.
In order to preserve the possibility that perhaps we're wrong.
In order to preserve the epistemic humility that is necessary for the functioning of a free society.
And of course, that sort of humility rests in a belief about the inherent flaws in human nature.
When you get rid of those, when you suggest there really are no inherent flaws in human nature, when individual identity breaks down, what you get is a desire for power, pure and simple.
And it doesn't matter that you disagree with your neighbor, only mildly.
You are virtuous, and your neighbor has the wrong idea.
And it doesn't matter whether democracy says that one thing or another.
Virtue overcomes democracy.
Principle overcomes democracy.
Now, there are certain cases where principle does overcome democracy, right?
I mean, those principles are spelled out in the Constitution.
This is why we have a constitutional process whereby if certain legislation violates core principles, it gets struck down.
There are certain things a democracy is just not allowed to do.
Again, that is because the founders believed that there were these core principles that had to be protected even from the people.
But if you're such a believer that human beings are essentially at root both completely malleable and inherently virtuous, but only people who think like you, you're much more likely to be anti-democratic.
Democracy becomes a tool in your arsenal.
When you're a majority, you're very pro-democracy.
And when you're a minority, you're very anti-democracy.
And you believe that you should rule using the authoritarian state, no matter what anybody else thinks.
We need an aggressive administrative state to do what we want without the weighing in of the American people.
But then when the American people agree with us, then the American people should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want.
This seems to be the perspective.
It is very strong on the left.
It exists on the right as well.
And again, it is an outgrowth of a failure to understand what human nature is.
And some of that failure of outgrowth happened over the course, again, of two centuries, and now we are seeing the apotheosis of it as everything becomes nationalized, right?
As every issue now affects you, as the way we approach issues is not by being in contact.
Like, here's the thing.
When you spend a lot of time outdoors or with your friends and family at synagogue or church, Yes, they're wonderful people, you hang out with them, and you also think, I really wouldn't want these people to control my life, and I certainly wouldn't want people far away to control our lives.
When you're online all the time, it's easy to find groups of people like you, who are the only virtuous people who have ever existed in all of history.
You can tear down all the old statues.
You can remake the world anew.
All you need is the power.
So as I say, I don't think this is about the polarization primarily, I think it is about the fact that the American people, and Westerners generally, have shifted away from a quasi-religious view of humanity, which, by the way, is more backed by the science, and toward a bizarrely mystical view of humanity, in which you define yourself inherently, you're completely malleable to the point where you can actually define your own gender, you can make of yourself whatever you wish, and not only that, you are the only person who has ever been virtuous in the history of the universe, and therefore democracy doesn't matter.
When we say in modern society that, you know, the democratic principles have to go by the wayside because there are higher principles, typically what we mean is we wish to be the person holding the sword.
And then it doesn't matter what you think of the person on the opposing side.
Like, the polarization doesn't help, obviously.
If you think the person on the other side of the aisle is bad, it makes you feel good about using the power.
But even if the other person is not all that bad, the power is there to be used after all.
That is really what's affecting our politics.
And this is evident in every area.
It's evident wherever you look in American politics and abroad right now.
This attitude.
That pluralism, democratic processes, that constitutional checks and balances, these things ought not matter because if we just have a great leader, he will lead us to a better day.
And in fact, if people disapprove, those people need to be run roughshod over.
This is the story of COVID demagoguery from the federal government, for example.
Don't look at the data.
When you present data to people, they get angry because it's become a referendum on your faith in government.
In some ways, COVID has become a referendum on your belief system that the enlightened few will lead us to a better day.
Not that every individual has the capacity to make a decision.
Many of those decisions will be bad, but freedom is still necessary.
Not the idea that free markets will bear fruit, which, by the way, is the story of the pandemic.
Yes, Operation Warp Speed protected all of these drug manufacturers from liability with regard to if they made a vaccine that didn't work, they'd still get paid by the federal government.
But you really think that if the federal government had not been pushing vaccines very, very hard, that companies wouldn't have jumped in?
I mean, how many private companies are attempting to develop things like oral vaccines?
Attempting to develop right now therapeutics that are not being paid for by Operation Warp Speed, for example.
But instead, what has happened is that, and this is perfectly, it used to be less true.
Now it is 100% true.
With so many treatments that are now available for COVID.
With the vaccines that are out there.
We should be moving away from the notion that we need top-down government control.
And yet, there is this sense that we need to be told what to do by the greatest among us.
Because they will shape the environment that's around us and help us achieve perfection, help us achieve almost a certain sort of personal salvation.
That's the only way I can explain the sort of fealty that a lot of people seem to have for public figures in the health establishment.
So when I say that we have good treatments, what I mean is that there's good news on COVID.
The COVID surge in the Southeast is over.
If you look at the numbers from Florida, from Georgia, if you look at Texas, all of these numbers are just way down.
Nobody reports on that because the media have an interest in pretending that freedom is coincident with a rise in COVID.
But right now, you look in the Northeast and there's a pretty big spike in COVID.
Because it turns out that this virus is seasonal and when people go inside, they tend to infect one another with COVID.
And if you're vaccinated, you won't die.
But if you're unvaccinated, you might die.
And even the states that have very high vaccination rates, they don't have 98% vaccination rates.
And even areas like Israel, where they have very high vaccination rates, still, a lot of people are being infected.
Okay, with all that said, we have a lot of good things that prevent hospitalization and death.
And we now have this new drug from Merck.
On Friday, they said they have an experimental pill for people sick with COVID.
And it reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half.
If cleared by regulators, it would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19, adding a whole new easy-to-use weapon to an arsenal that already includes the vaccine.
A decision from the FDA could come within weeks.
Now again, it is amazing that we still have to run through this ridiculous sideshow that the FDA is in order to delay treatment.
How many treatments at this point has the FDA delayed so long that they've probably allowed tens of thousands of deaths to happen in the United States just because the delay is inherent in the FDA system?
But, with that said, we now have good treatments.
We should be optimistic about where we are right now.
Instead, people are relying more and more on these supposed leaders in public health.
And leaders in public health know their job, and that's to scare the living hell out of you.
So you have Joe Biden putting out statements about the painful milestone of 700,000 American deaths from COVID, quote, just another reminder of how important it is to get vaccinated.
Now, remember, Biden is never going to take any of the blame for that astonishing death toll, even though many, many Americans have died under the auspices of the Biden administration.
It's not going to be that they blew it in how they rolled this thing out or their public health messaging.
The idea here is just give us more power.
It's always give us more power.
Anthony Fauci is a perfect example of this sort of person.
Now, if you listen to this show over the course of the last couple of years, what you'll notice is that I have shifted my opinion somewhat on Dr. Fauci.
So at the beginning, I thought, okay, this guy is, you know, the head of the NIAID under the National Institutes of Health.
And he seems, you know, fairly well qualified to talk what he's talking about.
And he seems like he wants to give some fact.
And even if he gets it wrong, you know, at least he's trying.
And then over the course of the pandemic, it's become clear that he's an openly political actor who wants to maximize his own power.
I was not willing to say that up until he started suggesting that you still needed to mask up after having had the vaccine and then reversed himself when he started mimicking every single message of the Biden administration.
Well, now, I mean, it's clear that he never wants to give up power.
Anthony Fauci was on your television over the weekend telling you that it might be too soon to tell if we can get together for Christmas.
It is not too soon to tell if you can get together for Christmas.
You can get together for Christmas.
The reason I say you can get together for Christmas is because if you have been vaccinated, then you are not in serious risk of hospitalization or death from COVID.
When I say serious risk, I mean a risk higher than the flu.
Once you've been vaccinated, you are very unlikely to be hospitalized or die.
Really, really unlikely to die once you've been vaccinated.
And if you're unvaccinated, you've made that decision yourself.
And you do not pose, when they say that you pose a massive risk to the vaccinated if you're unvaccinated, no.
The vaccine cuts that risk.
There is no guarantee in American society that you will never get COVID.
That is not a thing that we can ever guarantee because it is now endemic, as every major scientist has said.
And yet Anthony Fauci, because he is power hungry and because so many people seem to be wedded to the notion that again, government can solve all of your problems because human beings are malleable and government is just an extension of that, I don't know why anyone would listen to Fauci, but he's still there talking.
Here's Anthony Fauci over the weekend saying it's too soon to tell if you can get together with your family for Christmas.
We can gather for Christmas or it's just too soon to tell.
You know, Margaret, it's just too soon to tell.
We've just got to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we're going to do at a particular time.
Let's focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down.
And we can do it by people getting vaccinated and also in the situation where boosters are appropriate to get people boosted.
Okay, so he's saying we may not know by Christmas.
And here's the reality.
Most people in most of the country are already out and about and living their lives as normal because either they're vaxxed or they're not vaxxed.
And they've made that decision.
But Fauci is so delusional at this point that he's saying that he doesn't think it's okay.
He said this this week.
He doesn't think it's okay to get a mild breakthrough illness from COVID.
Well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but Dr. Fauci cannot protect you from a mild breakthrough illness from COVID.
The breakthrough cases of COVID are significant.
A very large number of people who have been vaccinated have gotten COVID and then they get a cold or they get a mild flu and then they're done.
Nobody cares about that sort of stuff normally.
But if you believe that the government is vested with this incredible power to instill both virtue and to protect you, then why wouldn't you listen to Dr. Anthony Fauci when he says something patently absurd?
Here he is.
It is an assumption that is okay To get infected and to get mild and moderate disease, as long as you don't wind up in the hospital and die.
And I have to be open and honest, I reject that.
I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID, even if they don't wind up in the hospital.
Okay, that's, I'm sorry, that's madness.
That's madness.
That means that this is a forever pandemic, as I've been saying for a while.
This government wants the pandemic to last forever.
Literally nowhere on earth is there a guarantee that you won't get sick.
That guarantee does not exist.
No mask is going, no masking regimen is going to stop that unless we're all wearing N95s for the rest of time.
There's no point at which we ever go back to normal under that rubric.
He's aiming, I mean, that's him saying he's aiming for zero COVID.
No reputable scientist believes zero COVID is possible.
It is not a thing.
And the sooner we accept that, the better off we are.
But that's in here, that's accepting our inherent Limitations as human beings and as a society and that's something that too many people are simply unwilling to do.
Accept those limitations.
Which of course leads to some rather fascistic top-down beliefs by people like Fauci.
That mandates are good.
Not just mandates on adults, mandates on children.
So Fauci was asked about California's new announcement that if you're above the age of 12 you must be vaccinated in order to go back to school.
Now again, the number of kids who've died between the ages of 12 and 18 is extraordinarily low in the United States because this disease, thank God, is not extremely dangerous for people who are under the age of 18.
It is less dangerous over the course of the last year.
More people have died from pneumonia over the course of the last year below the age of 18 in the United States than have died from COVID.
And there are many more cases of COVID, generally speaking, than cases of pneumonia in the United States.
But here's Anthony Fauci, very happy with the vaccine mandate for children.
The idea of getting vaccinated, for example, getting children in school vaccinated, which is gone right now with Governor Newsom in California, things like that are not new.
I mean, there are school situations where I know my own children how to get vaccinated with a variety of vaccines in order to be able to go to school.
And real quick.
There's nothing new about that.
Should other states follow California's lead and require kids to get vaccinated for the coronavirus to go to school?
You know, I'm not going to be recommending things to other states.
I'll let the leaders of those states, but I think what the governor did in California was something that was sound judgment.
Again, if you believe that government has all powers, then why not?
What do rights matter?
In this half hour, she talks about how rights don't matter.
Individual rights are no longer of consequence.
In the end, he ought to rule.
Our benevolent dictators ought to rule.
In a second, we'll get to our benevolent dictators trying to figure out exactly how to spend more of our money and encroach more on our freedom.
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Okay, so when you carry forward this vision, which is that you have the virtuous position and it doesn't matter what democratic obstacles stand in your way, somebody needs to get out of the way.
This takes you to some pretty anti-democratic places.
And this has been true, again, across the political aisle, but right now we are seeing it mostly from people on the left.
So Bernie Sanders, for example, over the weekend, he tweeted out, two senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want.
We must stand with the working families of our country.
We must combat climate change.
We must delay passing the infrastructure bill until we pass a strong reconciliation bill.
Hey, now, just focus in on those stats for one second.
We're talking about anti-democratic beliefs and norms.
It's not a surprise that Bernie Sanders is fond of anti-democratic norms.
After all, he loves the USSR and Cuba.
But Bernie Sanders tweeting out that two senators cannot be allowed to defeat what 48 senators and 210 House members want.
This boggles the mind a little bit, considering there are 100 senators.
So if 48 senators want something, this would mean, just using a little quick math up top here, 100 minus 48 is 52.
That means 52 senators do not want something.
So he is saying that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, if they don't want something, along with 50 other Republicans, they should not be able to trump what 48 senators want.
Which is a weird notion of how majorities work.
He says they're not allowed to defeat 210 House members.
What do those 210 House members want?
Now you'll recall there are 435 House members.
Now again, I may not be a math whiz, but 435 minus 210 is 225.
Which is larger than 210.
So he's saying a minority of the House and a minority of the Senate ought to rule.
And of course he believes that because he is privy to virtue.
And the process can't be allowed to stand in the way.
The process is of no consequence at all, obviously.
And this attitude has permeated down to the lowest levels of the Democratic activist wing.
So Nancy Pelosi put out a notice last week that they had extended the Thursday, September 30th legislative day to Friday, pushing back passage of the bipartisan infrastructure framework and to advance Build Back Better.
But they needed more time to reach their goal.
She says, quote, more time is needed.
To reach our goal of passing both bills.
Which we will.
It's about time!
We all take great pride in the rescue package.
It's about time.
There's an October 31st surface transportation authorization deadline after last night's passage of a critical 30-day extension.
We must pass BIF well before then.
The sooner the better to get the jobs out there.
It's about time.
She just keeps saying it's about time over and over and over.
If it were about time, then she would have passed a bill last week.
She doesn't have the support to pass the bill last week.
So instead, she's pushing it off till October 31st.
She was supposed to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure framework.
That bipartisan infrastructure bill had support from Republicans in the Senate.
It had support from Republicans in the House.
She wasn't going to bring it up for a vote, however, because there weren't enough Democrats in her own party to pass it unanimously within her own party.
They were going to try and vote it down.
So she instead delayed it, and she's falling prey to the progressives, who again are a very small wing of the party, This caused Kyrsten Sinema to blast fellow Democrats.
She said canceling the U.S. House vote on a bipartisan infrastructure investment and jobs act denies Americans millions of good paying new jobs and hurts everyday families.
And she points out that it's the radicals who are holding this up.
She says Congress was designed as a place where representatives of Americans with valid and diverse views find compromise and common ground.
That is why when President Biden asked me to continue bipartisan infrastructure negotiations, I agreed and helped deliver the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a historic, broadly popular plan that reflects a key priority of President Biden's.
My commitment to delivering lasting results is also why I have engaged for months in direct good faith negotiations over the separate budget reconciliation proposal.
Good faith negotiations, however, require trust.
Over the course of this year, Democratic leaders have made conflicting promises that could not all be kept and have, at times, pretended that differences of opinion within our party did not exist.
Even when those disagreements were repeatedly made clear directly and publicly, canceling the infrastructure vote further erodes that trust.
More importantly, it betrays the trust the American people have placed in their elected leaders and denies our country crucial investments to expand economic opportunities.
That's Kirsten Sinema going hard after her own party.
But what this means is that this means Kyrsten Sinema is the bad person.
And Kyrsten Sinema is apparently standing in the way of democracy.
And the folks who believe that the federal government should do anything and everything That any obstacle is an obstacle on the road to utopia.
Those people have no limits.
This is how you end up with video of protesters following Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University and berating her while she is on the can.
I'm not kidding you.
This is a thing that happened over the weekend.
Now, just imagine for a second if Republicans had followed AOC into the bathroom and berated her about the Green New Deal.
We would be treated to weeks on end of talk about the innate horrors of that.
AOC would be on TV crying and we would have the media talking about how all Republicans were like this.
Meanwhile, you have Democrats who are chasing Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom where presumably she is doing her business in order to harass her about not voting for a $3.5 trillion boondoggle.
And the media are kind of like, you know, normal politics every day at work.
Here's a little bit of that video.
We need a Build Back Better plan right now.
We knocked on doors.
We need solutions to build that better plan.
We have the solutions that we need.
And Bernie Sanders, of course, is doubling down on this as well.
So Bernie Sanders was slamming Kyrsten Sinema, saying that it's not the progressives holding this up.
It's Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin holding this up.
Well, no, it's you.
It's you.
I mean, these are two separate issues.
There's the bipartisan infrastructure plan, which, again, has bipartisan approval.
And then there's the reconciliation plan, which needs to be negotiated separately.
You guys tied them together because you wish to run roughshod over everyone.
And that's why you're angry at Sinema, because she's standing in the way of your utopian schemes.
Here's Bernie.
Well, I think Senator Sinema is wrong.
I think from day one, Jonathan, it has been clear.
President of the United States has said it.
Speaker of the House Pelosi has made it clear.
Our Majority Leader in the Senate, Schumer, has made it clear.
Both of these bills are going forward in tandem.
We're not just taking on or dealing with Senators Manchin or Senator Sinema.
We're taking on the entire ruling class of this country.
It's the higher ruling class of this country that needs to be taken on, right?
The language of virtue.
Of pure virtue.
Democratic norms don't matter.
Democracy doesn't matter.
This guy thinks that 48 senators and 210 congresspeople are enough to pass a $3.5 trillion bill.
What's the big deal?
After all, what they are doing is virtuous.
It all comes down, in the end, to government power.
It's all about government power.
And then the powerful are entitled to completely lie to you, of course.
So Cedric Richmond, who's an advisor to President Biden, he goes out on national TV and he keeps repeating the lie that we don't have to worry about the spending because of course the number is zero.
This is not about a number, because at the end of the day, here's what's important, Chuck.
The number is zero.
We are paying for everything in this piece of legislation.
And it's very popular with the American people that the wealthy and big corporations finally pay their fair share.
So we're going to pay for everything we do.
No, you're not going to pay for everything you do and you're lying to the American people.
But you believe you can get away with it because for too long, the American people have been willing to grant absolute power to whoever quote-unquote agrees with them, depending on whether they have a D or an R next to their name.
And that needs to stop right now.
We need to start thinking as an American people systemically.
We need to start thinking about the systems and incentive structures we create for our politicians.
This is not about electing the right people.
It's not about getting rid of the wrong people.
It's about making sure that the checks and balances of American government still work to protect the fundamental freedoms That are there because human nature exists and human nature is not trustworthy.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles Show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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An illegal alien harasses a U.S.
Senator in a women's bathroom, Dr. Fauci tries to cancel Christmas again, and a Democrat lawmaker claims that efforts to stop the killing of black babies are rooted in white supremacy.
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