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Nov. 23, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:35
A Society Without Men Is A Dying Society | Ep. 1382
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The leftist culture war against traditional masculinity continues to gain steam as China takes a different path, and NBC News recommends you skip the turkey this Thanksgiving.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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We'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Okay, so.
Very often on this show, we spend a lot of time on sort of the day-to-day political insanity that is breaking out across the nation.
But there are underlying trends in American politics that are really disturbing for the future of the country.
And maybe the most disturbing underlying trend in America right now is the substitution of radical subjectivity for basic objective truth.
What I mean by that is people tend to think that their truth matters more than the truth.
My truth matters more than the truth.
And once you make that stark division, Basically, your society is at an end because reality has certain dictates.
Reality requires that you live within its boundaries.
Reality means that you have to understand how the world works, how nature works, and then you have to adapt yourself to those realities.
Instead, as a society, we have decided to use every means at our disposal in order to reshape the reality around us, or at least what reality can do to us, in order to prevent that reality from intruding.
So when it comes to Everyday life we have set up systems whereby no one is allowed to criticize us if we are if we are criticized we get very Very upset and then we try to rig the system So no one can ever criticize us again if fact patterns emerge that threaten our view of the world we simply use the the bottlenecking Technologies at our disposal to prevent that sort of feedback loop from harming our interests and our narrative
So if a case, if a criminal case goes the way we don't want it to go, we simply have people on the TV repeat back to us what we want to hear as opposed to the reality of the situation.
When it comes to how we wish to live our lives, how we feel on the inside, this is supposed to matter an awful lot more than how reality matters.
And we are now using technology as sort of the all-purpose wonder drug.
So we're creating entire artificial realities where we can live completely free of reality itself.
There is a philosopher named Robert Nozick.
Robert Nozick is a libertarian philosopher and he once posited what he called the experience machine.
He said that most human beings are interested in freedom in the real world.
He said if you could be plugged into a machine, Where you spent all day experiencing the feeling that what you were doing was real, but where all of your activities simply resulted in success.
Would you do it?
And he posited no, because most people still want to live in the real world.
Most people want to feel like their work has real impact on other people.
I'm not so sure anymore.
I think that we have now created, if Karl Marx suggested that religion was the opiate of the mass, I think that we have created actual opiates in the form of online addiction, in the form of virtual realities, in the form of a media-created reality.
And we feed ourselves this drug that separates us off from the reality.
And we just have people reflect back at us what we want to hear.
I think a lot of people would plug into that experience machine now, that Robert Nozick experience machine.
They would give up their ability to affect real change in the real world in favor of a sort of solipsistic, drug-induced SOMA, virtual SOMA from Brave New World.
And that's really disturbing.
And I think that we have entire institutions that are built up around this.
We have institutions that cater to our every whim.
We have algorithms that tell us the stuff that we need.
And at no point are we ever confronted with the realities of the actual real world.
And when we are, we get insulted by those realities.
We get angry with those realities.
There's only one problem with this.
And that is reality wins anyway.
We can fight reality.
We can construct artificial realities.
We can create worlds in our own imagination.
And we can occupy those worlds with others who also wish to live in their own imagination.
We can all live inside Facebook's meta.
But that is not going to change the reality that for billions of people around the world, most people throughout human history and most people right now, those virtual realities not only don't exist, they are seen as spiritually enervating, as spiritually emptying, as counterproductive.
Civilizations that drug themselves into enervation lose.
And that is what we are watching right now.
According to the Washington Post, more U.S.
adults who do not already have kids say they are unlikely to ever have them.
This is according to a new Pew Research Study survey.
Findings that could draw renewed attention to the risks of declining birth rates for industrialized nations.
There's not a single industrialized nation in the West, I think the only exceptions are Georgia and Israel, that has a replacement-level birth rate, meaning at least two kids.
In order for your population to maintain, every two-parent household has to have two kids.
But in the United States, that number is more like 1-7.
In Italy, that number is like 1-2.
That means these populations are going to be dropping dramatically.
According to the Washington Post, experts are concerned that the U.S.
birth rate, which has declined for the sixth straight year, may not fuel enough population growth on its own to keep the future economy afloat and to fund social programs.
Women between the ages of 18 to 49 and men between 18 and 59, who said they are not parents, were asked the question, thinking about the future, how likely is it that you will have children someday?
In October, 26% of them said it is very likely, a six point drop from 2018, when 32% answered, very likely.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans who answered not too likely in 2021 grew to 21% compared to 16% in 2018.
So we now have near parity between the number of Americans who say that it is very likely that they will have kids and not too likely that they will have kids.
When asked why they don't want to have kids, 56% of childless adults who said it is not at all or not too likely they will ever have kids said it's because they just don't want them.
That's a change from 2018, when 63% of childless adults in those categories said it was because they had no desire for children.
This time around, 43% cited other reasons, including medical issues, economic or financial reasons, lack of partner.
The bottom line is that this is part of a broad-scale trend in the West.
People just don't want kids.
And the reason people don't want kids is because they don't live in the real world.
They live in a world in which the government takes care of all their future problems.
All of the incentives, why you used to have kids, are basically gone in the West.
So the reasons you used to have kids, for example, or you needed child labor to work your farm.
Okay.
Thank God that is no longer an issue.
Then it was, well, you want the spiritual connection that you get from your kids.
And then we decided to kill spirituality.
And then the idea was you had a moral obligation to have kids.
And then we said, no, no, no.
You have a moral obligation not to have kids because your kids are going to ruin the earth.
And then we said, well, you know, at the very least we need to have kids because who's going to pay for us in our old age.
And the idea is, well, the government will pay for us in our old age.
The government has endless reams of cash.
So it doesn't matter.
So what is the incentive structure outside of the religious communities to have kids?
And the answer is there is none.
Which means the only people who are going to be having kids are the people who are not engaged in this sort of solipsistic, self-obsessed, navel-gazing, you know, where do I vacation with my small dog this week?
The only people who are going to be having kids in the United States, and in the West generally, are religious people.
And this is what the stats show.
Every religious community in the United States is reproducing at above replacement rates.
Every secular, atheistic, agnostic community is having kids at below replacement rates.
So if you're a fan of secular liberalism, I gotta ask you, what do you think your future is?
Really, how do you think that that's going to reflect?
Could it be that the secular liberalism, disconnected from the root values that created the space for liberalism to arise in the first place, has been self-defeating?
Is it possible that when you cut off the roots of the tree, the tree just dies?
When you get rid of the moral precepts that allowed for a sphere of freedom to emerge in the West, that the freedom itself kills the tree?
Is that possible?
Because that seems to be what we're watching in real time.
That freedom, unbound from morality, unbound from reality, because morality and reality are related in this sort of teleological old philosophical sense.
If you get rid of that, if you say that there's just fact patterns and freedom, all you end up with is libertinism.
And that's where we are in a society.
I define myself how I want.
You have to, you have to confirm how I define myself if reality hits me in the face.
That's not reality hitting me in the face.
We have to construct systems to insulate me from reality, so I don't have to make good decisions anymore.
I don't have to make the decisions that lead to success.
I don't have to make the decisions that lead to a future for my country or for my family.
In April, the Census Bureau reported that in the last decade, the U.S.
population grew at the second slowest rate for any 10-year period since the nation's founding.
Pew surveyed 3,800 parents and non-parents online in late October as part of a broader study of nearly 10,000 U.S.
adults known as the American Trends Panel Survey.
Those who said they have no kids were asked to rate their desire to have them in the future.
Adults who said they already have kids were asked to rate their likelihood of having more.
There is no difference based on gender in the responses among parents and non-parents.
According to Pew, men and women are equally likely to say they will probably not have kids or more kids in the future.
There was a difference based on age.
Adults in their 40s were far more likely than younger adults to say they're unlikely to have any or more kids in the future, which of course makes sense.
The older you get, the harder it is to have kids.
What's striking there is the lack of difference between men and women in their view of having kids.
Typically speaking, you would imagine that women would be more interested in having kids than men.
Just because, historically speaking, this has been the case.
And by the way, when it comes to poll data, I'm still not sure that that is reflective of how normal people act.
What I mean by that is there are a lot of people who say they don't want to have kids, and then women have kids, and then they want to take time out from the workforce to spend with their kids.
How people act is very different than what they are asked in polls.
However, what the demographic rates show is that we are a society in decline.
In massive decline.
And we are also a society that is in decline because we have decided to make our people genderless widgets.
Men and women are exactly the same.
In fact, they are so the same that men can become women and women can become men.
Gender makes no difference at all.
Sex makes no difference at all.
And to point out that sex makes a rather large difference in how the world works is to be labeled some sort of bigot.
Even though the fundamental basis of a civilization that is growing is a recognition of the difference between men and women.
Because literally all human growth, all human reproductive capacity is based on sexual dichotomy between men and women.
And recognizing that the differences between men and women are not only important but very beautiful and very wonderful.
But we're a society that has decided that the apex of being a man is not to be a protector and guardian and provider for your family.
It is to basically sit home, play video games, and tweet out the latest hashtag.
And the apotheosis of femininity is not to have kids and to raise them in conjunction with your husband.
Instead, the apotheosis is to work 2200 billable hours as a paralegal at the local law firm.
I'm sorry, that is not a civilization that has a future.
It is not.
That is not to say that women can't do those things and have kids.
They can.
My mom worked.
My dad stayed home.
My wife is a doctor.
Okay, it is to say that the fundamental root of civilization has to recognize the massive and important differences between men and women, or men will not be men, and civilization will fall, and women will not be women, and people will not reproduce.
And that is what we are seeing right now.
And the media are pushing this.
Okay, let's just face this.
Serious fact.
I know that we're not supposed to talk about these things.
There are major differences between men and women.
These differences range from the biological, everything from height to muscle capacity, to how the brain works.
These are very different between men and women, and they were meant to be.
This is a good thing.
It's not just true for humans, true for all mammals.
All mammals are rooted in sexual dichotomy.
To pretend that that doesn't exist, and to, as a culture, attempt to fight that is an attempt to fight reality.
Reality's gonna win.
When I say reality's gonna win, I mean there are other civilizations that are not delusional United States is delusional.
The way the Western civilization has decided to buy into the mass delusion of a sort of Cartesian duality between the genderless spirit and the sexed body.
That is not reality.
That is not how the world works.
You are an integrated being.
Your spirit and your body are one.
They work together.
This belief that you are sort of a floating ghost in the machine has not been true forever.
And it wasn't true when Descartes wrote about it.
But we have convinced ourselves of this phantasmic chimera, and it is not going to end well for us.
In a second, we'll get to some of the differences between men and women that are quite important, and then we'll talk about why it is that we are, as a society, failing.
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Okay, so there are these vast differences between men and women.
These are very durable.
We've known about them forever.
A good paper by Yana Weisberg from the Department of Psychology in Linfield College and Collins Young, University of Minnesota Department of Psychology, Jacob Hirsch, University of Toronto.
This is from a few years back, 2011, from Frontline Psychology, talking about the differences between men and women.
There are these personality traits called the Big Five personality traits, and these are very durable psychological findings.
There are major differences between men and women in many of the personality traits that are expected to be present in human beings.
So, for example, neuroticism.
Neuroticism describes the tendency to experience negative emotion and related processes in response to perceived threat and punishment.
These include anxiety, depression, anger, self-consciousness, and emotional ability.
Women generally score higher than men on neuroticism, as measured at the Big Five trait level.
Additionally, women also score higher than men on related measures not specifically designed to measure the Big Five, like indices of anxiety and low self-esteem.
Men tend to get more angry.
And so, women tend to be more neurotic in the Big Five, and men tend to get more angry within this category, which makes sense.
Men are more aggressive.
Women tend to worry more about the details.
Again, this is not true for every woman or every man.
We are talking about on average.
These on average differences make a very large difference in how we as a society treat maleness and femaleness.
When it comes to agreeableness, women consistently score higher than men on agreeableness and related measures, such as tender-mindedness, which of course makes sense.
This would be altruism, empathy, kindness.
By the way, you can see this in job selection.
Women tend to select jobs where they have interpersonal contact reliant on empathy.
Men tend to like machines.
There's a reason for this.
Because biologically speaking, women tend to be maternal in instinct, and men tend to be protective or aggressive in instinct.
When it comes to conscientiousness, there's no marked difference between men and women, or at least not a durable one, across cultures.
When it comes to extroversion, assertiveness, sociability, positive emotionality, gender differences are small on the overall domain level of extroversion.
Women typically score a little bit higher, but that's because women score higher on warmth, gregariousness, and positive emotions.
Men score higher on assertiveness and excitement-seeking, right?
Men are more risk-taking.
This has been proved by pretty much every psychological study.
Men, again, tend to be more aggressive.
And when it comes to openness and intellect, which reflects imagination, creativity, intellectual curiosity, and appreciation of aesthetic experiences, there are no significant gender differences typically found on openness or intellect.
Women typically score higher on aesthetics and feelings.
Men tend to score higher on the ideas facet.
Again, a lot of this seems stereotypical, but it is also rooted in biological difference between genders.
Hey, why is all of this important?
The reason that all of this is important is because when we as a society sublimate reality in favor of a peculiar vision that all men and all women are genderless, what we end up with is a society that does not reproduce, that does not see responsibility in a serious way.
We are not paving the way for true human flourishing.
There's a lot of talk in philosophy about human flourishing, what that constitutes.
What does it mean to flourish as a human being?
So from the Marxist perspective, human flourishing, basically the predicate to it is material well-being.
You have to make sure that you have enough stuff, you have to make sure that you're taken care of, and then we will all flourish.
It is the notion that a Marxist society will breed a society of artists and innovators This is what Nancy Pelosi says when it comes to job lock, right?
Get rid of job lock, create a better welfare state, and society will flourish forth.
Then there's a vision of human flourishing that suggests that human flourishing is about the cultivation of particular individual goods, meaning you cultivate friendship or you cultivate virtue.
That's sort of a more ancient idea.
I think.
And when it comes to human flourishing, I think this is the Judeo-Christian worldview as well.
I also think that it tends to be backed by evolutionary biology.
Human beings are essentially tools.
We are the Swiss army knife of the creatures.
There's something that Brett and Heather Weinstein, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying talk about in their book on evolutionary biology.
Both of them are evolutionary biologists.
The basic idea is that human beings are really good at adaptation.
That's what we are good for.
And what that means is that because we are a Swiss army knife, we fulfill particular roles.
Some of those roles include learners, Creative forces in the world, right?
We as human beings have an instinct to create.
Protectors, which typically tends to fall more on men.
Guardians and parents.
Maternal influences tends to fall more on women.
And there are sexed roles.
There are some that are less sexed, and then there are some that are more sexed.
To ignore gender differences in roles is to, as a society, defeat yourself.
To pretend, for example, that men and women have an equal duty to serve in armed forces cuts against virtually all of human history and also basic biology.
Not to suggest that female soldiers can't do an amazing job.
Many of them do.
But, if you are on a battlefield and you're about to fight a battle, what you would like is an army of- if you have to pick between an army entirely of men and an army entirely of women, you're gonna pick an army entirely of men.
They have greater physical capacity, they tend to follow orders a little bit better according to sociological studies, and they tend to be more aggressive.
Again, that's not to demean women in any way.
There are things that women are much better at than men.
But all of society rests on these foundational principles.
And failing to recognize the true beauty and difference between men and women leads to a society where men are told that they don't need to be men, which, by the way, makes room for actual toxic masculinity, and women are told that they shouldn't be women in any way, which leads to a sort of genderless apathy about the future of the human race.
This is a problem.
When women don't want to have kids, and when men don't want to defend their families or feel an obligation to do so, societies end.
And other societies that actually recognize realities don't end.
They just continue on.
They reproduce.
They have kids.
They bring up those kids in healthier ways.
And when I say healthier, I don't mean ways that we would approve of.
I mean ways that propagate their societies, their civilizations.
Healthier on almost an objective metric level.
And when that happens, societies begin to crumble.
That's what we're watching here in the West.
I bring this up because there's an article in Politico today that's quite fascinating, all about why Republicans can't stop talking about masculinity.
And the answer is, maybe when you tell men, young men particularly, they have no role in our society.
When you tell a society that risk taking is bad, aggressiveness is bad, the meritocracy is bad, you end up undermining the society.
And when you tell women, That women ought not have kids.
That abortion is the highest good.
You end up with a society that is completely crazy.
A society removed from reality.
Well, here's the thing.
Reality doesn't care.
Reality's gonna come for all of us.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, so, if my theory, and I think the theory of evolutionary biology is correct, that human flourishing rests in fulfillment of particular roles that human beings are good at fulfilling and that are durable across cultures.
Roles like father, roles like protector, roles like mother, roles like empathizer.
Roles like community member, right?
If you are designed to fulfill a bunch of roles over the course of your life, right?
And like many roles, you're not one role.
You're not just a dad.
You're not just a brother, right?
You're not just a protector.
You're not just a creative force.
You're all of these things.
You're not just a mom.
You're not just a sister.
You're not just somebody who's involved in your community.
You're all of these things.
If we as a society boil ourselves, our identities down to one thing, We flatten out human existence and human flourishing becomes impossible.
So if we boil ourselves down to, for example, just creators of economic product, that is one aspect of human flourishing.
It is not the only aspect of human flourishing.
And if that comes at the expense of us making the decisions that allow us to flourish in all these other ways, society falls apart.
You can have really high GDP and also a crumbling society.
Similarly, if we flatten ourselves out to only our sexual instinct, which used to be sublimated to role fulfillment, right?
The sexual instinct used to be sublimated to a broader role.
It wasn't just you had a sexual instinct.
It was that sexual instinct was supposed to come in the context of a marriage that produced children and healthy upbringing and provided the impetus for you to become a protector for your family and to become a maternal influence with your mom.
These things were very important.
When you separate that off and you basically say your genitals are you, Or your genital pleasure is you?
If you say that, you have flattened out humanity to its thinnest veneer.
And as a society, human flourishing becomes nearly impossible.
This is why masculinity and femininity matters.
This is why it matters when you are told the lie, and when your kids are indoctrinated in the lie, that gender is entirely malleable, and that it's not important, and that if you mention that it's important, it's really bad.
Hey, so there's an article in Politico today trying to take this on, okay?
It's an article, a Q&A with historian Kristin Cobes-Dumez on Josh Hawley, JD Vance, and why manhood seems to be such a big topic on the right today.
The answer is, of course, because you have millions of dispossessed young men who have been told they have no role in society.
You want a healthy society?
You want healthy young men?
Give them responsibility.
Give them duty.
Tell them they have a role in the world.
As a society, we've told men they don't have a role in the world.
In fact, we've told women that their roles and male roles are exactly the same.
And we have told men that if they insist on roles as father and protector, this is somehow degrading to women, which of course is idiotic.
Idiotic.
According to Politico, Republican lawmakers and hopefuls seem particularly interested in the idea of masculinity lately.
In a TV interview earlier this month, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley claimed the left was telling men their masculinity is inherently problematic.
That's true.
He also told interviewer Mike Allen he would make masculinity a signature political issue.
Why?
Because the pre-political basis of all human society is the family.
You know what's really important in families?
Masculinity.
A dad who's a provider and a protector.
That is very, very important.
It is true in all human societies of which I am aware.
Holly's comments sounded similar to those of Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, who went viral last month in a video calling on mothers to raise their sons to be monsters.
What he meant by that, of course, was the sort of Jordan Peterson notion that men are monsters and you have to use that aggression in positive ways.
Not that women should raise men or...
In order to be aggressively evil, but that men are aggressive.
That aggression can be channeled in defense of self and others, or it can be channeled in horrifying directions, which is what you've largely seen in American society.
Men channeling their aggression toward violence, or channeling their aggression toward drug use, or channeling, or just being enervated completely because their mission has been taken away from them.
Vance tweeted that the Rittenhouse trial filled him with indescribable rage, said we leave our boys without fathers, we let the wolves set fire to their communities, and when human nature tells them to go and defend what no one else is defending, we bring the full weight of the state and the global monopolist against them.
Okay, so here's Politico's objection.
According to historian, Cristian Cobes Dumez, this way of talking about masculinity has its roots in conservative evangelical spaces, but it's going mainstream.
Dumez wrote a book last year called Jesus and John Wayne, how white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.
About how the model of masculinity in evangelicalism went from emulating the qualities of Jesus to emulating those of the actor John Wayne, and how that has shaped culture and politics ever since.
Well, who's to say that the values of Jesus and the values of John Wayne are in direct conflict?
Why?
The whole idea of John Wayne as a character is that he was an honorable man who was out defending hearth, home, and society.
And sometimes on the edge of the law in order to do so.
Dumetz says, within conservative evangelical spaces, first of all, there's the idea that masculinity is a God-given thing.
Okay, that's not just the idea of conservative evangelicals, by the way.
That masculinity is a God-given thing.
It's a biology-given thing.
I'm sorry to break it to secular liberals, but masculinity is baked into the cake.
That is not just a question of God making it that way.
Although, as a religious person, I believe he did.
I believe male and female, he created them.
But I think that's a reflection of basic human biology.
And by the way, all mammalian biology.
But, says Cristian Cobes Dumez, when Hawley is talking about an attack on men and saying the left is attacking manhood and that they hate this country and don't believe in gender, all of that sounds very familiar.
In white evangelicalism, this has been a refrain for decades now.
By the way, try again.
This has not been a refrain for decades now.
This has been a refrain since the Bible.
The Bible has explicit bans.
I mean, I'm rather familiar with the first five books.
The Bible has explicit bans on men dressing as women and women dressing as men, for example.
says this quote-unquote scholar, in evangelical spaces, Christian manhood has long been equated, particularly in conservative circles, with a kind of rugged, militant quality.
It's not just about rugged and militant.
That's not what it's about.
It's about, what is your role?
What roles are you fulfilling?
When you remove roles from men, and tell them the roles are bad.
When you say marriage is bad, and fatherhood is bad, and you don't need a dad, and you don't need a, and you don't need protectors, and you don't need, soldiers are bad, cops are, when you say this sort of stuff, you remove all place for male aggression to go.
By the way, male aggression is gonna go exactly those places in other societies.
It just ain't gonna go there here.
You can remove the masculinity from the West, but you can't remove the masculinity from the world.
And if you remove the masculinity from the West, the West will crumble.
There are other forces out there that do not give a bleep.
They don't care.
But says this scholar, this is a kind of reactionary masculinity that emerges in the 1960s and 70s in conservative evangelical spaces, and more broadly, in American conservatism.
The context here is important.
Coming out of the post-war era, there was a baby boom.
Traditional family values were all the rage, at least among the white middle class.
Well, no, they were all the rage among everybody.
During the baby boom, the black single motherhood rate was below 20%.
Today, it's above 70%.
Then you have this disruptive moment in the 1960s, says this writer.
You have the civil rights movement, which is particularly disruptive in the American South to the status quo.
You have the early feminist wave and second wave feminism of the 60s, and very importantly, the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement.
All of these are seen to destabilize the social order.
Conservatives are particularly concerned.
In all three of these cases, it's the assertion of white patriarchal authority or power that can restore order.
And to understand, the revolutionary forces that want to tear down gender, what she's saying, the implicit understanding of what she's saying, the revolutionary forces that wish to destroy the institutions of the United States, are focused on tearing down masculinity as a pathway to doing so.
That is part and parcel of this.
Because if you have men who are willing to defend those institutions, then the institutions won't fall.
So she says that the assertion of traditional masculinity would have been against, for example, the Civil Rights Movement.
That's weird, because it seems to me that there are plenty of good, powerful, strong men who are standing up in favor of the Civil Rights Movement.
I was unaware that it was enervated hippies who were leading the Civil Rights Movement, as opposed to strong, powerful men and strong, powerful women, all of whom were gendered at the time, because we're talking about the 60s, not the 1990s and not the 2010s, who were leading that movement.
The inherent Feminization of powerful civil rights movement is pretty astonishing.
I mean, I think you'd be very hard pressed to make the case that either Martin Luther King Jr.
or Malcolm X were effeminate men.
That's a very difficult case to make.
But says Dumas, I think that this language is becoming more useful in the wake of the Trump years.
There's a lot of history, particularly of Republicans unfavorably comparing Democratic men and masculinity against a stronger, more rugged American manhood.
It kind of had a resurgence during the Obama presidency.
It was very popular for Republicans to impugn his masculinity and to question his manhood and his strength.
Okay, well, I never questioned Barack Obama's manhood.
He's a father with kids, which to me is the mark of a true man.
I questioned his assertiveness in foreign policy.
I questioned his policy priorities, which seemed to me not to foment the kind of aggressiveness and masculinity and risk-taking that you need as a natural society, which brings us to where we are in terms of policy today.
Because it's not just a question of degrading men to the level of the genderless.
It's also a question of, as a society, do you get rid of masculine values like risk-taking?
Risk-taking tends to be a more masculine value.
Do you get rid of those values in favor of a broader value of empathy as a society?
And if you do, what does that do to society?
And the answer is, it destroys your society.
Because when you get rid of the risk-taking, when you get rid of the innovation, when you get rid of the harsh realities that both provide the incentive for risk-taking but also punish stupid risk-taking, then you end up with a society that is completely stagnant.
Which is why, for example, the University of California is now deciding that in favor of empathy, they're going to get rid of standards, and innovation, and risk-taking, and reality.
Reality must be shielded.
You have to shield yourself from reality.
So for the foreseeable future, there's no standardized testing for the University of California.
Why?
Because minorities weren't getting in at the rates that the UC wanted them to get in.
So they just got rid of the standardized test.
Which, by the way, is kind of racist.
Because the idea is that black people apparently can't do well enough on tests in order to be admitted.
So you have to set up a different metric where they will do well.
Which seems rather both paternalistic and sneering at black Americans.
It is not true, by the way.
Black Americans are fully capable of doing well on tests.
But the notion is that if we get rid of the metric, then everything gets all better.
Get rid of the standards.
Get rid of the requirements.
Get rid of the metrics.
Get rid of the requirement that you work hard and that you take the risk, and society somehow improves.
That's a lie.
We'll get to that in a second.
As I say, there are other societies that are waiting with bated breath for us to do exactly this sort of stuff.
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Okay, so as a society, if we embrace empathy to the exclusion of aggressiveness and merit and risk-taking and standards, we will die.
A society needs both empathy and aggressiveness.
It needs male and female.
These are characteristics that, by the way, again, have been seen in every society since the beginning of time.
And this is not to deny that there are women who can be more masculine and men who can be more effeminate.
It is to say that, on average, there are differences in quality between male and female, as everyone understands, and that these qualities are very important in a society and should be pressed forward, fomented, and fostered by a society that remains healthy.
In other countries, by the way, they're not doing this.
In other countries, opposing civilizations, they're not playing games with any of this stuff.
They've decided that they are going to prevent people from living in a sort of miasmatic genderless space where all of their desires are reflected back at them.
There's a good piece by a person named Hobby Zhang in the Wall Street Journal today, a doctoral student in political science, talking about the coddling of American children.
Quote, as a Chinese doctoral student raising a young son in the United States, I'm mystified by how American elementary schools coddle students.
In China, schools are run like boot camps.
What do the therapeutic comforts America showers on its youth portend for a growing competition with China?
I recently registered my son in the third grade at a New Jersey public school.
Hattie had recently finished two years of elementary school in Chengdu, China, where he trotted off to school each day with a backpack stuffed with thick textbooks and materials for practices and quizzes.
Here, he leaves for school with little in his backpack other than a required healthy snack.
The first day, he came home with a sheet of math homework.
35 addition problems.
He finished in about a minute.
On the second day, he was asked to write 328 in different configurations.
He first wrote down 300 plus 20 plus 8 following the prompt, and then 164 times 2, 82 times 4, and 656 divided by 2. My son is not a genius, but he started studying math at an early age.
It is a core belief in Chinese society that talent can be trained, so schools should be tough on children.
Chinese students score at the top of international math and science tests.
We've got the UCs removing the SATs and ACTs because, God forbid, too many Asian students get in.
And at the same time, you've got Chinese schools that are basically saying, no, no, no, you guys are going to be forced to learn, you're going to be provided the opportunity to learn, and you're going to be expected to learn.
This is not a philosophy shared by American schools, says this writer.
On Friday night, my son came home announcing in bewilderment he didn't have any homework.
In China, students tend to receive twice as much homework on the weekend, given the two days to complete it.
How will America compete with a China determined to train the best mathematicians, scientists, and engineers?
Unfolding now are two Maoist cultural revolutions, one in the East and the other in the West.
The former is a jingoistic nationalism enforced by party loyalties and ubiquitous secret police.
The latter is an anti-Americanism enforced by progressive mobs seeking to defund the police.
Both are about limiting expression, controlling thought, and regulating behavior.
Xi Jinping has been cracking down on everything from finance to entertainment to whip his country through a national rejuvenation.
America, China's nationalism is explicitly anchored in Maoism, with Mr. Xi representing a new cult of personality.
Meanwhile, woke America, which consciously or not deploys Maoist tactics, is destroying the core traditions of Western civilization with identity politics.
In both countries, control must extend to the very young to mold them in the image of the official ideology.
In fall 2020, Chinese pupils returned to school with a new requirement to study Xi Jinping Thought.
Across the ocean, American pupils are taught that white America is inherently racist regardless of individual intention or action.
Chinese education pushes the young in directions that serve the party and the state.
Youths are trained to be skilled laborers ready to endure hard work and brutal competition.
American education is supposed to be about opening minds but appears not to fill them with much.
Worse, young Americans are not prepared for the demands of being an adult.
It's much worse than that.
American education right now is geared toward teaching people that the things that matter about you are your mutable racial characteristics and your sexual proclivities.
And those sexual proclivities can span the entire gamut of human existence.
And this is the most important thing about you.
Who do you think is going to win?
Really, the only thing holding China back from winning is the fact that they're tied down to idiotic communism.
If they were not, they would be eating our lunch much worse than they are right now.
As a society, when we abandon our own central values, when we abandon basic truths about life, reality comes to bite you in the ass.
Alright, we'll get to more in just one second.
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Societies that have confidence in themselves stand up for their centralized values and for their heroes.
Well, meanwhile, societies like the United States, we removed Thomas Jefferson statues according to the New York Post.
Thomas Jefferson is no longer in the room where it happens.
Art handlers packed up an 884-pound statue of Jefferson in a wooden crate on Monday.
After a mayoral commission voted to banish the likeness of the nation's third president from City Hall, where it resided for nearly two centuries, because he owned slaves.
About a dozen workers with martial fine arts spent several hours carefully removing the painted plaster monument from its pedestal inside the city council chambers and surrounding it with sections of foam and wooden boards.
They then lowered that massive structure down the stairs, leading to the building's first floor rotunda with a pulley system ushered the founding father out the back door.
It's going to be on long-term loans to the New York Historical Society, which plans to have Jefferson's model survive in its lobby and reading room.
Kerry Butler, executive director of the Public Design Commission that voted to banish the statue, at first tried to block the press from witnessing the removal.
Butler relented after members of the mayor's office and city council intervened.
So, there are now pictures of Thomas Jefferson's statue being removed.
Very important to get rid of the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence because history is filled with people doing bad things.
And so we have to make sure that's gone.
We need a George Floyd statue in there because truly what signifies America is the victimization of black Americans, not the great and good founding principles that allowed for the end of slavery in the United States, the end of Jim Crow in the United States, and the vast thriving of vast numbers of black Americans in the United States, particularly in the post-civil rights era.
Hey, this is all of that is irrelevant.
The really relevant thing is that human beings suffer in the United States because we are a system that has decided that we are bad and we are very, very bad.
Meanwhile, the Teddy Roosevelt statue at the Museum of Natural History is going to be moved to North Dakota.
The Teddy Roosevelt Presidential Library Foundation, set to open in 2026, said in a statement it had entered into an agreement with the City of New York for the long-term loan and reconsideration of the equestrian statue designed by James Earl Frazier, this is according to the New York Post.
That announcement came five months after the New York City Public Design Commission voted unanimously to relocate the brand's effigy of the nation's 26th president amid claims it symbolizes colonial subjugation and racial discrimination.
It was vandalized with paint in 2017.
Well, the idea, I love this, the library agreed, the statue is problematic in its composition.
Moreover, its current location denies passerby's consent and context.
Yes, if you are faced with the reality of a statue, you have not given your consent to be faced with the reality of the statue.
By the way, that naked man peeing on the street in New York City, you didn't give your consent for that either, but that's freedom.
Freedom is a man peeing on the street or prostitutes walking the lanes and you living in that society.
That's true freedom.
That's the true blessing of liberty right there.
But if you have to walk by a statue of Teddy Roosevelt, you did not give your consent for that.
For you to walk by that inanimate object that's not bothering you in any way.
That one you didn't give your consent to.
But we don't need your consent for the homeless man crapping on the sidewalk to do that in front of your children.
This is the society that we are creating for ourselves.
And this is what happens when what you value is your own sense of self Pity over the realities of the world.
History is filled with bad things.
History is also filled with institutions built before you were about.
And the belief that the world will end spinning when you are here and thus you are the great moral arbiter of the universe and get to reshape the universe in line with all of your thinking is destroying the country.
It's throwing everything from history to race to sex in the United States.
And it's really, really ugly.
If we wish to survive against the forces of nature that exist outside of us, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that reality does exist.
Biological reality exists.
Historical reality exists.
The reality that your singular choices in life make a very large-scale difference in how your life turns out, that's a reality that exists.
And if we just decide that we're going to blind ourselves to that reality, well, we can wander around blindly until we stumble directly into the fire of reality, and it is going to burn.
It's going to burn an awful, awful lot.
Speaking of the fire of reality, so this situation in Waukesha, Wisconsin continues to percolate.
We still do not know why the person, the 39-year-old black male who decided to drive a car into a crowd of children, why he did that, we don't know.
And we probably will never find out, because we are not allowed to ask such questions.
Because to ask such questions might reveal that certain ideologies are not, in fact, good.
According to the U.S.
Sun, the suspect in the Christmas parade rampage that killed five revelers wrote an anti-Donald Trump rap and declared, F the pigs, according to songs posted online.
One of his songs includes the lyrics, they're gonna need a cleaner for the bleep we did.
All my killers at Gacy wear them bodies hid.
Here's a little bit of his, uh, of his brilliant rap.
This that Malcolm X s**t, revolutionary.
This for my n****s in the can, eatin' convosary.
For every ghetto in America, I know they waitin'.
This that f**k Donald Trump flow, and whoever had s**t.
So, both untalented, incoherent, and has a terrible philosophy.
Well, we're not supposed to investigate any of that, though.
If Andy Ngo posts anything about his philosophy, the journalists among us will shield us from the vicious reality that maybe this guy believes a lot of really bad stuff.
By the way, you know that if there had been a white guy who drove a car into a crowd filled with children, and they had found on his Facebook page a bunch of white supremacist garbage, that would immediately be the leading motive that was suspected.
We know this for a fact.
So, again, blinding ourselves to reality.
Okay, so, this brings us to the most obvious issue with what is happening in Waukesha.
So, one thing that we clearly know at this point is that this person should have been in prison.
There's no question that this guy should have been in jail at this point.
We know that he was out on bail, $1,000 bail, from apparently using his car to hit somebody, like a few days before.
And then he was just set free.
Joe Biden finally reacted to Waukesha, by the way.
It took him like 48 hours to react to Waukesha.
Suffice to say that if the races had been reversed, it would have taken less than a second and a half, right?
If it had been a black guy, if it had been a white guy driving a car into a crowd of black kids.
Biden would have been to the microphone before the car stopped moving.
But this was a black guy using a car to hit a bunch of white kids.
And so apparently that is that's a different thing.
You got you got to be considered about it, by the way, should be considered in both situations.
Here is here is Joe Biden finally sounding off about Waukesha.
We know this morning that five families in Waukesha are facing fresh grief of a life without a loved one.
At least 40 Americans are suffering from injuries, some of them in critical condition.
Bye.
And an entire community is struggling, struggling to cope with the horrific act of violence.
Last night, the people of Waukesha were gathered to celebrate the start of a season of hope and togetherness and Thanksgiving.
This morning, Jill and I and the entire Biden family, and I'm sure all of us pray, That that same spirit is going to embrace and lift up all the victims of this tragedy.
Okay, so glad that Joe Biden could be bothered to emerge and say these things.
It is also true that we know, at least from a policy perspective, why this happened.
According to CBS 58 in Wisconsin, the Waukesha Police Department is referring five counts of intentional homicide for the man accused of ramming his SUV into the Waukesha Christmas Parade.
Those charges carry possible life sentences.
There's the possibility more charges will be filed as the investigation progresses.
This was not the first time that this suspect, and again, I don't use names for people who do this sort of stuff because I don't like people being glorified for this.
I don't think they should become famous because of this.
I think that they should be thrown in jail to rot and then forgotten because that's what they deserve.
This was not the first time this suspect allegedly ran someone over with his car.
Just three weeks ago, he ran over a woman he had a child with.
But at the time, his bail was set at just $1,000.
He paid it and was released.
Now, the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office is conducting an internal review into why the bail was set inappropriately low.
Justice Jeanine Gieske, who is on the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 93 to 98, explained, quote, there are hundreds and hundreds of cases in Milwaukee County.
Even the backlog of full homicides is tremendous at this point.
Judge Justice Gieske said the district attorney's office recommends the bail amount to a court commissioner before it's approved by a judge.
It's not unusual for a court commissioner to be setting 30, 40, 50 cases of bail on a day.
The bail amount is supposed to consider a person's prior record, character, whether they might flee, whether they might commit a crime while out on bail.
But there are plenty of red flags.
Because, um, this guy had a bail-jumping felony.
He had second-degree recklessly endangering safety felonies.
He paid the $1,000 bail.
It was released November 11th, 10 days before the Waukesha parade.
The DA's office now says in a statement, quote, the bail recommendation in this case is not consistent with the approach of the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office toward matters involving violent crime, nor was it consistent with the risk assessment of the defendant prior to the setting of bail.
Well, there's only one problem.
It's very consistent with the with the Milwaukee County D.A.
John Chisholm's approach.
Yesterday, we talked at length on the show about the fact that Chisholm was made nationally famous for his approach to low bail.
He put out a statement saying, quote, the state's bail recommendation in this case was inappropriately low, and they're conducting an internal review.
Yeah, no bleep, you're conducting an internal review.
Insane.
I mean, it's totally crazy.
Okay, but again, we are now going to obscure the real facts here.
We're going to pretend that it was an SUV, right?
The SUV was the problem.
It's funny how this works, by the way.
If it's white guy in SUV runs down black kids, it's white guy in SUV runs down black kids.
If it is, in fact, a black guy in an SUV running down white kids, then the SUV is the problem.
Look at the way that the media report these headlines, right?
There's a headline today From CNN breaking news, quote, five people have died and more than 40 are injured after an SUV plowed through a holiday parade in Waukesha.
Well, you know, that's unfortunate when the SUVs just sort of run out of control all by themselves this way.
Meanwhile, the left continues to foment the exact same garbage policy that led to this in the first place.
So, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez literally put out a message to legislators today, asking for bail reform.
She put out a tweet that was sent out within 24 hours of Waukesha, quote, chairman of the committee on oversight and reform, and representative Jamie Raskin, two New York City's five district attorneys requesting information on excessive bail in the New York City court system.
When prosecutors seek excessive cash bail, it results in increased rates of incarceration, particularly for low-income defense.
Well, we wouldn't want criminals in the prisons.
We need them out on the streets, obviously.
You know the level of blindness, and honestly, self-confidence you have to have to make a statement like this in the immediate aftermath of Waukesha?
So this criminal is out on bail.
Inappropriately low bail.
And like within 24 hours, she and the rest of the Democratic Party, apparently are releasing a statement calling for low bail.
Condemning thousands of individuals to languish in an environment plagued by persistence overcrowding and mounting violence as they wait trial is not acceptable and risks violating their federal civil rights. If these conditions are not addressed, federal intervention may be necessary to protect detainees from additional harm.
We have grave concerns.
Excessive bail amounts are leading to unnecessary pretrial detention. Oh, do you?
And by the way, if you think these people are in any way tethered to reality, they are not.
Perhaps the funniest clip of the day, Jonathan Swan of Axios, who is basically like Jon Stewart now.
He just interviews people, and he asks them really obvious questions, and they have no idea how to answer them.
I can't tell you how many of these almost parodic videos Jonathan Swan has put out at this point, where he asks someone a very obvious and clear question, and they have no idea what to say about it.
So he was interviewing the execrable Rashida Tlaib, one of the worst members of Congress, She's just terrible.
Vicious anti-Semite.
Terrible person.
So he asked Rashida Tlaib about her plans to basically unleash criminals across the United States.
It goes poorly for Rashida Tlaib.
To what extent have you wrestled with any potential downsides of releasing into society every single person who's currently in a federal prison?
Yeah, again, I think that everyone's like, oh my God, we're going to just release everybody.
That's not what I'm... That's what the facts is!
Yeah, but did you see how many people are mentally ill that are in prison right now?
No, I know, but the act that you endorsed actually says release everyone in ten years.
But in ten years, but think about it, who will release you?
But there are like, human traffickers... Oh, I know!
Child sex... So, but you're saying, do you mean that you don't actually support that?
And she's like, it's amazing.
So she signed an act, right?
She sponsored an act that says release everyone.
And then he asked her, you mean everyone?
And she's like, no, not everyone.
He's like, so why did you sign the act?
She's like, well, I mean everyone.
Okay, politics is veep, but it has very serious consequences.
Everybody thinks politics is house of cards.
Understand something.
If you ever spend any time with legislators, the vast majority of them have below room temperature IQ.
Our politicians are morons.
Because most of the people you know are morons, and politicians are no different.
But what they do has vast national ramifications.
But if you just shield people from reality and pretend that what they are saying makes a lot of sense, then you're fine.
You can pursue whatever delusional policy you want without any sort of eye on the ramifications.
This is why DC has now recorded its 200th homicide of the year.
That's a mark they haven't seen since 2004, according to the Washington Post.
Homicides rose in 29 major U.S.
cities through September compared with the same period last year.
And they were up last year, too.
Killings across the country spiked nearly 30% in 2020, according to the FBI.
Baltimore has now passed 300 murders.
For the seventh consecutive year, homicides in Philadelphia reached 496 on Sunday.
That's 14% higher than this time last year.
Officials in the district and across the country say there's no simple explanation for the increase in deadly violence.
District leaders have offered many possible reasons, including the proliferation of illegal firearms, their use in seemingly minor disputes, and pandemic-induced disruptions.
Um, well, it's... I have an answer for you.
It's really, really easy.
Not enough cops, too many criminals on the streets.
End.
That's the whole thing.
Done.
Was that super hard?
I feel like it was really easy, because I said it inside of 10 seconds.
We all have to pretend again.
Shield people from the realities of their own bad policies.
That is the important thing.
Make sure that nobody has to face the consequences of their own stupid notions of how the world ought to work.
The consequences are just born by everybody else.
The consequences are just born By the most vulnerable and the weakest and by the society at large.
Again, shield yourself from reality, but reality ain't going to shield itself from you.
Reality is coming for you one way or another.
Speaking of reality coming for you one way or another, Joe Biden apparently wants to run for re-election.
Yeah, good luck with that, Joe.
Forget about running for re-election.
The guy can't even hobble for re-election.
So, Jen Psaki There were reports that President Biden was telling allies that he's going to run for re-election in 2024.
Can you confirm, is he going to run in 2024?
Is he telling staff that?
He is.
brain dead human being has run for president of the United States.
You have some people who are pretty close, but but I'm not sure that we've ever had a person whose mind has has actually turned to mush running for president of the United States again.
That's exciting stuff.
There were reports that President Biden was telling allies that he's going to run for reelection in 2024.
Can you confirm?
Is he going to run in 2024?
Is he telling staff that?
Yes, that's his intention.
By the way, Joe Biden says that he's going to run in 2024 and he brags that he has a jobs presidency and a small business presidency.
Let me remind you that right now he's attempting to force every small business with more than 100 employees in the United States to vax their employees.
that he wants all of these employees apparently out of a job or to obey him.
Those are the only two possibilities.
Also, he's created massive inflation, supply chain bottlenecks, and he wants to raise taxes, corporate taxes on everyone with an LLC.
But don't worry, this is a jobs presidency and a small business presidency, says this delusional old man.
America's small businesses are the primary job creators, innovators and drivers that power our economic progress.
That's why it's a powerful statement about, of the faith about, that we have in our country, where our country and our economy is heading.
And small business creation is surging, surging in America today.
Which is why I'm proud to say, if you look at my presidency so far, it's a jobs presidency.
And it's a small business presidency.
No one believes this, which is why he's at 36% in the approval ratings.
Also, Joe Biden is just lying about things.
He says more people have more money in their pockets even after inflation.
Statistically speaking, this is not true.
Wages are actually down compared to inflation now.
Things are getting better for American workers.
Higher wages.
Better benefits.
More flexible schedules.
Balance sheets for American families are better as well.
Savings are up.
Home equity is up.
Credit card balances are down.
And if you continue and combine the wage increases we've seen with the direct relief my administration has provided to middle class families, the typical middle class family's disposable income has actually gone up 2% this year, even after accounting for higher prices.
Is he kidding?
Real wages are down.
Everyone knows real wages are down.
I mean, even Janet Yellen is concerned about it.
She says, yeah, we're on a strong growth spurt at the moment.
They're just going to try and talk their way through this one.
Here is Janet Yellen, who is just terrible at her job.
If the Fed acts quicker to taper, pare back its stimulus and acts quicker to raise interest rates, does that risk a recession or choking off the growth?
Well, I see the U.S.
economy being on a strong growth spurt at the moment.
Unemployment has been falling fast.
We have seen over 500,000 jobs a month since President Biden was elected, and I think that's going to continue into next year, driving down unemployment.
So, yeah, good luck with that.
Meanwhile, NBC News is saying maybe you should skip the turkey.
Inflation isn't real, but you should skip the turkey, says a correspondent for The Today Show.
While we are on the topic of something that could be controversial, perhaps forego the turkey.
Bear with me.
I know that is the staple of the Thanksgiving meal.
However, some people think turkey is overrated and so it tends to be the most expensive thing on the table.
Maybe you do an Italian feast instead.
And I will say this, if you tell everyone you're having a Thanksgiving without turkey, some guests may drop off the list and that's a way to cut costs too.
Oh, sounds great.
Just lower your expectations, guys.
Wear a sweater, like Jimmy Carter.
Lower your expectations.
Here's the nice thing.
Okay, so, there's some people out there who, you know, try to fight reality.
I root for it.
I root for reality.
Because in the end, reality wins anyway.
And we can either adapt ourselves to reality with systems that make sense.
The notion of natural law, where we adapt How we behave to the realities of both what humanity is and to how the world works.
That is a better system.
Reality is going to win in the end.
That is the comforting thought I always have.
I get a lot of questions from people about the future of the country, the future of civilization.
You know, are you pessimistic or optimistic?
Well, always in the short term I'm pessimistic and always in the long term I'm optimistic because here's the thing.
Either we learn or we get clocked.
We might get clocked first, but we are going to learn.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out The Michael Molls Show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Executive Producer Jeremy Boring.
Our Supervising Producer is Mathis Glover.
Production Manager Paweł Łydowski.
Associate Producer Bradford Carrington.
Host Producer Justin Barber.
The show is edited by Adam Sajewicz.
Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
Hair and Makeup is by Fabiola Christina.
Production Assistant Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2021.
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