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Jan. 5, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:02:10
You Aren’t The Only Person In The World | Ep. 1405
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According to the left, the exceptions should get to make all the rules on gender, crime, and marriage.
Plus, the Chicago Teachers Union decides never to go back to school, and Joe Biden addresses the nation on the Omicron surge.
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.
There's a phenomenon that has now cropped up throughout American society, and that phenomenon is that we are supposed to let the exceptions make the rules.
That if somebody just is very different from every other human, that that person gets to make all the rules for all the other humans.
I'm not talking about individual rights, rights that apply to everyone.
Right, rights that adhere to everyone.
What I'm talking about here are specifically the overthrow of institutions that are generated for the benefit of the vast majority of human beings, and that, broadly speaking, bring success and happiness, being overthrown because there's an exception who has not brought success or happiness by a historic institution that has been a part of life for literally centuries, for eons.
This philosophy, which is that if you don't fit into the box, the box must be changed, is the death of society.
It is the death of society and it is what is breaking down pretty much every institution in our society these days from religious institutions to governmental institutions to basic institutions of life like marriage.
All of these institutions were originally created, I shouldn't say created, they originally evolved because that is a more accurate way of describing how these institutions came about.
They evolved gradually over time.
As the great economist Frederick Hayek suggests, wisdom is essentially just a bunch of things that have happened and that have stood the test of time.
They've evolved, they've changed gradually over time, and so we should respect those things that have done this.
It doesn't mean we can't change them, but it means we have to take some very serious thought about why we ought to change these institutions before we change them.
G.K.
Chesterton, the famous Catholic theologian and philosopher, he gave what is probably the greatest description of the difference between the left and the right.
He said that if you are a person of the left and you walk across a field and you see a fence in the middle of the field and you have no idea why the fence is there, your first move is to immediately start removing the fence.
And if you're a person of the right, you say to the person from the left, you don't get to remove the fence until you can explain to me why the fence was built there in the first place.
In other words, we have to accept that there must have been a reason why things were the way they were before you just start dismantling it.
And maybe you do dismantle it.
Maybe you look at the institution, you say, there's a serious problem with this institution, and now we're going to change it because we have considered the ramifications of changing it.
And we believe that perhaps times have changed or there's new evidence or they just got it wrong.
But you first have to understand the logic of why those institutions were built in the first place.
Well, we have completely dispensed with that in Western civilization.
We have now come to the point where if one person has a problem with an institution, or a very, very vanishingly small group of people have a problem with an institution, it's the institution that's wrong.
The institution must change.
This is dangerous stuff.
One of the original fathers of sociology was a guy named Tilcott Parsons.
He's the father of a school of sociology called functionalism.
The basic idea of functionalism is that institutions stand the test of time because they are functional.
And so when you look at an institution, Or when you look at a societal role, you have to consider the function of that societal role.
That it wasn't just an imposition of a materialist dialectic, as the Marxists like to say.
It was not just something that came full-blown out of someone's head, as rationalists might suggest.
No, these institutions came about over long periods of time, and then they were very durable because they were very useful, right?
They were functional.
The way that Tilka Parsons put it, he said, institutions are the way that individuals interact with society, right?
Institutions are the middleman between you and society.
Because you, as an individual living in isolation, you can do whatever you want.
Whatever you want is what you want.
If you're living on a desert island, there are not a lot of rules that apply to you because there are no other people that it affects.
However, when you are interacting with other people, there have to be some militating institutions.
There have to be some institutions in the middle that you can all sort of agree on and work within the framework of.
He says that social systems are generally built by individuals interacting with one another, motivated by the optimization of individual gratification and happiness, as defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.
In other words, we have to share some common rules.
We have to share some common roles.
We have to share some common institutions.
Well, if those things have stood the test of thousands of years of time, then perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to dispense with them because one person doesn't like the rules.
However, what the left suggests is that If government is meant to be God, right?
Or if society at large is meant to be God-like, then these institutions can be dispensed with.
We can change the rules at any time.
In fact, the pathway to a higher you is to get rid of all of these rules.
There is a Rousseauian belief in the natural goodness of human nature underlying all of this.
We get rid of all the rules.
If we get rid of all the rules, then natural human man will emerge and we will be freed from all of the All of the institutions that have burdened us for so long, right?
As Rousseau suggested, man is everywhere born free, man everywhere should be free, but he's born in chains, essentially.
And that we are free spirited individuals and it's only institutions of society that have chained us down.
Okay, that is completely ass backwards.
That is not the way that real life works and it is not the way that institutions work.
The reason I bring this up is because there's a column in the New York Times today that is just a perfect example of this.
And again, once you spot the pattern, it is impossible to unspot the pattern.
Once you spot the pattern from the left, which is there's an institution.
Let me give you an example of X person.
For whom this institution makes life more difficult.
Therefore, the institution is bad, tear down the institution.
That is the logic that is constantly used everywhere and always by people who completely want to restructure society to the detriment of the vast majority of humanity.
We'll get to that in just one second.
Let us talk about the fact that they're everyday things that you really don't pay a lot of attention to make a huge difference in your life, right?
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Okay, so the reason that I'm talking about the destruction of institutions is because pretty much every day now there's an article in the op-ed section of the Washington Post or the New York Times or any other left-wing publication talking about why a historic institution is bad for me and therefore the institution should go away.
The latest The latest iteration of this ridiculous thesis comes courtesy of Caitlin Greenidge, who is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times.
And she wrote a piece that's up today titled, What Does Marriage Ask Us to Give Up?
And now, normally, the answer to that is marriage asks you to sacrifice, for example, the possibility of sexual variety in favor of one partner.
Marriage asks you to grow up.
Marriage asks you to give up the possibility of endless hedonism in pursuit of a deeper and more profound relationship with one human being from whom you create children and create the next generation of civilized human beings, right?
That's what marriage asks you to give up.
And tradition is pretty clear about this.
I mean, in every marriage ceremony, every ritual ceremony I'm aware of, there's great talk about what exactly you are giving up, what you are sacrificing, right?
Whether you're talking about till death do us part, or whether you're talking about in the Jewish marriages, full-on prenuptial agreements, right?
The Ketubah in a Jewish marriage actually lists the obligations that men and women owe to one another in the actual marital contract, which is read out loud under the chuppah.
So it's not as though people who are familiar with marital tradition are unaware of the sacrifices that they're making.
This is, in fact, the goal of the institution.
The goal of the institution of marriage is that men are to sacrifice sexual variety for the sake of being able to build a family.
And women are asked to sacrifice the possibility of mating with another option in order to settle down and civilize the man, right?
These are sacrifices that everybody has known about throughout all human society when it comes to the monogamous institution of marriage.
According to Caitlin Greenidge, however, she has discovered Something about marriage and that is that it doesn't it wasn't good for her therefore We need a new society that completely dispenses with the idea of marriage as a norm Now you might say to yourself, wait a second, haven't we been doing that since the 60s and hasn't it paid off with tremendous downsides for women and men?
Hasn't it created a society where women by polling data are less happy now than they were in the 1960s?
Hasn't it created a society where men are lonelier now and more addicted to pornography now than they were several decades ago?
Like where is the great spate of happiness that has arisen thanks to the destruction of the institution of marriage?
But again, the idea was marriage wasn't great for everyone.
Therefore, marriage should not be the norm.
Wrong.
The reason marriage was the norm is because it is a very useful sociological institution.
It is functional.
It is fully functional.
Once you get rid of it, once you set the standard of something else, you destroy the society.
But again, this is the way the left thinks.
So according to Caitlin Greenidge, quote, I spent most of my 20s and 30s single only to marry and then come to the conclusion that my marriage should end.
Now I am single again, but I am not alone. My marriage ended during the pandemic while I was at home with family. Since the pandemic began, my daughter and I have been living in what my family jokingly calls the compound, a house my mom and I bought together before I was married.
She and my siblings and their families live there in an attempt to withstand the waves of gentrification that have displaced everyone in my family every four to five years as the sketchy neighborhoods we afford get discovered by rich young people.
The compound is a noisy place.
Sometimes when everyone is talking and laughing and joking at once, my daughter, who is young enough that language is still new to her, will raise her voice in a keening screech to try and join the cacophony.
Living with all this noise has stirred up many emotions.
Gratitude to my family for their support.
The irritation of adolescence, as we sometimes catch ourselves in the dances of our older selves.
A longing for sleep that can only be felt in a household full of children who are all awake and ready to play by 6.30am on a Saturday.
What has not materialized is the intense loneliness that people warned me would come with divorce.
It was always interesting telling people about the divorce.
Some friends with small children almost panicked about what would come, about how the separation was too rash.
But I am lucky in that most of my friends have lived lives falling in and out of partnerships.
You can go it alone, you know, was the much more common response.
We are living through a time when all the stories the larger culture tells us about ourselves are being rewritten.
The story of what the United States is, what it means to be a man or woman, what it means to be a child, what it means to love oneself or other people.
We are imagining all of this again so these stories can guide and comfort us rather than control us.
That paragraph is leftism in a nutshell.
We are reimagining, reimagining, just out of our own heads.
The complete reimagination, the complete destruction of all institutions and basic facts about human life.
Right?
From the value of marriage to the differences between men and women to what it means to be a child.
And we are doing all of this because there are exceptions to rules in which people don't enjoy their marriage and want to get out.
Now, first of all, I think it's been a pretty long standing feature of marriage that there are some people who don't enjoy it.
This is, again, not a surprise to anyone who has read the Bible, for example, in which there are a fair number of somewhat dysfunctional marriages.
That is not a rarity if you read biblical literature.
So go back several thousand years, lots of failing marriages.
That does not mean that marriage as an institution is bad, nor does it mean because there are some bad men, which again, we've known about for all of human history.
This means that man and woman, the definition needs to change.
But the idea is institutions, we need to be liberated from institutions because there are exceptions to rules, except that when you destroy the institutions, you make people less free.
Because in order for there to be a sphere of freedom, a sphere of liberty, you cannot live in a fully chaotic world.
A fully chaotic world where there are no rules, where there is no framework, where there are no institutions, is a completely unfree world.
Right?
The man who is alone on a desert island is maybe the least free human because that person has no capacity to interact with other human beings, which is what brings about huge measures of happiness.
This is something the philosopher Joseph Raz has suggested, is that freedom has to exist within boundaries, because if there's no boundaries, there's no freedom.
The boundaries are necessary in order for you to cultivate relationships with other people that make you free and happy.
Living in a fully chaotic society in which no one's rights are guaranteed by any militating institutions, and in which there's no support for the social institutions that allow for the possibility of human flourishing and happiness, is not freedom.
It is in fact slavery, whether it is to the chaos around you, or whether it is to the drives that you find in your own brain subjectively changing from day to day.
But says this columnist for the New York Times, it's good to get rid of these institutions because she had a bad marital experience.
The innate narcissism here is truly astonishing.
Even as a child, I bristled at the assumptions behind the question that it was just her mom bringing her up.
It seemed obvious to me then, having lived in a two-parent home that was deeply unhappy and dysfunctional, that the number of parents around to make a working family was arbitrary.
That people beholden to the rigid mathematics of mother and father and children equals stability were short-sighted, ignoring all we know of human interactions and ways we make family throughout human history.
To believe that one equation would work for us all seemed so simplistic and childish that for much of my young adulthood, I simply disregarded it.
Again, that sentence is so telling.
It's such a deeply... It truly is a profound philosophical essay, this thing in the New York Times, but not in the way that the author thinks it is.
When she says, to believe one equation would work for us all seemed simplistic and childish, no one said marriage works for every single human.
What we all said is that marriage is an important institution that facilitates the bringing up of the next generation within a stable two-parent household.
And that is true for the vast majority of humans, not for all humans.
But the converse is not get rid of the institution.
Right?
She says that the equation doesn't work for everybody.
But the solution to that is not therefore no equation.
The answer is that's true.
There are free radicals.
There are people for whom this does not work.
And those people, we're not forcing them to get married.
But if society is to get rid of the institutions in favor of a different equation, which is no equation.
Then there's no formula for happiness whatsoever.
And if you believe that you subjectively can create your own level of happiness without any sort of militating societal institutions, good luck to you.
And more importantly, good luck to the society you've helped to fragment and destroy.
Atomistic individualism is the destruction of society.
I'm an individualist insofar as I believe that freedom is deeply important.
That self-definition is a very important aspect of freedom, but it is not the only aspect of freedom.
It is one among others.
And some of those others include the civilizing institutions that make you fully human.
We'll get to more of this in just one moment.
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All right, so back to this piece in the New York Times, because again, it goes to something deep that is happening in Western civilization.
The destruction of civilizing institutions on the basis that we are all freely acting atomistic individuals who get to define reality around us.
Now, the reality is that they are trying to set a set of rules.
So the lie is, well, we don't want any rules.
Wrong.
They do want a rule.
The rule is that marriage is actually an act of bad and we have to rethink the institutions such that we actually actively discourage marriage, or at the very least, we are indifference to whether marriage is a positive good.
That does restructure society.
In a wide variety of contexts, this is a great distinction that we have to make.
How you treat individuals who don't fit into the box is a different thing from saying that the box itself needs to be exploded.
When you explode the box, that is not a neutral standard.
Because you have still created an institution.
Now it's an institution that is indifferent as to whether marriage occurs or whether marriage does not occur.
Indifference is not a neutral standard.
Human beings do require institutions that support particular decisions that we as a society believe, and have historically believed, facilitate human flourishing.
You get rid of everything.
A neutral standard is not no standard.
A neutral standard is a standard, but it's a standard that is opposed to the institutions that existed before.
Uprooting a fence means that you have uprooted, there was a fence there, and now there is no longer a fence there.
That has consequences.
To pretend that that is a return to neutrality is of course very silly.
The status quo is what is neutral right now.
The question is, is uprooting that going to make it better or make things worse?
Okay, there's only two directions on this particular treadmill, right?
It goes forward, it goes backwards, that's it.
There is no, okay, we uprooted the institution and now things just stay.
Nope, that's not how life works.
Okay, so this columnist for the New York Times says, there's a lot of hand-wringing currently about the decline of marriage in the United States, no matter that divorce rates have also gone down and that when people are marrying, it is at later ages.
Our culture may have changed to allow for other ways for people to chart their lives, but whole industries and institutions, banking, real estate, healthcare, insurance, advertising, and most important, taxation, Revolve around assumptions of marriage as the norm.
Without that base assumption, the logic of many of these transactions is thrown out.
It can feel daunting to come up with new narratives about what it means to mature, to be worthy of housing and financial stability and healthcare, to find companionship or emotional support, when these industries have so much invested both financially and ideologically in a particular way of measuring life and community.
Okay, so what this columnist is doing now is making the Marxist move.
It's a Marxist materialist move.
So marriage is not an institution that has existed across societies for thousands of years.
Marriage is instead an imposition of materialist capitalist class upon everybody else.
And if you blow it up, then you can completely remake humanity in brand new, exciting directions.
It's the insurance companies creating marriage.
It is the capitalist infrastructure creating marriage.
It's the powers that be.
No, it is not.
No, it isn't.
So, says this columnist for the New York Times, in search of new narratives, I found myself drawn to Diane DiPrima's 2001 memoir, Recollections of My Life as a Woman.
It focuses on her childhood and life in New York, a portrait of the artist as a young woman in all her romantic and intuitive glory.
Ms.
DiPrima is remarkable because as a poet in her early 20s in 1950s New York, she decided she wanted to be a mother and a single mother at that.
Well, great.
I mean, except for the kid who now lacks a father.
But apparently this means she's virtuous because, again, she didn't fit in the box.
And the box is always bad, according to the left.
Her memoir revolves around this conflict between motherhood and the demands of an artist.
At a certain point, overwhelmed by the demands of parenting children alone while running a press, founding an avant-garde theater, Protecting her left-wing friends from raids by the FBI and the grinding poverty of an artist's life in New York City.
At no point, by the way, do we have any discussion of the impact of this on the child.
Mr. Prima entered into a marriage of convenience with a man she distrusted.
He was the ex-boyfriend of her male best friend.
Besides its messy origins, this relationship resembles the dream I've heard so many straight women describe in a joking, not joking way.
Wishing to start a family with a friend to avoid the complications of romantic love.
But Ms.
DiPrima is honest about the limitations of the arrangement.
She wrote that she avoided the pains of romance, but the man she married is still a domineering, abusive mess in her recounting.
Furthermore, in marriage, she has lost something integral to herself.
Quote, one of my most precious and valued possessions was my independence, my struggle for control over my own life.
I didn't see that it had no intrinsic value for anyone but myself, that it was a coin that was precious only within the realm, a currency that could not cross borders.
Says the columnist for the New York Times, Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independents.
is about her. All the rules have to be changed for her. She is the only person in the world.
Those who panic over the rise in the number of single Americans do not see that this statistic includes lives of hard-won independence. Lives that still intersect with a community, with a home, with a belief in something wider than oneself. The people clinging to old narratives around singledom and marriage can't yet see these lives for what they are.
Because, as Mr. Prima puts it, they are not an objectively valuable commodity.
Their meaning is a currency that cannot cross borders.
These lives threaten the communal narratives currently in place.
But what is a threat to some can be to others a glimmer of a new world coming.
Ah, that's the key.
Right?
The communal narratives, which we would normally refer to as societal institutions that promote human flourishing, those need to go away.
And so if you live life in direct conflict with those institutions, you're living your life politically, right?
Your life is now a political act.
This is why the personal is political for the left.
The left believes that if you live your life in these ways, that you're striking a blow against whatever institution they don't like.
The patriarchy, marriage, capitalism.
There's only one problem.
When you blow up these institutions, institutions don't go away.
You just get new institutions, and they are much, much, much worse.
Because when people live together, there have to be rules and shared frameworks, and somebody has to design those rules and shared frameworks.
Either it can be the wisdom of ages passed down generation over generation, gradually attuned by human reason and by the wisdom of experience, or it can be a bunch of morons who have decided that their subjective pleasure is more important than actual institutions that have helped create human happiness over the course of thousands of years.
That's what this is about.
And you can see this.
It's present in practical politics.
The reason I spend so much time on this is because as we will see, this applies to a variety of political issues that affect your daily life.
People have decided that institutions don't matter because they're the only people on earth who matter.
We'll get to this in just one second.
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You can see this philosophy carried out in policy, not just in terms of social policy and sort of approach to social issues, but the left-wing belief that exceptions ought to make the rules because after all, the rules aren't great for everyone.
That belief system ends with some pretty pathetic ramifications for all of human society.
So for example, California has now mandated that every big box store in California, this kicked in in the new year, every big toy store is required to create a gender neutral toy section.
Why?
Why?
So the answer that people will give you is, well, you know, we need a gender neutral toy section for those kids who are having trouble with their gender identity.
So what you're really saying is that gender doesn't exist.
What you're really saying is there's no such thing as biological sex or human proclivities that are directed by biological sex or connected to it.
That human tendencies are not connected to sex.
In any way, we have to redefine sex across the biological spectrum to account for the fact that there are some people who feel uncomfortable.
A vast, vast, vast minority.
This is not how you make societal rules.
Disassembling basic ideas of the reality of male and female, that is not the way that you promote human happiness.
That is the way that you promote chaos.
Once again, the left does not seem to care about the fact that male and female are pretty rigid categories biologically.
And when I say pretty, I mean innately rigid categories.
And that human activities within those categories tend to fall along somewhat stereotypical lines.
And that that's not a bad thing.
That societally speaking, that's quite a good thing.
That doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions to the rule and we ought not treat those people with tolerance, we should, but that does not mean that you redefine gender entirely.
And yet this is seen as a positive good.
Why?
Because there are exceptions and we have to make sure that all of society is restructured in favor of this small group of people who have a problem with the societal institutions.
And there's a good thing by law.
Again, somebody fills the gap, folks.
When you blow up the institutions, something else fills the gap.
Now, it's compulsory government gender theory.
Here we go, this is a report from NBC News on the new California law.
This might seem like a silly piece of typical California politics, but the truth is that big box toy stores across the country have been moving in this direction.
Both Walmart and Target have done away with gendered toy sections.
And experts say that's good, because gendered toys shape how children see themselves and each other.
Yep.
Who are these experts, by the way?
Are they experts who care about human flourishing?
Absolutely not.
They're experts who don't care about the majority of children flourishing because it turns out that kids like gender roles.
Okay, this is, by the way, this is true in primates as well.
Okay, if you find, if you find female primates, female primates will try to comfort, they'll turn random objects into dolls and they'll try to comfort them and male primates will turn everything into a weapon.
They will look for machines.
This is true for monkeys.
It's also true for human beings.
It turns out that gender roles are quite good for kids.
Kids like rules.
Kids like to be told that there are gender roles and that what they have are specifically created biological powers that merge with civilizational institutions that re-inculcate very important things about humanity.
that boys grow up to be men, are supposed to be protectors and guardians, and that girls grow up to be women, are supposed to be creators and nurturers.
This does not mean that women can't also be protectors and guardians, or that men can't also be nurturers.
It does mean that there are stereotypical attributes to masculinity and femininity, which by the way, even the trans community acknowledges, which is why they attempt to adopt the stereotypical garb of the opposite sex in order to claim membership in it very often.
They have surgeries to effectuate that change.
But the experts say that the institutions are bad.
Why are they bad?
I have a question.
Why are they bad?
Were there really a huge, a huge number of kids so deeply disaffected by societal institutions around gender?
Like huge numbers of kids who walked into toy stores and just started weeping because the Barbies were in the girls' section and the guns, the Nerf guns were in the boys' section.
Was it an overwhelming societal problem or was it that experts don't like the institutions because all institutions are militating factors in favor of civilizational things that are good and positive and they don't like the civilization itself and they want to remold the civilization itself.
Who are these experts?
Why are they experts on kids?
What makes them an expert?
Truly, what even makes them an expert on human happiness?
In order to direct policy, you have to determine what is the good you are seeking with the policy for whom are you seeking this good? It is pretty obvious here.
The good that they are seeking for society is tearing down roles.
Because roles are inherently bad, because we are all malleable widgets, and if you get rid of societal roles, you can remake humanity as essentially a piece of clay in the mold that you wish to remake it.
That is a utopian, nonsensical dream that always ends in tyranny.
Always.
Utopianism ends in tyranny.
It's a point that Karl Popper made, and he happens to be correct.
It's not just with regard to things like gender.
Why do you even care?
The same reason you care.
The same reason you do.
You made a law, guys.
So you cared enough to make a law compelling toy stores to have gender-neutral toy sections.
Don't tell me I shouldn't care about that.
When you're openly saying you wish to remold society and destroy societal institutions.
Okay, but it's not just with regard to things like men and women.
It's also with regard to things like crime.
So the entire criminal policy of the left, of the hard left, is that there are certain people who they don't think should be in jail.
Therefore, no one should be in jail, apparently.
According to the New York Post, Manhattan's new DA has now ordered his prosecutors to stop seeking prison sentences for hordes of criminals and to downgrade felony charges in cases including armed robberies and drug dealing, according to a set of progressive policies made public on Tuesday.
In his first memo to staff on Monday, Alvin Bragg said his office, quote, will not seek a carceral sentence, meaning put people in jail, except for homicide and a handful of other cases, including domestic violence felonies, some sex crimes and public corruption.
This rule may be accepted only in extraordinary circumstances based on holistic analysis of the facts, criminal history, victims' input, and any other information available, the memo reads.
Assistant DAs must also now keep in mind the impacts of incarceration, including whether it really does increase public safety, potential future barriers to convicts involving housing and employment, the financial cost of prison, and, and, the racial disparities over who gets time.
Now, again, we are making rules for the entire society based on a small minority of people who commit criminal acts.
That's what we are doing.
By the way, minorities are the minorities.
Because when we talk about, oh, there are too many black men going to prison, that is still a vast minority of black men.
The vast majority of black men do not go to prison.
This baseline idea that we have to completely reshape how criminal law and institutions of justice are done in this country because you don't like the outcome for a minority of humans who decide to commit crimes is patently crazy.
But that is what they are seeking to do, because the idea is that we have created a quote-unquote carceral society, and our carceral society is having downstream effects that shape how people live, and we don't like how those people are living, and therefore we have to get rid of these institutions altogether.
Well, we've done that, but guess what replaces it?
Chaos.
When you get rid of institutions, you create new institutions.
Those new institutions either foster chaos or foster tyranny or both.
When it comes to criminal law, the left has fostered absolute anarchy.
Chaos.
That's why you've seen mass increases in murder rates across major cities in the United States.
Because prosecutors have decided that they are not interested in prosecuting people on behalf of the small minority.
So just as the institution of marriage must be destroyed because there are some people who don't like it and they don't fit within the box.
And the institutions of law must be destroyed because there are some people who don't like the law and commit crimes.
And the institution of gender must be destroyed because there are some people who feel uncomfortable.
And of course, we have to destroy the institution of schooling as well because there are some people who feel uncomfortable.
So, for example, the Chicago public schools have now cancelled all classes because the union voted to go virtual.
Now, we have been told by the Biden administration that public sector unions are a are a fulsome good.
They're excellent.
And we need public sector unions that bargain against the taxpayer.
We need this.
They're very important.
And we need to make sure that these teachers, who are the heroes of the pandemic after all, I mean, soldiering on, soldiering on from their homes and apartments, doing Zoom classes to a bunch of kids who aren't watching them.
They are the true heroes.
They are truly the heroes.
Now listen, there are some teachers who actually tried to go back into school, and those people are just as heroic as everybody else who went to work.
No more, no less.
They're not more heroic for having gone into a school than the guy is for having gone into a factory, or even the banker is for having gone into his office today.
The silliness where teachers are more heroic than every other member of the population is really foolish when it comes to Omicron, when it comes to COVID generally, considering that kids are not getting sick.
You're more likely to get sick at your local factory working than you are likely to get sick at your local school working.
This has been true throughout the pandemic, by the way.
In fact, you remember that last summer, when Delta was beginning to spike, there was all this talk, well, if we reopen schools, teachers are going to get sick.
And it turned out that every story that was coming up about teachers dying was from a teacher who'd gotten infected outside of school.
Well, now the Chicago Teachers Union, the greatest of all people who are running the Biden administration, by the way, Randy Weingarten is in the White House every other minute.
The Chicago Teachers Union voted to teach virtually rather than in the classroom because, of course, these are heroes, heroes of the republic.
CPS is the third largest school district in the country.
They resumed in-person learning on Monday in conditions that union leaders described as unsafe.
The union held an emergency meeting on Tuesday.
The vote was 73% in favor of the remote work-only job action, the union said on Twitter.
Chicago public schools described the union vote as, quote, an unfortunate decision.
The union said the action will end when the current surge in cases substantially subsides.
So just a quick note.
This is an illegal strike.
By law, public sector unions are not allowed to strike.
The reason they're not allowed to strike is because they're not striking against an employer.
They're striking against the taxpayer.
Public sector unions are barred from strikes.
By law.
Doesn't matter, they do it all the time.
But again, the idea is the rules must change.
The rules must change because there's a small group of people who are paranoid and being crazy.
And so all the rules have to change to restrict students from being able to go to school.
And this is the way that all of this works.
Now, on the other end of this...
You know, what people on the left will say is, well, yeah, but you on the right, you guys, you also want a few people to rule the roost in terms of the prevailing societal rules.
You're not doing it for the broad spectrum of humanity.
And what they will mention is, for example, vax mandates.
They'll say, well, why aren't you in favor of vax mandates?
Vaccinations are good for the vast majority of people.
So why are you saying that we shouldn't mandate vaccinations?
First of all, nothing I've said in here says that marriage ought to be compulsory, for example.
Or that gender segregated toy stores, gender separated toy stores ought to be compulsory.
So the use of government compulsion is one factor that militates here.
The other is the nature of rights.
So there is a very big difference between rights that adhere to every individual and that you choose to exercise when you get a vaccine or don't get a vaccine, and the collective institutions that we share as a society.
There's rights exist within certain boundaries.
And one of those rights is the right to say, I don't wish to vaccinate myself because my health is essentially my business.
But according to Lori Lightfoot, it's amazing.
So what the left will say is you have no rights when it comes to your own health.
But also we are going to completely restructure society when it comes to things like marriage, gender and crime.
Here's Lori Lightfoot, who has done all of these things, saying that businesses love the vaccine mandates, love them.
And what we're hearing from a lot of folks, particularly business people, is they want to create a safe environment and they're grateful for us imposing this vaccine mandate in entertainment venues.
So, restaurants, bars, gyms, and the like.
Okay, imposing actual coercive measures on individuals is a very different thing from there being societal institutions that we foster and uphold.
To understand what rights are, you have to think about rights within a framework.
When we think about rights generally, like for example, the right not to get a vaccine, you have to determine what rights apply, which rights obtain, you have to be pretty specific about how rights work.
We're going to get into that in just a second, because when we use the language of rights, very often we are unclear about what exactly we are talking about.
And I think it's kind of important to clarify, so we'll get into that in just one moment.
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Alrighty, we'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, if you're looking for some motivation to start your year off strong, look no further than the brand new book club that I am launching once a month.
I will be reading a book with you.
I'm going to recommend a book that has earned an important place in our society and the history of Western civilization.
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Not only will the Book Club hold you accountable for each new read, you'll also get exclusive access to my personal notes and analysis.
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Also, as you know, this Friday, the Supreme Court is going to convene to hear arguments on the legality and constitutionality of the Biden administration's absurdly tyrannical vaccine mandate.
That means this week is going to be huge for the lawsuit that we have filed against the Biden administration and medical tyranny.
Already, over 1 million people have signed our Do Not Comply petition.
We would love to increase that number vastly before Friday.
Help us send our message loud and clear.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash do not comply and help us push back against the tyrannical VAX mandate from the Biden administration.
You are listening to the largest, fastest growing conservative podcast and radio show in the nation.
Okay, so let's talk for a second about rights.
So, what the left is constantly doing is they're cramming down from above their version of society.
What they suggest, of course, is that they're not.
They're just upholding rights, okay?
But the question is, what is a right?
Right, what is a right?
Is it a right for you to have a gender-neutral toy section?
Is it a right for criminals to walk free?
Like, what constitutes a right?
And how does that differentiate from, for example, your right to medical freedom, right?
Not to get a vaccine if you don't want a vaccine.
Again, I'm a big proponent of the vaccines.
In fact, I think that there are certain circumstances in which the government can compel vaccination.
I think particularly for childhood diseases, you know, in the context of public schools.
If you wish to take part in a public school and this is a childhood disease like measles, mumps, rubella, I have no problem whatsoever with school districts mandating that you get your shots before you go to school because these are childhood diseases.
The destruction of the disease requires that children get the shot and not transmit it to one another at the public school level, for example.
Right, so how do you determine when a right obtains and pertains?
How do you determine that?
So in order to discuss what a right is, we first have to get more specific about this.
Because people use rights in many different ways, right?
If you talk to the left, there's a quote-unquote right to housing.
That's a very different thing than saying I have a right to free speech.
A right to free speech means no one has the power to compel me to say anything.
A right to housing means I can compel you to give me housing.
I had to compel somebody to give me housing.
I have a right to housing.
Because we're not talking about a right to obtain housing at a fair price.
We're talking about a right to have a house.
So this is what Isaiah Berlin...
Term the difference between positive liberty and negative liberty.
A positive liberty, a positive right is you're being given something.
A negative right is I have a right against you to prevent you from harming me, for example.
This is a pretty strict difference, but we can get more specific than that.
And when we talk about rights, we should keep a framework of what exactly we're talking about in our mind because it determines what government can do and what government can't and what our moral duties are and what they aren't.
So there's a famous legal scholar from the early 20th century.
He used to teach at Yale Law School.
His name is Wesley Newcomb Hofeld.
Okay, and Wesley Neukom-Hofeld had essentially a four-part analysis of what a right could be.
There are four types of rights that he talks about.
First, what he calls privileges.
So, privileges are things that we don't have a duty to do.
And so, for example, I have a privilege not to eat a hamburger today.
I have no moral duty not to eat a hamburger.
I have no moral duty to eat a hamburger.
I have a privilege to decide whether or not to eat a hamburger.
Because there's no moral duty compelling me to eat or not eat that hamburger.
Okay, so I have a privilege if I don't have a duty to do that thing.
So I have a privilege to eat a hamburger if there's no duty not to eat the hamburger, for example.
Then there are claims.
So a claim is a right that I can claim against you.
So, for example, If you have a duty to feed your child, your child has a claim against you.
Your child has an actual, real-life claim against you, because you have a duty to feed your kid, so your child can say, you have a duty to feed me, you have violated your duty, therefore I have a claim against you.
This is a kind of right.
Then, there are powers.
Powers are the ability of some overarching authority to change the nature of privileges and claims.
So, for example, an employer can order a contracted employee to stay late at work.
They have the power to do that.
And they have the power to do that.
Because normally, I couldn't force you to just stay at your job, right?
I have no relationship with you.
So I can't force you to stay at your job beyond a certain number of hours, for example.
But your employer has the power to change your work duties because you've contracted to your employer.
So you have powers.
So that's the third type of right.
Power.
And finally, the fourth type of right is immunity.
Immunity is where you say an institution does not have the power.
So this is what we are generally talking about when we're talking about vaccine mandates.
So you can say two things at once.
One, I think in certain circumstances, you probably have a moral duty to yourself and to others to get vaccinated.
For example, if you're immunocompromised in 75, I think that you have a pretty strong moral duty to get vaccinated.
Okay, now that is a different thing from saying that the government has the power to compel you to get vaccinated.
You have an immunity against the government.
Why?
Because we don't want to give the government the full-scale authority to reshape how we all live.
We don't want to give the government the full-scale prudential authority, on a prudential level, right?
As a matter of what we would like the government to have, the government should not have the ability to reshape all aspects of our health life for our own benefit.
So we have immunity against government.
So you can say that you have an immunity without, for example, having the privilege.
Like, you may have a moral duty on sort of a moral, general level that you should protect yourself and you should make yourself healthier.
I can say both those things at once.
Okay, so for the left, they don't believe that.
For the left, they believe that there is no such thing as an immunity from a thing that they wish you to do.
So if they wish you to do something, then they ought to be able to compel it.
For them, every lack of privilege, every time you have a moral duty to do something, they have the power to compel it.
That is not something I think with which most Americans agree.
And yet, that is the going theory among people on the left.
And by the way, people are running headlong from places that impose these sorts of things.
Anything that is not prohibited is now compulsory, according to the left.
Every single thing.
Right?
As long as you're not prohibited from an activity, it must be a compulsory activity.
This is the way that they think.
And people are fleeing these states.
There's a good piece in the Wall Street Journal today talking about how people are fleeing these states.
So for example, where are people leaving and where are people going?
According to the National Movers Study released Monday by United Van Lines, the largest net gain in terms of share of move-ins was Vermont.
74% of moves were inbound.
The rest of the top five, South Dakota, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Florida.
One of those common themes is affordability.
Another one of those common themes is safety.
Nearly half of the moves into Vermont and Florida were among households earning more than $150,000 a year moving away from higher-priced spots in the Northeast.
New Jersey was the biggest loser.
71% of its moves were headed out-of-state.
67% of moves concerning Illinois were out-of-state.
New York, 63%.
Connecticut, 60%.
California, 59%.
People are leaving blue states.
They're heading on over to cheaper and better states.
And less repressive states.
States that have strong social institutions but not a lot of compulsion.
The left doesn't believe in either of those things.
They don't like the strong social institutions, which they say hem humanity in, and they also love compulsion, because again, anything that is not prohibited is compulsory, according to the left.
So, this is resulting in some pretty dire ramifications when it comes to everything from gender, to crime, to COVID.
They have to compel you to do what they want to do.
The bottom line is their view of life requires tyranny because social institutions are an excellent militating force against tyranny.
Things like marriage and family militate against total governmental top-down control.
Things like church militate against total top-down governmental control.
Because social pressure is a great force for Social binding.
When you don't have that, when you blow up all those institutions, the government has to create the ersatz, the fake level of social cohesion necessary in order for a society to operate.
You can only do that with top-down compulsion.
So they blow up the institutions on behalf of a small group of people who don't like the institutions or for whom the institutions are not beneficial.
And then they replace that with governmental compulsion of a new form of social cohesion.
And then they are shocked when people leave and don't like this, and move instead to places where there's more social cohesion, places where there are a set set of social institutions and rules, and where freedom exists within those social institutions.
The great irony of life is that the stronger the social institutions, the greater the freedom.
The weaker the social institutions, the less the freedom, because the government must create some sort of social cohesion, and they can only do that with the billy club.
That is the only way the government creates social cohesion.
So, Joe Biden right now is trying to happy talk his way through this thing.
He tried compulsion, it didn't work when it came to vaccines.
He has tried everything he can think of in order to create Airsat's social cohesion, top-down, while wrecking institutions on behalf of wokeness and redistributionism, and now he's going to happy talk his way through this thing.
So yesterday, Joe Biden went out there in the middle of an economy in limbo and an Omicron surge.
And what he could say is, listen, we have great social institutions in this country.
We have people, we have hospitals, we have communities, we have people who take care of each other, and we have freedoms.
And we have vaccines that are available to you.
We have all these things available to you.
Go out and live your life happily in a free country.
Instead, Joe Biden is trying to happy talk his way through his own failures of ideology.
So first of all, it's always fun to watch the current President of the United States not know what year it is.
That's exciting.
This House plant, President House plant over here, hiding the water stain that is the Democratic Party agenda.
Things are going poorly.
Here was the President of the United States yesterday.
He was giving an emergency speech on COVID in which he said absolutely nothing of value.
Here he was saying that it is 2020, which is a surprise to most of us.
We're going to get through this.
We're going to get through it together.
We have the tools to protect people from severe illness due to Omicron, if people choose to use the tools.
We have the medicines coming along that can save so many lives and dramatically reduce the impact that COVID has had on our country.
There's a lot of reason to be hopeful in 2020.
But for God's sake, please take advantage of what's available.
Okay, so encouraging people to get vaccinated, I have no problem with.
But alarming people unduly about the nature of human life, what we have is a pandemic of panic among the vaccinated.
Joe Biden said yesterday that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Realistically speaking, it is not a pandemic of the unvaccinated anymore.
It is a pandemic of everybody.
Now, it may be a lot of hospitalizations and death among the unvaccinated.
That is true.
The vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths that are currently occurring in the United States are of unvaccinated people when it comes to Omicron.
It also happens to be that Omicron is hitting a huge swath of the population, like over a million positive tests yesterday in the United States, five times the number last year, and somewhere in the same range of deaths on a daily basis, which means this thing, thank God, is significantly less deadly, like up to five times less deadly than Delta, according to the South African data.
And so Joe Biden is trying to panic everyone.
What he should be saying is, no one should be panicked at this point.
If you're unvaccinated and you've never had COVID before, then you should be concerned, particularly if you're immunocompromised or elderly, you should be concerned and maybe you should go get a vaccine.
But otherwise, everybody should get back to daily life and stop testing asymptomatically or if you have a cold.
It's silly.
He's not going to do any of that.
Because again, he is invested in the idea that government can change everything.
Government is going to force you to be a good citizen.
So here is Joe Biden saying that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
And if you are vaccinated, you should be concerned.
But if you're unvaccinated, you should be setting your head on fire.
What he's actually doing is creating a panic of a pandemic panic among the vaccinated.
I got to tell you, it's amazing.
I mean, I'm speaking to people all over the country on a regular basis.
The only people who are panicked are people who are fully vaccinated and boosted living in blue states.
That's the entirety of the people who are panicked.
There is no one who is unvaccinated at this point who's panicked.
Because if they were panicked, they already would have gotten vaccinated.
And it's not everybody who's vaccinated who's panicked.
I'm not panicked.
I don't care.
I'm done.
I've been done since I got the vax.
And my parents have been done since they got the vaccine boosted.
And my wife is vaccine boosted.
So I don't know what there is to panic about.
But the only people in America who are panicking right now are people who are vaccinated, boosted, boosted again.
80% of their body weight is now vaccine.
And they're still panicking about Omicron.
That's because of this dullard.
Here's President Biden.
We're seeing COVID-19 cases among vaccinated workplaces across America, including here at the White House.
But if you're vaccinated and boosted, you are highly protected.
You know, be concerned about Omicron, but don't be alarmed.
But if you're unvaccinated, you have some reason to be alarmed.
Many of you will, you know, you'll experience severe illness in many cases if you get COVID-19, if you're not vaccinated.
Some will die, needlessly die.
Okay, again, I'm a fan of vaccines, and I think vaccines are good.
But you know what would be great here is some actual statistical data, which is available to the President of the United States.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden says he believes that schools should remain open, which comes as news to the Chicago Teachers Union.
He has yet to tweet about the Chicago Teachers Union shutting down all schooling in the city of Chicago.
We know that our kids can be safe when in school, by the way.
That's why I believe schools should remain open.
You know, they have what they need.
Because of the American Rescue Plan, the first month we were in office, or second month, that I signed in March, the states and the school districts have spent this money well.
Many of them.
But unfortunately, some haven't.
So I encourage the states and school districts to use the funding that you still have to protect your children and keep the schools open.
Okay, weird, because it's your party that's shutting down schools right now.
Also, Joe Biden fibbed, he says that hospitals are being overrun thanks to the unvaxxed.
So first of all, the data on hospitals being overrun is really scanty.
Okay, maybe hospitals are being strained in some places like rural parts of the country, but if they're being overrun, it turns out that that is probably due to the fact that there are a bunch of people who are not working.
According to Maria Raven and Gene Noble, writing for the Wall Street Journal, The United States currently has a severe shortage of nurses and healthcare workers are suffering from significant burnout compounded by understaffing.
As the Omicron variant spreads, outdated COVID-19 testing and quarantine policies are exacerbating healthcare worker shortages.
It turns out that when you vax mandate a bunch of people who already have natural immunity and they work in hospitals and they go home, and then you have to activate the National Guard in, for example, New York in order to staff hospitals, that creates artificial shortages.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Omicron is highly contagious and now accounts for most infections in the United States.
Hospitals are increasing asymptomatic testing of their employees and requiring those with potential exposure to quarantine even if they have no symptoms and a negative test.
In light of that staffing crisis, the CDC last week reduced the isolation period for COVID-infected healthcare workers to five days.
But now they're saying, well, maybe you should think about getting a test anyway before you go back to work.
But here's Joe Biden, again, suggesting that this crisis is not brought about by his own stupid policy.
It's instead a crisis that's been brought about by the people he can always blame, the unvaxxed.
Countries across the world are seeing rising cases.
Here in the United States, our team have been working around the clock during the holiday weeks.
In the last two weeks, we have deployed hundreds of military doctors and nurses to staff the hospitals in our states that are overrun and overworked because of unvaccinated COVID-19 patients primarily.
Okay, well, maybe it's because there are shortage of workers created by your federal vaccine mandates and they're having to fill in using the military.
Also, Joe Biden keeps saying things about testing. He's just incompetent. The level of competence in this administration is truly astonishing. It's just unbelievable incompetence.
Here's Joe Biden saying, you know what, why don't you go try to find a free COVID test nearby?
Yeah, good luck with that, by the way, we have a massive COVID test shortage. Google, quote COVID test near me. Go there, Google, excuse me, COVID test near me on Google to find the nearest site where you can get a test most often and free.
Look, with more capacity for in-person tests, we should see waiting lines shortened and more appointments freed up.
I'm testing.
I know this remains frustrating.
lines of cars for blocks because of the stupid restrictions that he's put down about how you have to test before you go back to work and about how we have to test the asymptomatic.
And then you didn't supply the test. My favorite part of this is that Joe Biden says that the testing shortages are very frustrating to him. Are they, though? Because I feel like Joe Biden can get a test. Are they deeply frustrating to Joe Biden? This addled, this addled old man. My goodness.
I'm testing. I know this remains frustrating. Believe me, it's frustrating to me. But we're making improvements.
In the last two weeks, we've stood up federal testing sites all over the country.
We're adding more each and every day.
Yeah, and you should have been doing that, what, like a year ago?
I mean, really, like, as soon as he became president, I thought this was his first priority.
He talked about it repeatedly.
We need more testing.
This is not unexpected.
By the way, what we actually need is fewer people testing.
If you're asymptomatic, you should not be testing.
If you have a mild cold, you should not be testing.
Just assume that everyone's gonna get Omicron and move on with your life.
It is that simple.
We are all going to get Omicron.
For most of us, it's going to be asymptomatic or a mild cold.
If we are vaccinated, it's going to provide you Exorbitantly small levels of harm in terms of hospitalization and or death.
But he can't let go.
He can't do it.
He's again, for the left, everything is compulsory.
Everything.
And so here is Chuck Schumer, who's trying to happy talk his way through this thing, saying Joe Biden is doing a great job on testing, which is weird because everyone knows he's not.
I think that they are doing a good job in terms of getting the tests out.
I've asked that more tests be coming to New York.
They've sent them.
They've sent them there.
And look what happened.
COVID came back with a fervor in a far wider way than we've known.
But I think the Biden administration is doing a good job on testing.
Meanwhile, Jen Psaki denied that Biden has lost complete control of the pandemic.
Apparently, things are going swimmingly.
If they think they can happy talk their way through this one, they're out of their minds.
They're crazy.
Let's speak straight here for a second.
Cases are rising across the country.
Tests are hard to come by in many places, or there's long lines for them.
Schools are closing again or having to go virtual.
And that's not just because of the weather in some parts of the country, but because of the pandemic.
There is a sense among many that the country has lost control of the virus.
Would the White House agree with that?
We would not.
No, of course we wouldn't agree that we've lost control.
I mean, we just have a million cases a day.
You were never in control, guys.
You just weren't.
By the way, best thing is that the administration and the panic, the COVID panic porn people, their big thing has been, we are going to focus in on the kids.
The kids are the ones who are really in danger.
The kids are not in danger.
They've not been in danger this entire time.
Now Jen Psaki says the kids are at risk because of unvaccinated adults.
Wait a second.
I thought that the adults were at risk because of unvaccinated kids.
The logic just changes whenever they need it to change.
It's amazing.
I think what's important to step back here is recognize we're still in the middle of a pandemic.
There are still far too many people who are not vaccinated.
There are still kids who are at risk because there are not enough people, adults, vaccinated.
And I think what we're all collectively trying to do here is protect more people and save more lives, whether you work here or at the CDC or the FDA.
Oh, okay, so it's about the kids.
By the way, the Today Show picking up on this panic because we basically have a Pravda loop that exists inside the media.
Anytime the administration says a thing, the immediate response from the media are, how do we mirror this and just keep repeating it back to the White House?
And the media will be cited by the White House as justification for their policy.
It's a perfect loop.
Here is the Today Show yesterday promoting KN95s for possibly kids.
Obviously, the KN95 and N95 are the most effective, but it can be really hard to find them in small kid sizes.
And also, to keep them on your kids all day, they're not the most comfortable.
So, the second best option is to make sure you have a kid-size surgical mask.
And by the way, look at what a difference the kid-size mask is from the adult size.
So, you really want to make sure you have one that fits your child's face, and you want to layer the cloth mask over that mask.
So, the surgical mask goes on first, and then the cloth mask.
Um, this, none of this is scientific.
None of this is required.
None of it.
But, not according to Vivek Murthy.
Vivek Murthy is the Surgeon General of the United States.
Here he was yesterday saying it's time to vax the five-year-olds.
Five-year-olds are not dying from COVID.
They are not.
The number of kids who have died under age 18 in the United States remains below 700 for two years.
Two years of pandemic.
Alright, here we go.
I think we have even more work to do here to get more children vaccinated.
We've got more than 200 million people vaccinated, fully vaccinated in our country, millions who are boosted.
But kids saying I had vaccines authorized later for them because the studies took longer to do and that was important to do thoroughly.
But now we've got to really push, put our foot on the accelerator, get our kids who are five and above vaccinated.
It's more critical than ever.
You're all insane.
You're all insane.
So because a minority of people in the United States are deeply panicked and deeply worried over a thing that should not panic or worry them, we all must live under their rule.
That's the way this works.
All righty.
We'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
Coming up soon is The Matt Wall Show.
It airs at 1.30 p.m.
Eastern.
Be sure to check it out over at dailywire.com.
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Shapiro, this is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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