Well, I'm not live right now because it's the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, but here's the thing.
When you subscribe at dailywire.com, you get an additional hour of content of my show every single day.
Here's a bit of a taste of that right now.
So, apparently Joe Biden is mostly mad at this point because no one pays attention to him inside the White House, which is really kind of sad and also hilarious.
NBC News has a piece today titled, Inside a Biden White House Adrift.
It's adrift, guys.
It's not that he's a bad leader.
It's that it's just adrift.
Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy, while bristling at how they've tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.
I love this.
I love it so much.
Because this is politicians in a nutshell, right?
They take responsibility.
They literally run for the office, and then they're like, why is everyone failing me?
Why?
So Joe Biden is a horrible communicator.
He can barely get a sentence out of his face.
I mean, his face hole just starts making sound.
And when the sound comes out, it makes no sense.
And then he's like, why aren't my aides allowing me to say what I want to say?
I was like, what did you say?
And why won't you let me let Joey be Joey?
Well, if we do, it just sounds as though you are spewing mashed potatoes from your face hole.
But I want a guns with Kevlar gear and shoot somebody with a cannon and blows a lung out there.
You're bad at this.
This is the reason you're the reason you're failing is because you're bad at this.
Nope, not that.
It must be because they have not been able to craft a more compelling message.
OK, I have a question.
Could the best PR executive on planet Earth craft a compelling message for Joe Biden?
Is that possible?
There's just no way.
I'm sorry you can't sell new Coke.
It doesn't matter how good your marketing department is.
You ain't selling new Coke.
It ain't happening.
According to NBC News, Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters' confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say.
Well, here's the thing about sure-handed leadership.
Typically, if I wouldn't want to put you behind the wheel of a car in a crowded area, I also don't think that you're going to be able to provide sure-handed leadership to the country.
What about Joe Biden says sure-handed leadership at this point?
He's basically stumbling into walls.
He doesn't know where he is half the time.
He says things that make no sense.
He's slurring his words routinely and he's not drunk.
Like, I don't... Good luck with this mission, AIDS.
In other missions, if you can come with Cold Fusion, that'd help the administration.
Like, as long as we're just, like, going from possible things that might help Biden, let's do that.
Crises have piled up in ways that, at times, made the Biden White House look flat-footed.
I love how the way the media always poses this is, you know, all these exogenous crises that just sort of randomly crop up while Joe Biden's president.
Weird how that works, right?
It's very weird.
It's sort of how, like, whenever Amelia Bedelia is in the House, just things get screwed up, just randomly.
It has nothing to do with Amelia Bedelia being an idiot.
It has to do with the fact that, like, you know, when she draws the curtains, she actually just draws the curtains.
That happened to her.
It wasn't a thing she did.
Crises have piled up in ways that at times made the Biden White House look flat-footed.
Record inflation, high gas prices, a rise in COVID case numbers, and now a Texas school massacre that is one more horrific reminder it has been unable to get Congress to pass legislation to curb gun violence.
Democratic leaders are at a loss about how he can revive his prospects by November.
I don't know what's required here, said James Clyburn, whose endorsement in the 2020 primaries helped rescue Biden's candidacy, but I do know the poll numbers have been stuck where they are for far too long.
Speculation is churning Biden could shake up the West Wing staff, although that's not about to happen right away.
Multiple people close to the White House said they've heard Chief of Staff Ronald Klain will depart at some point after the midterms.
One has heard him discuss leaving.
Should Klain go, a potential successor is Anita Dunn.
Uh, yeah, man, that ain't gonna do it.
Dunn began working at the White House at the start of the term, then left and returned in early May at Biden's specific request.
No woman or person of color has ever been the White House Chief of Staff since the position was created after World War II.
Well, I mean, Trump had a pretty close top political advisor named Kellyanne Conway, as you recall, but OK.
Other and wasn't Valerie Jarrett like super tight with with Barack Obama?
Anyway, other possible replacements include Steve Ruscetti, longtime Biden aide, who is counselor to the president, and Susan Rice, domestic policy chief.
Terry McAuliffe is now speaking to the White House about taking a senior role as an advisor to the president.
Terry McAuliffe.
So your solution to giant failure is to take the former governor of Virginia, who is the head of the DNC, and somehow lost the governorship of Virginia to Glenn Youngkin, and make that guy the guy.
Slow clap for the geniuses over at the Democratic Party in the White House.
Wow.
I mean, man, that is a list of luminaries right there.
Anita Dunn, who is Most famous for putting a male ornament on a Christmas tree during the Obama administration.
And Susan Rice, who's most famous for Benghazi.
And Tara McAuliffe, who's most famous for losing to Glenn Youngkin.
Geniuses.
The White House did not make Klain or Dunn available for comment.
Ron Klain spends most of his day proposing bad policy to Biden, then retweeting Ezra Klein.
That's basically what his day looks like.
It's like 8 to 9, propose bad policy to Joe Biden.
9 to midnight, retweet Ezra Klein.
Any assessment of Biden's performance needs to take into account the epic challenges he faced from the start.
I love that.
By the way, that is not, they didn't even add the usual qualifier experts say.
Did experts say that you have to take into account all of the crises that he has faced?
That is NBC News's objective coverage.
Any assessment of Biden's performance needs to take into account the epic challenges he faced from the start.
Weird, I don't remember them saying that about actual COVID and Trump being hit with that.
Then it was just Trump's blowing this.
How many Americans are dying?
Joe Biden tweeting a, over 200,000 Americans die on your watch.
And you ought not be president.
And then like 700,000 Americans die on his watch.
And it's like, Matt Locke.
Chris Quipple, the author of a new book about the White House Chiefs of Staff, is writing a book about the Biden presidency.
He says, they came in with the most daunting set of challenges, arguably since FDR, only to be hit by a perfect storm of crises.
From Ukraine, to inflation, to the supply chain, to baby formula.
What's next?
Locusts?
Oh, give me a fricking break.
You ran for the office, my man.
You wanted this.
And that's not even true.
The Ukraine crisis did not exist when you took office.
You created it by pulling out of Afghanistan and looking soft to Putin.
The inflation crisis did not exist before you took office.
You exacerbated it by blowing out the spending and not talking to Jerome Powell about loose monetary policy.
Since when?
He had the easiest runway.
Honest to God, he had the easiest landing strip I've ever seen for an incoming presidential candidate.
I said this at the time.
He was coming in with an economy that had been put into an involuntary coma.
It was an artificial coma.
It was going to come out of it.
He had a vaccine.
He had an American people who were exhausted by politics.
All he had to do was just sit down and shut up and be dead, which was basically his mandate.
And he couldn't do it.
But now it's like, well, I can't.
Why do all these bad things keep happening to Joe Biden?
I just can't imagine.
He's not bad at the job or anything.
Just why?
Why does it's weird that the it's weird that we keep having these nuclear radiation risks at Homer Simpson's workplace.
Why is all of this happening to Homer Simpson?
Biden wonders the same thing.
I've heard him say recently, he used to say about the President Obama's tenure, everything landed on his desk but locusts.
And now he understands how that feels, a White House official said.
Amid a rolling series of calamities, Biden's feeling lately as he just can't catch a break.
Oh, poor baby.
Oh, he can't catch a break, guys.
Be nice to old Joe.
I mean, all he wants to do is just be your friend and you won't be nice to Joe.
Be nice to Joe.
Biden is frustrated.
If it's not one thing, it's another, said a person close to the president who is named the president.
That last part, I added.
An assumption baked into Biden's candidacy was that he would preside over a smoothly running administration by dint of decades of experience in public office.
But there are signs of managerial breakdowns that have angered both him and his party.
Oh, everyone's failing him!
By the way, I do love the idea that he is wildly incompetent.
For his entire senatorial career, he runs a couple of real crappy presidential campaigns, and then they're like, this guy's an expert.
He's been here forever.
Bob in accounting.
He's been here for 35 years.
He must be great at this.
Or maybe Bob was never made head of accounting because he sucked at this.
Maybe that's the problem.
Biden is annoyed he wasn't alerted sooner about the baby formula shortage and then he got his first briefing in the past month, even though the crisis has been long in the making.
The White House did not specify when Biden got his first briefing on the formula shortage.
Beyond policy, this is the best part.
Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing.
He makes a clear and succinct statement, only to have aides rush to explain he actually meant something else.
The so-called cleanup campaign, he has told advisors, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise.
Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point he's not fully in command.
This is the best part.
I love that so much.
So he says something absolutely incoherent with significant consequences, and his aides are like, I'm pretty sure he didn't mean that.
He's like, how dare you undermine me?
I mean exactly this crazy loony thing I just said.
What did I say?
I can't remember.
The issue came to a head when Biden ad-libbed during a speech in Poland that Russian President Vladimir Putin cannot remain in power.
Within minutes, Biden's aide tried to walk back his comments, saying he hadn't called for Putin's removal and the U.S.
policy was unchanged.
Biden was furious.
Fu-rious.
His remarks were being seen as unreliable, arguing he speaks genuinely and reminding his staff that he's the one who is president.
Uh, so does he mean that he does want Putin removed from office?
Because if that's what he means, then that is a radical shift in American policy and might lead to nuclear war.
So it feels like that walk back was probably not a bad thing.
But you're always like, yeah, but it undermines my... Why don't people take me serendipitously?
Why does everyone always go out there and say something super clear?
Like, Shambhala is simply going to help Putin.
And then you guys all come out and say our policy is unchanged.
It's undermining my credit band and boo.
Geniuses.
Biden has vented to aides about not getting credit from Americans or the news media for actions he believes have helped the country, particularly on the economy.
Unemployment rates have dropped to below 4%, but polling indicates most Americans believe the economy's in bad shape.
Biden grouses Republicans aren't getting their share of the blame for legislative gridlock.
Well, I mean, you do have a majority in both houses of Congress, dude.
The president also says he doesn't think enough Democrats go on TV to defend him.
Wait, who does this sound like?
Who does this sound like?
You know, we were told that the adults were back in charge.
You know, not people who spend all day watching cable news and about how everybody's mean to them.
The adults, you know, like Joe Biden.
He's an adult.
Not like Donald Trump.
That terrible bad man, Donald Trump, who spent all day just watching the TVs and then tweeting out policy ideas and having his aides walk it back and not getting things done.
He'd be totally different.
Mm-hmm.
A particular sore spot is his slumping poll numbers.
He's mystified.
His approval rating has dropped to a level approaching that of his predecessor, Donald Trump.
He's now lower than Trump.
He's really twisted about it, another person close to the White House said.
Maybe because he's a worse president than Trump.
I know.
Blasphemy.
But it happens to be the reality.
So, good times.
I think Bernie's gonna primary him.
And it's gonna be great.
I think that's what's gonna happen.
Okay, meanwhile, our neighbors to the north have decided on full-scale tyranny.
So if you didn't, I guess Justin Trudeau's plan was, if you didn't like it when we froze your bank account because you didn't like our COVID lockdowns, you'll love it when we take away your guns.
According to foxnews.com, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on Monday, his government is introducing legislation to implement a national freeze on all handgun ownership throughout the country.
On ownership, what this means, it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer, or import handguns anywhere in Canada.
We recognize the vast majority of gun owners use them safely and in accordance with the law, but other than using firearms for sport shooting and hunting, there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday life.
It is amazing how the left, internationally, has now decided that self-defense is not the reason to own a gun.
Literally the only reason I own a gun.
I'm not a hunter.
I'm not a sport shooter.
I own a gun for self-defense.
That is all.
That is the entire list of reasons.
But apparently that's no one in Canada needs a gun ever for self-defense ever.
So he's going to ban, I mean, he's banning all handgun transfers, but eventually it's just going to be seizing the guns.
Will it not?
I mean, the answer is yes.
Canadian minister of public safety, Marcio Mendocino, Marco Mendocino said a mandatory buyback program for assault style weapons will go into effect later this year.
So it'll be Australia, right?
You're mandated.
And if we find that you have a gun in your home, you will presumably be fined or jailed.
The first AR-15s and other assault style firearms will start to be bought back by the end of this year.
It's going to be hard, but we're going to get it done.
About 55,000 new handguns have been registered annually in Canada over the last decade, according to Mendocino.
So, wow.
I mean, and if you think this is what the left in America, they don't have designs on the same thing, you're wrong.
This is why you have articles in the Washington Post saying, quote, the Evaldi shooting stirred something in him, so he gave up his gun.
For years, even as mass shootings swept the country, Richard Small bristled in any talk of tighter gun restrictions.
But then the 68-year-old retired high school history teacher saw a photo of one of the young victims in Valdi, and they drove—he and his wife drove 90 minutes from their ranch.
And then he decided that he was going to drive it to his local police department and turn in his gun.
Which is weird because he's not the one who shot anybody or was going to shoot anybody.
But folks, as I mentioned, it is the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, so we're not live right now, but there's all sorts of content you've never heard because you're not behind the paywall.
You should go to dailywire.com and subscribe right now.
Here's some of the interview that I recently did with Douglas Murray.
Joining us on the line is Douglas Murray, Associate Editor of The Spectator, based in Britain.
His latest publication is The War on the West, in which Douglas talks about how the Western cultural elite have been undermining the traditions that made the West great in the first place.
Douglas, great to talk to you.
It's great to talk to you as well.
I'm actually speaking to you from America.
Oh, well, that's exciting stuff.
So first of all, welcome to a temporarily freer country than Britain.
I say temporarily because it seems like things are moving in the wrong direction in pretty much all of these countries.
Maybe there'll be a backlash.
So why don't we start with where we stand?
So, you know, I will say I have become a little bit more of an optimist about where the West is going over the course of the last year and a half because the left has lost its mind so much that it seems like a backlash is brewing.
Where do you think we are?
Are you more optimistic or pessimistic than you were, say, a year and a half ago?
I'm definitely slightly more optimistic, as you are, Ben.
I mean, the point I make in the War on the West is that there has been this insane attempt to war on all of our foundations in the Western democracies.
A war on our religious traditions, our philosophical traditions, our historical traditions.
An attempt to pull down every single one of our heroes in the West, and sometimes Quite literally.
A war on our culture and, of course, crucially, and this is where we really get the overreach, a war on the peoples of the West.
You see, my view is that if you tried to tell any group of people in a society that they are evil from birth, that they have nothing to be proud of, that they can never escape their birth and are just to be condemned for all eternity, it would be highly unlikely that you could persuade a minority population of that.
But here's the thing.
When it comes to white people in the West, white people are a majority in America.
They're a majority in the UK.
So why would a majority agree to go along with that?
Why would a majority agree to go along with what the Kendi's, D'Angelo's, and others of our age are telling them, which is, If you are born white, you're born evil, you're born uniquely guilty, everybody else is a kind of saint, you're a perpetual sinner, and the best thing you could do with your life is to kind of sidle through it without anyone noticing and atoning throughout it.
Why would a majority population go along with that?
And I think the answer to some critical point is they won't.
They want a more reasonable estimation of their own past, their own present, and everybody else's.
So why don't we start with, as you discussed, the backlash is beginning, but why did so many people go along with this for so long?
Because, again, Ibram X. Kendi is a well-respected public intellectual in the United States, despite the fact that he is neither an intellectual nor should he be well-respected.
People like Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 6019 project have been promoted to the tunes of literally tens of millions of dollars by the New York Times.
She's still an employee of the New York Times.
She apparently writes maybe one piece every couple of years for them.
It's pretty incredible.
And not only that, you've seen all of their sort of nostrums now mirrored at the top levels of American government.
You have the Biden administration openly saying things like equity should be infused in every element of what we do.
And by equity, they mean Ibram X. Kendi style anti-racism, active discrimination on the basis Of race.
You see a Supreme Court nominee in the United States unable to explain what a woman is.
So why has it worked for so long?
Well, this is one of the reasons why I'm spending my time in America at the moment, is because America is clearly now the net exporter of bad ideas around the world.
And I'm very sorry to say that as a very pro-American figure.
Some of you recognize that America has been a net importer of bad ideas from the old continent in the past.
It's now exporting bad ideas.
You mentioned people like Nicole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project, one of the many people that I try to take apart piece by piece at the opening of this book.
Here's the thing.
You just mentioned, by the way, Ben, that they're public intellectuals.
I dispute that.
They're private intellectuals.
Why do I say that?
First of all, to be a public intellectual—apart from, I agree, they're not intellectuals, but that doesn't matter—to be a public intellectual, you would have to contest your ideas in the public sphere, as you do, as I do, as many other people do, of left and right and all sorts of people.
These people will never debate.
Kendi will never debate, as you know.
Nicole Hannah-Jones will not debate.
There are many historians in the US who have picked up on all of the mistakes, the schoolgirl errors that Nicole Hannah-Jones makes.
Will she debate them?
Of course not.
So that's one of the things.
To be a public intellectual, you have to actually be willing to debate your ideas in front of the public.
These people aren't.
Why do I also say they're private intellectuals?
Because they are all wafted up.
through private corporations and often, sadly, public ones, but they are effectively creatures of a small type of advancement program.
In the case of Kendi, for instance, he ends up holding a chair at Boston University, only previously held by Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winning author of many great books like Knight.
Kendi has done nothing like this.
Nicole Hannah-Jones.
All these people get MacArthur awards, they all get university chairs, but none of them are willing to contest their ideas.
So what's happened is effectively a small number of private non-intellectuals have been wafted up in America with ideas that have not been contested.
But here's their advantage.
They have a terrific cudgel in their hands, a bat to beat everybody with, the same remorseless weapon they consistently use, which is the charge of racism.
If you don't like Nicole Hannah-Jones's work, it's not because it's sloppy, as it is.
It's not because it's basically made up in parts, as it is.
It's not that it's an attempt to completely rewrite the American story so that it's not a story of heroism, but one of unbelievable theft and guilt and awfulness.
It's not just that.
It's the fact that if you contest any of these things, they will say, you are a racist.
And currently in American public life, quite understandably, nobody wants to be accused of racism.
These people overuse the term and they use it against everyone and anyone who criticizes them.
So they've got away with smuggling racism back into public life in the form of anti-white racism, which these people excel at.
So, Douglas, you talk in the war in the West, on the West, about the institutions that have been attacked by these members of the radical left.
And those institutions range from things like the ability to reason and have conversations to the church.
What do you think holds all of that together?
Because it really is sort of an incredible spectacle.
At the same time that they are saying that we can't accept any of the traditional wisdom of the past, they're also saying we can't use reason as a guide.
You're left with pretty much nothing.
I mean, you can at least make the case that the sort of rationalists of the 19th century, who were anti-religion, they were anti-religion because they were rationalists.
Now you have irrationalists of the 21st century who are arguing against both rationalism and also traditional religion.
It's kind of amazing.
I mean, one of the things I try to demonstrate in the book is it's warred on absolutely everything.
As you say, this is a war against our religious tradition and our secular tradition.
So the Judeo-Christian religion comes in for assault, but so does the tradition of secularism and the Enlightenments and reason and much more.
So that even, as you say, you say reason is said to be a white supremacist thing, so that mathematics is said to be a white supremacist thing. Correct answers are a white supremacist thing and much more. There are several answers to it though.
The first is simply that the desire is there is nothing left in the in the public landscape except for this set of claims which they've smuggled in in recent years.
There is nothing left to explain anything other than this new religion.
As I say, the churches are basically going along with the new religion of equity, diversity, inclusion, equity.
I give remorseless examples of them doing this in America and across the Western world.
They've basically sold one religion to take up another.
The religion of Kenya.
So on.
But another thing is, as you know, there's a section in the book on what is very revealing about the people they don't do this to.
Currently, everybody in our past, particularly in America, has been subjected to the same attack because of living in a time when racism existed, living in a time where slavery or colonialism existed, and using words or playing with ideas that we would not use today.
Well, here's the thing, as I say in one section of the book.
Look at Karl Marx.
Karl Marx, as I showed in his private and public writings, was a vicious racist by contemporary standards.
Of course, a vicious anti-Semite.
He had appalling views on slavery, colonialism, and much more.
Only last year, a new statue to Karl Marx went up in Germany, paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, it should be mentioned.
So why don't we do this with Marx?
Well, I think there's a very revealing truth here, which is that one of the things that's been going on is that people want to tear down every hero except, for instance, for Karl Marx, because they think he's going to be useful, as he would be, with them trying to smuggle back in the same reprehensible project they spent the last century and more trying to smuggle into American life.
So they don't bring down Marx like they brought down Thomas Jefferson for the same reasons, because they say, oh no, well, we're not interested in it with him because he's a figure we admire.
Here's something.
We admire Jefferson.
We admire Washington.
We admire Lincoln.
We don't look to these people for their views on race.
We look to them and admire them because of their extraordinary foresight, their heroism, their ability to come up with the greatest country on earth.
I mean, in the case of the founding fathers, you know, we don't look to them because we want to look at their private letters and see where they once referred to slaves.
So, I think we reveal an enormous amount in the fact that this unbelievable, remorseless exercise is done on everyone, except for a few far-leftist heroes.
Well, I think we should play it at them as well.
If you want to play the context of your time thing, sure.
Well, that relates to everybody.
We're talking with Douglas Murray.
His latest book is The War on the West.
It is out this week.
So Douglas, what form do you think the backlash is going to take?
There are a couple of forms that have sort of been put out there.
One is the sort of John Stuart Mill, classical liberal, libertarian form where everybody just basically goes weapons down.
We all leave each other alone.
You live your life.
I live my life.
And it seems like that is now taking a backseat to an almost more traditionally conservative, European conservative feel, which is you guys are not going to go weapons down.
We don't trust you to go weapons down.
And so we are going to start using some of your own methods against you until you either surrender or in the case of some, I would say, more passionate advocates of this position, they say that even in a vacuum, we would use these sort of arguments.
So to take sort of a fixed point, what's happening in Florida right now with regard to Disney?
There are a few arguments, really interesting arguments, I think, happening on the right over this.
There's some classical liberals who say, no, no, no, Disney should be able to say what it wants to say, and Ron DeSantis should basically leave them alone.
Then there are people like me, and I've taken the position this is mutually assured destruction.
The left has basically weaponized corporate America against All of these traditional institutions and they've done so through government regulations and government laws and they've done so over the course of decades and so I'm not happy with going after corporations for speech but the speech that Disney had wrung out of it by the Democrat media complex was not speech that Disney even wanted to do in the first place and so if there's no incentive structure created on the other side then there must be an incentive structure on the other side so we can go back to status quo ante and then there are the people who are sort of
The more passionate European style conservatives who say, well, even if the left weren't pushing this, we should basically punish corporations for types of speech that we don't like because they're tearing away at the social fabric.
What form of backlash do you think is going to be most likely here?
I think, to take the case of Florida, it's a very useful example.
I don't actually think that what the Sanders has done is in any way wrong, because the fact is, as you know, Ben, that Disney was enjoying advantages in Florida already.
So if a particular corporation enjoys tax and other advantages in a state, and then uses its position to level political allegations that are flat-out false, against that state.
I think that the state has the right to take away the advantages that Disney owns.
If there were any other company that did it, you'd say the same, I think.
I don't see why a bakery or anything else that enjoyed a particular status advantage and then decided to become a political activist and war against the government of a state should, in any way, be allowed to retain an advantage because of it.
As you mentioned, these entities have become political actors.
So it's perfectly reasonable to say, you know, we would like to have a public square where large entertainment corporations and so on did not become political actors.
But if you do, there's a price to pay for it.
Now, I would prefer it if that was a reputational price that was basically ground up.
But, you know, as I have done, you know, if I see a, and it happened to me the other day with a streaming service, they said, if you want to upgrade to Disney, it's only five bucks a month, click here.
I said, it's the easiest damn decision of the year for me.
I do not want Disney's content.
I didn't really want it very much.
Anyway, I really don't want it now.
I think the same thing, as we know, is happening with Netflix.
It's gone intolerably awoke in one direction.
And I'm just not interested in it anymore.
The subscription cancellation beckons.
But that's where I'd prefer it to come.
I prefer it to be a bottom-up approach and just the market expresses itself.
But where there are, as I say with Disney, unfair market advantages already, I see no reason why government shouldn't take advantage of them.
It goes back to where we started from in a way, this thing of private individuals who get wafted up.
I don't know why the New York Times thinks it has the right to rewrite the date of America's founding, but it thinks it does.
I'm very happy to have that debate out in the public square.
As I say, the authors of that are not.
It's the New York Times' position.
They should be able to argue that position.
They have the right to argue that position.
I also think the American people have the right to ignore them as a result.
That's where I'd like it to happen.
But as I say, there are cases like Disney where there's a clear advantage already.
They've become political actors, and politicians shouldn't be shy about responding in kind.
What we do with the legacy media in relation to that, I think, is another question.
Because, effectively, legacy media and platforms like Twitter are now in a sort of death match.
And, again, the problem is we have institutions that are not what they say they are.
Twitter pretends to be the public square, except that it isn't.
Instagram pretends to be the public square, it isn't.
I do think there's a backlash.
I would like to see it reasonable.
And most of all, I would like to see it as a backlash not of one side trying to kill and hurt the other, but a recognition that we all have to live in the same country.
We all have to be able to get along at some level.
And the best level to get along at is to have some common understanding about our past.
And in the case of America, it is, you know, if you decide to fundamentally rewrite our past, we will not go along with that.
And I think there are plenty of moderate Democrats who would agree with that position.
We can agree to litigate, re-litigate slavery as if the United States has never done this before.
We can agree to that and have a reasonable discussion about what was known and what wasn't.
What is not tolerable is to lie about the country.
Lie about the founding figures of the country.
In the war in the West, I keep catching out these figures doing this.
Nicole Hannah-Jones and her colleagues lie about the founders of this country.
Ibraham X. Kendi, as he calls himself, I catch him out in his book.
He lies about Thomas Jefferson.
He doesn't know this because he hasn't even read the letter that he refers to, clearly, as he shows from his sourcing.
But I don't think these people should be allowed to get away with lying about this country, because that's what causes the division.
As surely as it would if the right invented a new form of history about America, or pretended that slavery had never existed, or something like that.
You know, the reasonable position of a country is to be able to look at itself in the round.
The radical left wants to push a view on America, of America, that is not a view of American history in the round.
It says only America did slavery, flat out false.
Everybody in the world was doing slavery.
You know, the biggest slave trade, as I say in the book, the biggest slave trade was not the transatlantic slave trade.
It was a slave trade of people being taken east from Africa, the Arab slave trade.
You know why nobody knows about the Arab slaves, among other things?
Because the 18 million people taken to the Arab countries, the males were all castrated.
That was actually a genocide.
That was going on whilst America and European countries were involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
So these people who try to force a false narrative on America of America's own alleged sins are pushing a story that is unfair, uneven, unequal, totally unrepresentative, totally lacking in context.
And they are telling the American people that America is not uniquely good, but uniquely evil.
That is flat out false, and it's high time these people were pushed back against.
the book again is in the war on the west Douglas Murray is the author.
Douglas, final question for you.
You know, you look at the way that the left has been reacting to the backlash against it, and they seem like they are just really walled off in their echo chamber.
They seem completely unable to grasp the fact that a lot of Americans just are not into this.
I mean, Joe Biden entered office with a 60-some percent approval rating.
He's down to the low 30s now, and yet he can't seem to shift course.
And it seems like the left—this is true nearly across the board—the left seems unable, I think they hoped that they wouldn't have to go to the public with their ideas.
I actually think this was the crucial flaw in their plan.
I say this about the critical race theory, Hucksters.
They generated this idea, as you well know, Ben.
They generated this idea in universities.
They came up with these ludicrous, unworkable claims.
They're not theories, they're just claims.
And the fantastic thing about it is it didn't outlive its first meeting with the public.
American parents found out that their children were being told that if you're white, you're evil.
Well, that theory may have worked when Kimberley Crenshaw and co.
were working it out on American campuses.
Didn't work when you tried to shove it onto school children and kindergartners.
Didn't work on its first meeting with the American public.
So this is a very useful thing.
The radical left works on all of these theories, including the equity stuff.
It doesn't work whenever it actually meets the general public.
That is a fantastic sign for optimism.
They are going to continue to try to maintain this cathedral of holy ideas that they have erected and they're going to try to keep pushing it and they will try to find ways that circumvent the public so that they will have commissions on equity.
They will try to, as the Biden administration has, look at things like reparations without having to go to the public with the actual horrible monstrous idea they're trying to trying to impose on us.
So I think their hope is they don't have to confront the public.
My great hope and I think our great hope is that the public does feel confronted and that the public has a much bigger voice than this minority of radical activists.
The crucial thing is that the majority, that the public need to be armed with the facts when they meet these hucksters and these extremists and that's one of the things I try to do in my book.
Got to arm the public with the facts That's Douglas Murray.
His book is The War on the West Douglas.
Congratulations on the book again.
Thanks so much for joining the show.
Such a pleasure.
Thank you.
Obviously we're not live right now, but here's the thing.
There's all sorts of content you haven't heard on The Ben Shapiro Show because you're not a subscriber.
If you were, you would have heard this segment of the mailbag.
Ari writes, Yeah, that's right.
But the whole abortion debate raging across the country, I was wondering what your position is on IVF, in vitro fertilization on a strictly secular pro-life position.
I know some sects of Orthodox Judaism allow for the procedure.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, so in vitro fertilization is pretty controversial in the pro-life community, because of course, if you're creating embryos only to discard the embryos, then that is a serious pro-life breach.
I mean, you're creating an independent human life with potential, and then you're just discarding it.
That looks a lot like an abortion.
So my position on in vitro fertilization has always been that you should, that if you're going to use IVF.
You should only fertilize the number of embryos that you are willing to carry to term.
So you shouldn't fertilize 20 embryos, pick the two that are best genetically, and then implant those, and then discard the rest.
If you are willing to carry three to term, then implant three and fertilize three.
It's a much more expensive procedure, but it's also the most protective of human life.
And that's my own perspective on IVF.
I think that's generally a fair pro-life perspective as well.
As long as you aren't creating embryos, Knowing you're going to destroy them, or destroying embryos that have been created for no purpose other than you don't have anything to do with them, then you haven't violated pro-life precepts.
Evan says, In light of the leaked Supreme Court decision, I've been trying to wrestle with the often-used exceptions to abortion, like rape, incest, and health of the mother.
I'm a cradle Catholic and a firm pro-life believer.
However, the exception people cite of the health of the mother has me struggling with this idea.
To be clear, I'm not struggling with the idea of being pro-life, but if there should be any exceptions to the pro-life stance at all, I think I've worked my way through why rape and incest should not matter and abortion should still be prohibited in those circumstances no matter how terrible the underlying facts may be.
However, if the choice is between the mother not having a high chance of survival or carrying the baby to term, I feel like that is a valid exception to the rule.
I wanted to know your thoughts about if there should be any exceptions to the pro-life stance.
So pretty much all pro-lifers believe that if the mother's life is in danger, not health, life is endangered, then you should be able to, you should be able to abort.
If you have a case, and this is a vanishingly small number of cases that happen worldwide where this is the case.
I've talked to many OBs at this point about this particular topic.
They say this is almost never the case.
Basically, there's no reason why you'd have to abort in order to preserve the life of the mother.
Barring some sort of extraordinarily rare circumstance.
But, assuming that that were the case, assuming that, for example, you know, you're living in the olden days, and a baby gets stuck on the way out.
And so, either mom is going to die, or baby is going to die, or mom and baby are going to die.
The general pro-life position has always been that you preserve the life of the mother.
If you have to preserve the life of the mother by killing the baby, right?
That has been the position of, I would say, most major religions as well.
So that's not really a pro-life exception.
That's an understanding that if only one person is going to emerge from this, and one is the baby and one is the mom, then typically under pro-life circumstances, the idea is that you can perform an abortion there.
But that's widely accepted in pro-life circles.
That's not controversial in any real way.
Isabel says, hey, Mr. Shapiro, my name is Isabel.
I live in Florida.
I heard you recently moved.
Welcome to the sunshine state where I was born and raised.
I'm autistic, though very mildly.
So I'm also deeply religious.
I was wondering what would you like those with a disability or with a neurological disorder to know?
Personally, thanks to my Christian faith, I don't allow my disability to stop me from getting an education, from getting a job and from living a full and happy life.
Thank you, Mr. Shapiro, for teaching me not to be defined by my circumstances and to rise above adversity.
You know, honestly, that's heroic stuff right there.
I mean, listen, I think everybody has challenges.
A lot of those challenges are biological or genetic in origin.
And understanding that the challenge exists does not relieve you of the burden of having to face down the challenge.
But life is filled with those sorts of challenges.
Some people have physical challenges.
Physical disabilities, some people have mental challenges, some people have emotional challenges.
And all of those challenges and how you face those down, that defines you as a human being.
This is something Viktor Frankl wrote about in Man's Search for Meaning.
He said, you know, in the Holocaust, you still had the choice of how to react to the circumstances that surrounded you.
And here you're talking about people literally locked into concentration camps and then occasionally shot or gassed.
Or more than occasionally.
And how you reacted to that still provided a measure of freedom, according to Viktor Frankl.
That is true even if the limitation on your freedom is coming from inside the house and coming from your own biology, rather than coming from some sort of external force.
Jonathan says, I have a constitutional law question for you and a related opinion question.
First, is our current fiat money system unconstitutional based on Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1 of the Constitution?
No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation, grant letters of marque and reprisal, coin money, emit bills of credit, make anything but gold and silver, coin a tender in payment of debts, pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
No, because it says no state shall do it.
So the idea here is that you wouldn't have a separate California currency.
But that doesn't mean that the federal government can't issue currency.
Again, that sort of restriction is placed on the states.
It is not placed on the federal government.
The goal there was to prevent states from coining their own currency and undercutting the U.S.
dollar, for example.
Second question, do you think it would be a good thing if we got back to a gold standard and how as a country could we do this?
So the idea of sort of a soft gold standard where the dollar is actually tied to the value of gold, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Going back to something like Bretton Woods, makes some sense to me.
The hard gold standard is a little bit different.
The hard gold standard was the idea that you could literally take your money and go up to the counter and trade in your dollar for an ounce of gold or whatever.
That's been basically outlawed in the United States since FDR.
It seems to me that we don't have enough gold on hand to actually make that happen anymore, but pegging the value of the dollar to some sort of hard asset as opposed to the fiat currency where we gradually inflate the dollar to the point where over the course of 50 years you've lost nearly all of the value of the dollar you put in the bank, that seems More solid to me.
It seems more predictable to me.
It's less flexible.
If there's an economic shock, it means that the government can't inflate its way out of the problem, or it can't manipulate interest rates so as to cool down or heat up the economy.
But it also means that if you're a business person, you have a lot of predictability in the markets, which was the case in favor of the gold standard.
William says, With Roe presumably being overturned soon, what is the next battleground in the fight for life?
Do we have to mobilize movements in each state, or is there still a federal argument to be had?
For example, the 14th Amendment and equal protection.
Roe v. Casey being overturned is a great victory.
I know the war isn't over.
So, on a judicial level, you could theoretically move toward a reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, the Equal Protection Clause, saying unborn people are protected under the Equal Protection Clause.
That's the judicial movement that would have to take place?
That's the move that you'd like to see from Robert George from Princeton, for example, is a big advocate of this sort of thinking.
The extension of the 14th Amendment to cover the unborn.
As far as, you know, the most immediate possible action, that's all going to happen at the state level.
So you're going to see movements inside states to push for more restrictive abortion laws.
That's largely going to have to take place in purple states.
So states that are more evenly divided, states like Florida, it's unlikely you're going to get a full-scale abortion ban in the state of Florida.
Instead, you're going to see a gradual paring back of abortion in the state of Florida, and that's where pro-lifers are going to have to put most of their effort.
In states like Mississippi, it's a foregone conclusion that they're just going to go pro-life.
In Illinois, it's a foregone conclusion they're just going to go completely pro-abortion.
But a lot of the purple states, it's very unclear which direction they are going to go.