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July 5, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:03:27
Are You Proud To Be An American? | Ep. 1527
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A new Gallup poll shows fewer Americans than ever are proud to be American, the celebrity world shows its ugliest side while pushing abortion, and a mass shooting rocks Highland Park in Chicago.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Slash Ben, I hope you had a wonderful Independence Day weekend.
We'll get to all the news in just one second.
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Well, July 4th is normally a time when we come together as a country and we celebrate the things that we have in common.
Unfortunately, it seems like these days we have less and less in common.
And this raises the question in the United States of exactly what are we?
So if you go all the way back to the founding of the country, this was a serious question.
What exactly was the United States?
Inherent in the title United States is the idea that there are separate polities inside the United States with very different views about what happiness looks like and what life should look like and what Government should be constructed like we were the United States.
There were a bunch of states.
These preceded the federal government.
The federal government was an outgrowth of those states.
And this has always been a struggle in American life because literally at the time that the Declaration of Independence was being created, the Articles of Confederacy, the original Articles of Confederacy was also being discussed.
What exactly would that look like?
How exactly were Americans supposed to come together?
If you had said in, say, 1777, what is the most important document that's happening right now?
Presumably it would be all of the legislation coming out from the Second Continental Congress.
It would be things like, how do we form up in a confederacy?
It would not have been the Declaration of Independence.
The reason we celebrate the Declaration of Independence is because it is supposed to Signal that these are the things that we all share.
California and Florida, New York and Texas.
These are the things that we all share.
And over time, as the United States' federal government has grown more and more powerful, and as the states have lost more and more power to the federal government, as that has happened, that should have required more unity at the national level.
Unfortunately, what has happened in the United States is that the states have retained their independent characters.
That is a good thing.
But the federal government has moved further and further away from the states.
It's moved further and further away from the citizens.
And so ironically, as the federal government has used more and more compulsion, as it's grown, as its tentacles have now entered every area of American life, Americans feel less secure.
They feel less unified by the federal government.
And it's very easy to celebrate together on July 4th when we agree to disagree on most things.
And there are a few core ideas that we come together.
Over when it comes to the national government.
Then you can celebrate July 4th when the thing that actually unifies us is the statements of the Declaration of Independence.
You can say these are the things that we all have in common at the very least.
But over time as the federal government gains more and more power and as it has less and less tolerance for people living different choices of life in places like Florida and California and New York and Texas.
As that happens, there's more and more disunity and we stop looking like an actual national government and we start looking again like the original United States, a sort of confederacy of states that have some common interests with regard to say tariff policy or foreign policy.
We start to look a lot more like the EU, Greece and the UK.
Why are they in the same body politic?
And the answer is they sort of are and they sort of aren't.
Why exactly are we supposed to believe that France has the same interests as Germany all across the line?
They don't.
So why are we supposed to believe that Florida and, say, Massachusetts have the same exact unity of vision?
Now again, the Declaration was supposed to spell out that unity of vision.
The United States was supposed to be a different place.
The idea was that to prevent conflict on the continent itself, you had to have some sort of federal government that was going to prevent that conflict and also to bring us together.
This is described fully in the Federalist Papers.
Alexander Hamilton talks about the idea that over time there'd be more and more allegiance that would be placed to the national government as opposed to, say, the state government.
And the very least, that our unity in the national body politic would trump whatever conflicts we had between the states.
But now it seems that that is all coming apart because the common vision for the United States has been actively attacked by one side of the political aisle over the course of the last 50 years.
And now the country seems to be coming apart at the seams.
And you can see it in nearly every issue.
You can see it in the way that issues themselves are described.
So, for example, there's a fascinating article today in the Associated Press talking about this horrific shooting in Highland Park.
It's a mass shooting in Highland Park at an Independence Day parade.
And we'll get to a lot more coverage of that a little bit later, because first of all, I think that it's rather suspicious.
The media only seem to care when a bunch of white people get shot in Highland Park, as opposed to when a bunch of black people get shot every single weekend in the south side of Chicago.
If you want to talk about endemic racism in the media, that would be it.
The fact that there are 30 people get shot every weekend in Chicago and the media do not give one good damn about that.
But then there's a mass shooting, a bunch of white people in Highland Park.
That suggests that there's a bit of a double standard as to just how much the media care about the deaths of people of minority status in the United States.
That is worth noting here.
That is not to downplay what happened in Highland Park.
It's to say we should be using the same kind of coverage when it comes to mass shootings that happen literally every weekend in the rest of the city of Chicago.
But put that aside for just a second.
This article in the Associated Press, I think, spells out the conflicts that have now broken out across the country.
And the reason that I'm mentioning this is because really the events of the weekend, in a wide variety of ways, should theoretically unify the country.
When there is an evil person, a person who appears to have serious mental issues.
I mean, there's just no way to describe the shooter in this Highland Park scenario without saying that.
This person looks like a crazy person.
When you see that, instead of the country coming together to mourn and to try to find solutions and to try and talk with one another, instead we immediately revert to who do we blame?
Who on the other side is to blame for all of this?
There's no way to have unity over issues like that when you can't even identify common threat without seeing your neighbor in it.
That's a real problem in the United States because the common principles that held together the polity have been completely fraying.
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So here's what the Associated Press says, and it really is telling.
Quote, a shooting that left at least six people dead at an Independence Day parade in a Chicago suburb rattled Monday celebrations across the United States and further rocked a country.
Already a wash in turmoil over high court rulings on abortion and guns, as well as hearings on the January 6th insurrection.
So you're saying to yourself, wait a second, what does a mass shooting have to do with the rest of these things?
And the answer is that every single thing in American life has now broken down along political lines.
All of it.
Where you shop.
How you view movies.
Whether you live in a blue state or a red state, mass shootings, everything now breaks down along these political lines because all common interest seems to be gone.
It seems like the things that unified us at the federal level, again, those principles laid down by the founders that were supposed to be the chief areas of unity for all of us nationally, those seem to be completely exploding.
And the reason they're completely exploding is because, frankly, they've been under assault for five decades in the United States.
We've now reached the apex of that moment when every single issue that we discuss is supposed to be a guise for power relationships.
It's a serious problem.
The latest mass shooting, says the AP, came as the nation tried to find cause to celebrate its founding and the bonds that still hold us together.
Well, I mean, honestly, this should be an easy one, right?
What exactly?
Fine cause?
How about the fact that the United States is the most powerful force in world history?
How about the fact the United States is still the most powerful country on planet Earth?
By a long shot, China does not compare.
How about the fact that the United States is still the world driver of the economy?
That the United States' values with regard to, say, free speech and freedom of religion are still the envy of the world?
How about the fact that the United States has historically freed more people than any other country in the history of the world?
How about the fact that the Declaration of Independence spells out timeless principles that virtually every other Western country has now imitated?
Aren't those reasons to celebrate?
And the answer, for the Associated Press, is apparently no.
Because we have domestic problems and those domestic problems can be laid at the feet of those principles.
That the conflicts that we're seeing are all up at the top of the iceberg.
Conflicts over gun control or abortion or even January 6th.
Those are all at the top of the iceberg.
What undergirds a lot of this is a feeling that you cannot trust your neighbor because they don't believe the same things that you believe and the things that you are supposed to believe together.
Say, for example, the values of equality before law.
The value of virtue via Judeo-Christian tradition.
These values have gone away.
And so you cannot trust your neighbor.
Because your neighbor is not trustworthy.
From the right, because your neighbor doesn't actually believe any of those things anymore.
And from the left, because your neighbor does believe those things and those things are actively bad.
And so no wonder it feels like things are coming apart and why every flashpoint looks like a symptom of a graver disease.
You know, I have three kids.
When they have a boo-boo, the first thing that you try to figure out is whether this is a symptom of a deeper malady or whether the boo-boo is just a pinprick.
When you have kids, when a kid scrapes and they fall and they scrape their knee, you grab a band-aid, you slap it on, you put some antiseptic on there, you put some neosporin, you put a band-aid, you're done.
But, sometimes your kid has a malady that runs a little deeper.
And right now it feels like every wound in the body politic in the United States runs a little deeper.
Because maybe instead, we're not treating these things as scratches and cuts and bruises that are endemic to living in a very chaotic democracy.
And I'm not talking about acts of evil, right?
But even acts of evil didn't go to the heart of the United States in our national character.
But now it seems like every single thing that happens goes to the heart of the United States and its national character, which is to say how you view your neighbors.
So, this is all reflected in the polling data.
And the Associated Press is not wrong when they say that it feels like things are coming apart.
But the whole point is, it shouldn't feel like that.
It should feel like we still have some unifying principles.
The declaration was supposed to be about that.
The polling data shows that fewer Americans than ever are extremely proud to be American.
This is according to Gallup.
38% of U.S.
adults say they are extremely proud to be American.
That is the lowest in Gallup's trend that began in 2001.
65% of U.S.
adults express pride in the nation overall.
I don't know how you can't be proud to be American.
This country is unbelievable.
This country is God's gift to planet Earth, this country.
Anybody who pretends otherwise, frankly, should leave.
I mean, there's a reason that people are clamoring to get in and have spent centuries clamoring to get in.
There's a reason why the United States is still the world leader.
It's still the moral beacon for the planet Earth.
I'm proud to be American.
I think the president stinks.
I think the Congress stinks.
Until five seconds ago, I thought the Supreme Court stink.
None of that has to do with the fundamental principles of the United States, which are inherently good.
So here's what it shows.
It shows only 38% of Americans say they're extremely proud to be American.
And then there's another few percentage, up to 65, who believe they are extremely or very proud to be American.
Then there's some who are like moderately proud to be American or whatever.
Now what you see is that the numbers have declined.
And this is really astonishing.
The partisan split here.
So here's the partisan split.
26% of Democrats say that they are proud to be American.
26.
It was at its low ebb, by the way, in 2019, when only 22% of Democrats said they were extremely proud to be American.
Among Republicans, 58% say that they are extremely proud to be American.
Now, overall, this is the lowest point for Republicans in the history of the poll.
Not a great shock, because Democrats control all of the branches of government at this point.
But, even when Democrats control the government, Republicans are still more than twice as proud, twice as extremely proud of the country as Democrats.
Independents, only 34% say they're extremely proud of the country, right now.
So, Republicans, again, by and large, what Republicans believe, what conservatives believe, is that the country is worth being proud about.
Democrats historically actually have not believed by a majority that the country is worth being extremely proud of since like 2015.
That partisan split is very telling because what that says is that conservatives and Republicans inherently what they believe is that the Declaration of Independence is good.
The founding principles are good.
American history is overall good.
Yes, it has blemishes.
Yes, it has dark points.
But it is the story of America attempting to fulfill her founding principles.
All of that is good and worth being extremely proud of.
And what Democrats believe is that America is only worth being proud of when it is undergoing fundamental change.
And that is a serious split that goes to deeper values.
One of the things that's kind of fascinating here is the split between people who are college graduates and not college graduates.
41% of not college graduates in the United States say they're extremely proud.
Another 28% say they are very proud.
So that means overall, some 69% of not college graduated Americans say they are extremely or very proud to be American.
Of the college graduates, Only about 33% say they're extremely proud.
Another 26% say they are very proud to be American.
So these partisan splits are, again, reflective of deeper ideological rifts.
So Americans feel we have less and less in common at the top level.
Maybe the only thing that we have in common at this point is that nobody thinks that the Fed has anything under control because these experts, you know, real experts out there, these are the ones who said that everything would be fine.
There'd be no long-lasting inflation.
They weren't blowing out the dollar or anything like that.
Well, as it turns out, not so much.
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So when Joe Biden says, on July 4th, he's never more optimistic about America than he is today, the question is, based on what?
Based on what are the unifying principles?
See, this is the thing.
Let's say that you have one group of Americans who are generally not as proud to be American.
We will call them Democrats because that is what they are under the polling data.
Wouldn't you have to speak to those people about why it's important to be proud of America?
I mean, you're a Democratic president.
Shouldn't you talk to your own party about why they should be proud of America?
If you're a Republican, conversely, shouldn't you talk to your own party about the flaws in America?
But we don't do that.
That doesn't happen too often.
There's never any sort of fulsome explanation that should be bipartisan as to what is good about America and what America needs to change.
And that's because, again, the consensus is broken down.
There used to be a consensus about what made America great.
This is true in the 80s.
It's true in the 90s.
It's true in the early 2000s.
It's not been true, really, since about 2010, 2011.
There is no consensus as to America being a good country with flaws.
And so why should we be surprised that an emissary from the past like Joe Biden is still speaking this language, but it's falling upon deaf ears?
Here's President Biden talking about unity.
All of you are reminders that we're a great nation because we're a good people.
It's because of you I've never been more optimistic about America than I am today.
An optimism that digs deep, never gives up.
That's America.
That's America.
Okay, but what does he mean by any of that?
What are the founding principles of America that are worth standing for?
So, Joe Biden gives this speech and he says the United States should choose unity.
Here he is trying to explain why we should choose unity.
I know many Americans look around today and see a divided country and are deeply worried about that fact.
I understand, but I believe we're more united than we are divided.
Even more, I believe it's a choice we make And I believe it's within our power to choose unity and unity of purpose.
But here's the problem.
That sounds great, except it can't be platitudinous.
You have to explain what exactly we hold in common.
What exactly do we hold in common?
Well, fortunately, we have a document that says exactly what we are supposed to hold in common.
We had a whole celebration of it over the weekend.
That Declaration of Independence says specifically what exactly we are supposed to hold in common.
They say that the causes that impel them to the separation, these are truths to be held self-evident, that all men are created equal by rights, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government
Laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them, shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
Right?
Those would be the common principles, would they not?
Those would be the things that we hold in common.
And that would have to be backed by a polity that lives in virtue, as John Adams suggested.
The Constitution, the Declaration, written for a people of morality and virtue, by which he meant Judeo-Christian tradition.
It does not mean you have to be a Jew or a Christian in order to live in this country.
It does not mean that you have to be a believing Jew or a Christian in order to live out those principles.
But the principles of virtue that have been handed down over the course of millennia culminating in the creation of the United States and then further moving on to the abolition of slavery and equal treatment according to race, etc.
All of that is the outgrowth of a several thousand year tradition in which we are just links in a chain.
These are the things that we held in common.
These are the things that matter.
But as I say, one of the reasons the country is coming apart is because we can't even celebrate that.
What exactly are we supposed to celebrate on July 4th?
That's the question.
And the reason we have to ask the question is because there's a whole group of people who believe that we shouldn't celebrate July 4th based on any of that.
So for example, Paul Waldman has a piece of the Washington Post.
This came out on July 4th, quote, this July 4th, let's declare our independence from the founding fathers.
246 years ago, Americans did something extraordinary.
Declaring their independence from a colonial rule enforced from a great distance with the cruel and arbitrary hand of oppression, now it's time for us to declare our own independence from founding father fetishism.
We need to liberate ourselves from the toxic belief that those men were perfect in all things, vessels of sacred wisdom that must bind our society today, no matter how much damage it might cause.
As we've seen recently, the American right has found in the framers an extraordinarily effective tool with which they can roll back social progress and undermine our democracy.
It may have found its most ridiculous manifestation in the Tea Party movement that emerged when Barack Obama was president, when people started prancing around in tricorn hats, and every Republican was supposed to have a favorite founding father.
But today, it has gone from an affectation to a weapon, and a brutally effective one.
See, it's the founding principles that are tearing apart the country, says Paul Waldman.
We saw it in the recent Supreme Court decision that supercharged the legal philosophy of originalism on abortion and guns.
At the Supreme Court.
The Constitution of the United States.
These are things that tear apart the country.
The founding principles of the United States.
You know, that we should make laws about guns in the states.
You know, things like abortion law was not regulated by the federal government in 1789 or thereafter, and was left to the states all the way up until Roe vs. Wade.
The America of 1789 becomes a prison that conservative justices can lock us all in whenever it suits them, says Paul Waldman of the Washington Post.
The outcome is always the ones Republicans seek.
Anyone who disagrees, who shows how absurd the right's historical analysis is, even on its own terms, simply isn't respecting the divine will of the framers.
So, throw out the Constitution.
Throw out the Declaration of Independence.
None of these things are worthy of emulation.
None of them can bind us.
Over at ESPN, similar thing.
There's a piece on the front page of ESPN on July 4th by Howard Bryant, an ESPN senior writer, titled, Baseball, Barbecue, and Losing Freedom this Fourth of July.
And by freedom, they don't mean the things guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence.
They don't mean the very complex worldview espoused by Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, who were in conflict with one another fairly often, and they literally ran for president against one another.
They don't mean any of that.
What they mean by freedom is my freedom to do whatever I want and your freedom not to do whatever you want.
The left has decided fundamental principles that were supposed to unify us actually divide us.
They're actually bad.
They need to be undermined.
And then you wonder why the country feels like it's falling apart on July 4th?
Our fundamental principles are no longer held in common.
It's just a question of whether I get to control you or whether you get to control me, at least according to the left.
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So, to take that ESPN columnist, for example, again, Howard Bryant writing for ESPN.
He says, He says, last month, Major League Baseball and its partners again released Independence Day-themed baseball hats that each of the 30 teams will wear.
This year's version features a flush of stars across the front, against a blue and white backdrop offset with a shaggy shock of red.
The Toronto Blue Jays, located in a country that doesn't celebrate American independence, were also issued the caps.
Next is USA-themed socks, the marketing, the freedom-inspired spikes, gloves, wristbands, the inevitable pains to the armed forces.
By now, we're all numb to the spectacle.
At least publicly, the emphasis on the 4th of July shifted from family to symbols years ago.
September 11th did that.
Two decades of paid patriotism has made it ever harder to censor the 4th on reconnecting with their favorite aunts and uncles.
Grilling, baseball, fireworks, first replaced by symbols and now by a country tearing itself completely apart.
July 4th, 2022 falls in the midst of devastation.
Devastation, folks.
It is Independence Day in America with independence under recurrent and relentless assault.
From Miranda rights to the environment to the separation of church and state to guns.
So many guns.
People are reeling.
The U.S.
Supreme Court has run a chainsaw through what two generations of Americans had known to be the legal baselines of their lives.
Notice that.
Two generations of Americans.
Because it was in the 1960s and 70s that the American left completely rewrote the American bargain, utterly and completely, from the Supreme Court through the legislature to LBJ.
They completely rewrote the bargain of the Declaration of Independence.
And now they're angry that people actually are reading the Declaration of Independence.
Because all the things that were supposed to unify us actually divide us.
This is a columnist for ESPN, right?
You talk about why all the unity in American life is gone.
This sport is now a front and center issue.
You can't watch a sporting event with an American flag flying without hearing a lecture from ESPN about how American principles are bad.
You cannot go to a movie made by mainstream Hollywood with the one exception of Top Gun, which is why it's doing unbelievable business, without hearing Hollywood lecture you on why America is bad and why progressive politics are good.
You cannot go to the store without seeing the American flag replaced by other flags.
We had an entire month of this last month.
You'll get one day of the American flag up for Independence Day.
We'll get an entire month of the gay pride, pride, progress flag over a Target.
And it's very important that Judeo-Christian traditionalism be thrown out completely.
And if you oppose that, if you think Judeo-Christian traditionalism is a good thing and that it provides the virtuous basis for a free government, this means that you are the divisive one in the United States of America.
It is an amazing thing.
And again, this is the pattern in American life.
Joe Biden laments America coming apart because he's part of a movement that has torn America apart.
That would be why, guys.
Because all of the things that we used to... Freedom of speech is now seen by the hardcore left as a guise for power, which is why they're in favor of things like hate speech laws.
It's why they suggest there has to be heavy regulation on what you can say and do via big tech.
It is the left that believes that freedom of religion should be ground under the, you should not, as a coach of a football team and a high school, you should not be allowed to say an independent prayer on the 50-yard line that is according to three justices on the United States Supreme Court.
15 years ago, I probably would have been a majority of the Supreme Court.
It's, it's, there's a reason why NPR, National Public Radio, funded by you, On July 4th, they announced they were breaking with tradition.
Instead of a reading of the Declaration of Independence, NPR examines what equality means and has meant in the document.
Important segment about our past and future, according to Leila Fadel, the host of Morning Edition and Up First.
You can't even read the Declaration of Independence on NPR, national public radio.
You can't even do it anymore.
And these conflicts of vision become front and center when you have the conflict that you see, for example, between California and Florida.
Now, as I say, When the country was founded, there were pretty significant disagreements on massive issues, like the biggest being slavery.
Massive, massive disagreement, which actually culminated in a huge debate at the Declaration of Independence Convention.
There was a portion of the original Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Jefferson wrote this in.
He was a slaveholder at the time and remained so until the end of his life.
Thomas Jefferson is one of the most shaded and difficult figures in American history.
Thomas Jefferson had a line in the Declaration of Independence.
It's titled, The He Has Waged Cruel War Line, and it was about how George and the British government had effectuated slavery in the American colonies.
He has waged cruel war on a people from a faraway land, right?
It was in the Declaration, and the Southern states insisted it be struck in order for there to actually be a full-scale alliance between the states for purposes of resisting the British government.
So that was present at the founding.
But there were other principles that were at least held in common, and then would be increasingly expanded to more and more human beings over time, which was the vision of people like John Adams, who was from the North, where slavery was not, in fact, a thing.
But now, when you have the states ripping on one another, they are ripping on one another about fundamental basic principles.
I mean, you have California saying to Florida that boys are girls and girls are boys.
It's hard to get much more fundamental than that.
So now Gavin Newsom, who desperately wants to replace Joe Biden atop the 2024 Democratic ticket should Joe Biden keel over and actually not be alive anymore.
I mean, that is clearly his plan.
That's the only reason why Gavin Newsom is running ads in Florida.
So I thought I had escaped this when I came from California to Florida.
I thought I'd escaped this guy.
I literally took my company and we moved it to Tennessee.
And I and my family moved to Florida to escape the rule of morons like this.
The androgynous Ken doll that is Gavin Newsom.
So he started running July 4th ads in Florida, urging people to come back to California, which is hilarious because we all ran away from you.
But his vision of freedom.
We are now on a fundamentally different level in the United States about what freedom constitutes.
Here is Gavin Newsom.
It's Independence Day, so let's talk about what's going on in America.
Freedom?
It's under attack in your state.
Republican leaders?
They're banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors.
I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom.
Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate, and the freedom to love.
Don't let them take your freedom.
Okay.
I just came from that state.
Let me just say that Freedom in California, the ones that he's talking about, he shows a giant picture of the beach.
They shut down the beaches during all of COVID.
I was there.
I remember.
You couldn't take your kids to the beach.
Meanwhile, it was Rhonda Sands who was getting ripped up and down for keeping the beaches in Jacksonville open during COVID in June of 2020.
Gavin Newsom says that they're banning books.
You know how many books are banned in California?
They ban tons of books.
Except the books they ban in California are things like To Kill a Mockingbird.
And in Florida, they just say that we don't want syllabi that include trans theory to small children.
His vision of liberty is, is what?
Abortion on demand and marry whomever you please?
That is his vision of liberty over there.
And in Florida, by the way, it turns out same-sex marriage is legal because it has been legal across the country, thanks to the Supreme Court in Obergefell.
All we're saying is, in Florida, don't cram that down on kids until the age of 8 in public schools.
And Gavin Newsom's like, that's a violation of freedom?
I promise you, people are living free in Florida, much freer than in Gavin Newsom's world.
And by the way, generally more in line with virtuous values of raising children than in places like California.
The freedom to trans your kids is what Gavin Newsom is talking about in California.
And these are fundamental conflicts.
How do you celebrate a country that has... What are we supposed to believe Gavin Newsom and Rhonda Sanchez have in common?
And if the answer is nothing, then there's only one solution to that, which is that the original vision of the country, the United States, is going to come apart.
You'll end up with this sort of Articles of Confederation.
Again, we will be an agglomeration of states with a wide variety of policies, and we share very few things, fewer even than we did at the beginning of the republic.
Very, very, very few things.
And those things will be like foreign policy and tariffs, just so we don't go to war with one another.
That seems like the direction the country is going, and so the transition Over time that Alexander Hamilton foretold in the Federalist Papers from a group of people who believed in allegiance to their states foremost to a group of people who over time would feel serious allegiance to both their states and the federal government now it's beginning to recede again and people are beginning to believe in themselves as states as opposed to members of the body politic that is the United States because you just don't have enough in common with people who live in the country at large.
Again, exacerbated by the vision of freedom that so many people on the left seem to have, which runs directly counter.
That Paul Waldman column is really telling that.
That Washington Post column cited earlier.
Because in that one, he basically says, you know, it turns out that the right wing, they keep mirroring these principles from 1789 and 1776.
And those are really old.
Yes, those were the ones.
Those were the ones that used to unify us, gang.
Those were the ones that we all, you know, actually had a declaration about and celebrated every year.
Those were the ones that we actually became part of a constitutional body politic over.
And you don't like those.
We get it.
And this is why there's so many people on the left who feel the necessity, at least they're honest.
I'll give them this.
At least they're honest.
At least they recognize that in order for their left-wing agenda to prevail, the founding era notions of both virtue and liberty have to die or change radically.
Which is presumably why you have Jessica Chastain, who I believe lives in New York and is 45 years old, flipping off America on July 4th.
Right, this very attractive and extraordinarily wealthy actress.
She is flipping off America on July 4th.
Quote, happy Independence Day from me and my reproductive rights.
Oh, you mean abortion?
So you live in a state where abortion is available on demand forever.
And you are flipping off America because people in Florida want a 15-week ban on abortion and people in Texas do not want abortion at all?
This is why you're flipping off America?
Maybe you don't understand how any of this works.
Maybe we don't have anything in common because you believe that what you want ought to rule over the entire country on every single issue.
And you don't even want to use constitutional auspices to do it.
You just want a bunch of judges to do it for you.
You have Samantha Bee doing the same thing.
The celebrity left's attachment to abortion is so extraordinary.
I don't know what I have in common with people like Samantha Bee anymore.
I don't know what I have in common with people like Mark Hamill.
What are we supposed to have in common as Americans?
It's a serious question because if we have very little in common as Americans, even an allegiance to the system by which we govern differently, then how does the country survive?
Here is Samantha- Remember that time Samantha Bee was supposed to be funny?
I don't- I don't know who thought that was a thing.
Samantha Bee, the least funny human being on planet Earth, less funny than colon cancer, Samantha Bee.
Here she is, trying to explain that she is going to raise hell by which she is going to make- She means she will make a show that has a viewership that amounts to her immediate family and three hangers-on who get drunk with her at cocktail parties afterward.
I can't describe how painful it is to be here now in a place where the Supreme Court has the power to erase 50 years of constitutional law.
Make no mistake, this is not where it ends.
Conservatives will not rest until they have come for all of our rights.
Everything we have fought for could be lost unless we take it back.
It's not just about voting in November.
It's about doing everything in our power to protect and help vulnerable people access abortion across state lines.
And we have to raise hell in our cities, in Washington, in every restaurant Justice Alito eats at for the rest of his life.
Because if Republicans have made our lives hell, it's time to return the favor.
Okay, so her life is hell because she lives in New York City and is extremely wealthy for being the least funny human being on planet Earth.
It's like running gun battle between bubonic plague and Samantha Bee for least funny thing on planet Earth.
Like Ebola is more funny than Samantha Bee by a long shot.
Put aside her lack of humor, the fact that she is whining about living in the United States where she is unbelievably free.
And where even the freedoms, which by the way, are not anywhere written into the constitution of the United States or into the moral code of the West, by the way.
It's hysterical that the things that they consider the most core freedoms, the core freedoms for the left are things like contraceptive availability for people who are not married, abortion on demand, and same sex marriage.
You know, things that have not historically been written into the virtue code of the West.
You can make the case for any of them or all of them, but to pretend that they have any sort of history or tradition in the West, Older than about five minutes ago, historically speaking, is ridiculous.
But these are the core freedoms, not freedom of speech, not freedom of religion, not freedom to bear arms.
All of those things are bad.
If the Supreme Court says that you get those things, then that's terrible.
So this is a conflict of visions, a deep conflict of visions.
Again, it takes the ugliest form because when it comes to abortion, the left just loses its mind.
So you had Mark Hamill over the weekend.
Tweeting out, so there are a bunch of people who have been tweeting out that they'll adopt other people's kids.
Like if you decide to bring your child to term rather than killing it in the womb, we'll adopt your kid.
That seems like a pretty nice thing, isn't it?
We'll adopt your baby.
Isn't that a nice thing?
If somebody says, you know what, instead of you killing that baby in the womb, you'd prefer that that baby have a wonderful life.
We will adopt your children.
Isn't that like a beautiful thing?
Mark Hamill thinks it's a terrible thing.
Because according to the left, abortion is sacrosanct.
It is virtuous.
It is good.
Anything that undermines it, including the virtue of other people, is bad.
So Mark Hamill tweeted out a picture of himself.
He played the Joker in the animated series of Batman.
It's a picture of the Joker and Harley Quinn with the caption, We will adopt your baby.
He's a serious thinker, Mark Hamill.
By the way, he became famous playing Luke Skywalker.
Who was?
Wait for it.
Adopted.
So that's all good stuff there from Mark Hamill.
The celebrity class hates Judeo-Christian virtues so much that they're now attacking people who adopt babies.
That's how far they've gone.
So what do we have in common?
What exactly are the things we have in common?
And you can see how this breaks down, how everything breaks down when it comes to those blemishes and wounds on the body politic that crop up from time to time and are immediately politicized.
Well, it feels like the country is breaking down, but here's the thing.
You cannot allow your car to break down right now, because the truth is your used car is probably worth more than your house at this point in time, thanks to Joe Biden's supply chain crisis and his bad economy.
Well, with the ever-increasing numbers of car makes and models, it's now impossible to stock all the parts you need in a traditional chain storefront.
Why endure the often pointless or seemingly intimidating questions about the specifications of your vehicle, only to have the counterman order the parts on his computer anyway?
Well, you also have a computer and you also have access to the internet, which means you have rockauto.com at home and in your pocket.
Why would you choose to spend 30%, 50%, 100% more for the exact same auto parts at a chain store or new car dealership?
Rockauto.com is a family business serving auto parts customers online for 20 years.
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So, head on over to rockautor.com right now, see all the parts available for your car or truck, and preserve some of your most important property.
Write Shapiro in their how-did-you-hear-about-us box so they know that I sent you.
Alrighty folks, it has been an enormous few weeks for The Daily Wire and America.
Last Wednesday, we had our biggest live event of the year backstage live at the Ryman.
We celebrated the launch of our expanded streaming service Daily Wire Plus and the addition of Dr. Jordan Peterson, the preeminent intellectual philosopher of our time.
Jordan is fiercely independent.
He's come out of the gate fighting with the scathing criticism of the Twitter apparatchiks who just suspended his account for saying the true fact that Ellen Page is Elliot Page and they're the same person.
You're not allowed to mention that Elliot Page was super duper duper male, like absolutely just as male as I am.
Elliot Page used to be a woman named Ellen Page.
You're not allowed to mention that or they ban you from Twitter.
Jordan tweeted out the unsayable.
He got banned from Twitter, and now he's speaking out about it.
Then over the weekend, we celebrated the fierce independence of a country founded on principles we know are worth fighting for.
It feels like a watershed moment for The Daily Wire because it is.
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With DailyWirePlus, you're getting everything you love from all the content that I make, and we're talking everything from my show, to my book club, to Debunked, Matt Walsh's documentary, What Is A Woman, plus his show, you got Michael's show, you got Andrew's show, you've got Candace, plus the entirety of Jordan Peterson's existing archive podcast, new shows and bonus content, plus a new series from PragerU out in the fall, plus Again, What Is A Woman, Terror on the Prairie with Gina Carano, and we've got animated kids shows without the woke agenda coming very, very soon.
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So, the fact is that because we hold nothing in common, it now seems as though every blemish on the body politic, every wound is not just a scratch or a scrape on an underlying healthy body.
Instead, they're all symptomatic of something that can kill us, which is an underlying conflict.
So, for example, there shouldn't be anything in America more unifying than the grief we all feel and share when a crazy person, when a person who clearly is mentally ill, seriously mentally ill, murders innocent people.
Like, that is one where that should be pretty unifying, right?
We should be all on the same page about this.
Evil people are evil.
People doing evil things is bad.
We all agree on that.
Instead, now every time there's a mass shooting, we first determine the politics of the mass shooting, and then we determine how we feel about the mass shooting.
So, according to the media, if it's a mass shooting in downtown Chicago on the South Side like every single weekend, we don't even cover it because that's not news.
Because to cover it, especially if it includes black people, and really only if it includes black people, because this is how the media treat it, to cover it would sustain bad notions about race in the United States.
We won't even cover it.
We'll just pretend that it never happened.
It's not newsworthy.
If, however, white people get shot in Highland Park in Chicago, the news media will cover that because that's indicative, of course, of a graver American evil, which is, of course, the presence of guns.
You can't have that conversation about the South Side of Chicago, you can't have that conversation about Highland Park.
Because every single wound on the body politic has to immediately polarize, immediately.
So, this example from Chicago is just an amazing example.
So, here on this show, because we actually still believe in unity over things like evil people are evil and we shouldn't give them the time of day, we don't mention the names of mass shooters.
The entire media not only mentions the names of mass shooters, we show their faces.
Every other media outlet I know of, every other major media outlet I know of, reports the names, the agendas, the manifestos, everything they can about these mass shooters, which of course drives other mass shooters to want to get famous and then do it again.
And then the media, why is this happening?
Must be the guns.
Well, maybe you guys ought to take a look in the mirror sometime.
We are so meticulous about this that if I accidentally mention the name of a mass shooter from 10 years ago on this program, my editors will go back and cut it at my behest.
If we can, if it's not live, right?
This is a thing that we do here at the company because we are very careful about this stuff.
So I report to you only the things that I think are necessary for you to understand the story.
I don't think the name of these mass shooters is a thing that is necessary to understand the story.
I don't want them to be famous.
I want them to be obscure and rotten hell where they belong as a general rule.
So, in this particular case, the person who is responsible for this horrible mass shooting in Highland Park that killed six people and wounded 38 others, This person is obviously an insane person.
The reason I say obviously an insane person is because I know that we're not allowed to say this, but if you act like an insane person in society, we can generally assume you're an insane person.
Call it the insane person rule.
To pretend that this person is not a crazy person is to ignore the evidence of your own eyes.
This person posted evidence on social media of how crazy he is.
Here is, for example, we're going to show you an extremely creepy video of this person.
Hey, this is a creepy video of this person simulating a mass shooting in a school.
This is an insane person.
I don't know.
There's no better catch all term for this.
I don't know what form of mental illness the person suffers from.
This is not a sane and normal human being.
I know we also shy away from the word normal in today's society.
Normal meaning statistically normal.
This is not a statistically normal human being.
There is a normal.
This person is not it.
Which means that any attempt to politicize this is ridiculous.
But here is a video of this person that we're supposed to ignore on behalf of the idea that this person was a Trump supporter.
This is something I tried to pitch last night.
I don't like this sort of stuff at all.
Again, I don't blame Bernie Sanders when a Bernie Sanders supporting crazy person shoots up Congress people at a baseball game.
I don't blame Barack Obama when a Black Lives Matter supporting crazy person shoots up Dallas police officers.
And I don't blame Donald Trump when a crazy The person who believes that they're a Donald Trump fan goes and does math.
But in this case, there's not even evidence that the person was super political in any way.
The person apparently had postings from the left.
The person apparently had postings from the right.
But it doesn't matter.
The person's crazy.
Okay, so here is the actual video of the person.
is a crazy person.
Is a person reaching into a bag for a gun.
Okay?
And then walking through and simulating with joker laughter A mass shooting.
At a school.
And simulating getting shot by the cops.
Hey, it's EXTREMELY creepy stuff.
That hysterical laughter, if you can see this person standing in a classroom.
Dropping bullets on the floor.
Or looks like bullets.
Walking- I mean, it's like a full-built set.
Standing in front of an American flag.
Okay, it's- it's ex- This is creepy stuff.
This is a crazy person.
This is an insane person who wants attention.
And the media will give him as much attention as he could possibly want.
They'll mention his name over and over.
They'll plaster his face, which is a crazy person.
I'm going to say it again.
This person is mentally ill.
It is obvious this person is mentally ill.
To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.
There must have been red flags galore.
So the big failure here, if we're going to talk about bipartisan failure, where are the people around this person reporting them to the police?
Apparently, this person was known to the police.
We now know that.
This person performed as a rapper and whose recent music videos included depictions of mass murder.
This person's most recent video posted to YouTube showed him in the aftermath of a school shooting.
It ended with this person draping himself in an American flag.
Another music video showed a cartoon depiction of a man wearing a shirt with his YouTube channel's logo on it, holding a long gun, being shot by the police.
This is, um, not a shock when people like this do evil and terrible things.
Apparently, the father had described this person as having emotional issues.
Apparently, he used to, like, ride up and down the block on a motorized scooter playing extremely loud music for attention.
And again, WGN is reporting this person was known to police.
So, immediately, immediately, this breaks down into the person was a Trump supporter.
The evidence that this person was a Trump supporter, supposedly, is that this person took a video of themselves at some sort of Trump rally.
And at the Trump rally, the person is wearing a Where's Waldo outfit.
So, is the person just a troll or a joker?
It seems so.
Because this is what crazy online people do.
They're wearing a Where's Waldo outfit and so the entire left went Trump supporter.
Well that means that Trump's bad and the right is bad and therefore we can blame our neighbor for the evil of an insane person.
That's a symptom of a country that's breaking down when your first move is how do I blame my fellow American for this sort of stuff.
And again, every one of these stories breaks down this way.
So this is why, for the left, this immediately breaks down into talk over gun control.
Because on gun control, you can blame your neighbor for something that your neighbor had nothing to do with.
This is why the left will say things like, the NRA is to blame for mass shootings.
Or your neighbor, who is a law-abiding citizen, who owns a long gun, is responsible for a school shooting.
So Joe Biden immediately released a statement, of course, calling for more gun control because he has a hammer in search of a nail when it comes to gun control.
The statement says, Jill and I are shocked by the senseless gun violence that has yet again brought grief to an American community on this Independence Day.
As always, we are grateful for the first responders and law enforcement on the scene.
I recently signed the first major bipartisan gun reform legislation in almost 30 years into law, which includes actions that will save lives.
But there's much more work to do, and I'm not going to give up fighting the epidemic of gun violence.
Again, he only releases statements like this when a bunch of white people get shot, or unless a white supremacist shoots a bunch of black people.
That is the only time that Joe Biden ever sounds off on issues like this.
Meanwhile, the Illinois governor, J.B.
Pritzker, he says it's time to talk gun control, because it's always time to talk gun control.
Is it a day ending in Y?
Time to talk gun control.
Let's do it.
I'm furious that children and their families have been traumatized.
I'm furious that this is happening in communities all across Illinois and America.
I'm furious because it does not have to be this way.
And yet we as a nation, well, we continue to allow this to happen.
While we celebrate the 4th of July just once a year, mass shootings have become our weekly Yes, weekly American tradition.
There are going to be people who say that today is not the day.
That now is not the time to talk about guns.
I'm telling you, there is no better day and no better time than right here and right now.
Really, there's no better day and no better time to talk about it than like immediately while the bodies are still in the streets.
That's that's like the very best time of all the times to talk about this sort of stuff is the time to talk about guns.
By the way, Illinois has extraordinarily heavy gun control laws.
Chicago has extremely, extremely heavy gun control laws.
Tammy Duckworth, the senator from Illinois, she's doing the same thing.
She is talking about how we have to get rid of assault weapons.
I was just on the phone with Senator Durbin who is driving here as quickly as he possibly can to come to Highland Park and he also sends his condolences and his thoughts and you know he and I recently in the Senate last month proved that bipartisan compromise on gun safety is possible.
Today, we have seen that we can't just stop there.
We have to do more to keep our communities safe.
We have to get rid of assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, and so many other additional common-sense reforms that wide majorities of Americans are crying out for.
It's always a blemish on the body politic, graver cancer in the body politic.
Gun rights are bad.
State differentiation on the basis of gun rights are bad.
Remember, she's a federal official.
She's a senator.
Elise Pritzker is a governor.
She's a senator.
She doesn't make domestic Illinois law.
She's a federal senator.
The same left will call for the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court is very bad.
It doesn't matter.
There's a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution of the United States, which was designed to prevent the federal government from getting involved in these issues.
The left wants the federal government.
Joe Biden wants to be involved in these issues.
That is no longer a principle that we hold in common.
And other stories are supposed to be just completely ignored.
So, for example, this is a massive national news story.
A significantly less national news story is that two police officers were shot on July 4th at the Ben Franklin Parkway.
According to WPVI, two police officers on security detail were wounded during a shooting at Fourth of July festivities in Philadelphia on Monday night.
The shooting happened just after 9.45 p.m.
as the fireworks display was still underway.
Apparently the gunfire erupted from a location in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but behind the main stage on Eakins Oval.
Again, this is not going to be a national news story in the same sort of way as the mass shooting.
Number one, not as much death, but number two, when police officers are shot by criminals, it's not nearly as much of a national story.
Because every single thing is supposed to be an indictment of precisely the values that we were supposed to hold in common.
The Second Amendment was a value we used to hold in common.
At the very least, even if you were pro-gun control, you would suggest that this was not the Supreme Court's business.
This was a state-by-state issue.
And there was, in fact, a right to keep and bear arms that was guaranteed in the Second Amendment to the Constitution that was fundamental, including in the states.
None of this was particularly controversial five minutes ago.
Now it's really, really controversial.
And this is true for every issue.
All these things that aren't unified.
Crazy people shoot people.
That's bad.
Here's another one.
If you pull a gun on a police officer and you shoot at a police officer and then you get shot, that would be on you.
Right?
That was a pretty universally held value in the United States.
No longer.
Now we have to decide based on the race of the suspect and the race of the people who shot the suspect, whether or not this was indicative of graver American racism, which is what was happening, for example, in Akron over the weekend.
So a state of emergency was declared in Akron, Ohio.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a curfew started at 9 p.m.
on July 4th after protesters damaged property amid protests over the fatal police shooting of a 25-year-old black man.
The protests came after the release on Sunday of body cam videos that appear to show multiple police officers firing dozens of times at Jalyn Walker, who was unarmed.
Akron Police Chief Stephen Maillet said a lot of rounds were fired and investigators are trying to determine exactly how many.
So, the mayor said he issued curfew after protesters broke windows in downtown Akron and caused significant property damage.
Now, the way that this is described by the media, right, this is the Wall Street Journal.
Now, I should note here that the, quote-unquote, objective news side of the Wall Street Journal is actually to the left of the New York Times, by available data.
It's the editorial page that's different.
But, according to the Wall Street Journal, a medical examiner's report found at least 60 wounds to Walker's body.
Chief Mylett said Sunday, it was unclear how many of those wounds account for bullet entry and exit wounds, All eight officers who fired their guns were placed on paid administrative leave.
So what exactly happened?
Well, um, they have it on video.
They have it on video exactly what happened.
According to the Wall Street Journal, buried low down in this story, the June 27th incident started, according to the police, when Walker fled an attempting stop for an undisclosed traffic and equipment violation.
Video shows an officer reporting Mr. Walker's silver Buick sped away from police.
A few minutes later, the officer reported a suspected gunshot coming from the driver's side window of Walker's car.
Then his car slowed down.
He exited from the passenger seat wearing a ski mask.
Several officers chased him on foot.
One officer tried to subdue him with a taser stun gun before eight officers fired dozens of shots in about eight seconds.
Okay, so what exactly happened here?
He was unarmed when he was shot, but there was a gun and loaded mag found on the driver's seat of the vehicle and a spent shell casing found near the scene where the initial gunshot was fired.
So this guy was driving away from the cops.
He shot at the cops.
He stopped his car.
He ran away.
They have every reason to assume he's still armed and dangerous.
So if he reaches into his waistband or reaches down toward his waistband, of course they're going to shoot him.
This used to be a fairly fundamentally held idea in the United States, that if you shoot at a cop and then they have reason to believe you have a weapon on you and they shoot you, that one's on you.
But instead, we have full-scale riots in Akron that require a curfew on July 4th for it.
And then you have commentators on MSNBC doing what they do, talking about systemic American racism.
There are so many different things about the situation that don't make sense.
One of them being that if they believed that he posed a deadly threat, or they believed that he was capable of posing a deadly threat, then that undercuts the notion of them using the tasers to begin with.
They used the tasers, they missed with the tasers, and then it was when they decided To actually use their firearms as a means of trying to subdue the suspect.
In addition to that, the notion that one man, who ultimately was actually unarmed, posed a dangerous threat to any one of those eight not only armed but also bodily armored officers is absolutely absurd.
He posed no threat to them.
So he'd only shot a gun at them.
And they had reason to believe that he had a gun because there was one in his car with the spent shell casing on the street where he shot the gun.
But we're supposed to believe that he posed no threat.
Because again, every wound in the body politic is indicative of a deeper cancer.
That's the basic idea.
And the deeper cancer here is systemic American racism.
When the Supreme Court says that you now have the right as a state to regulate abortion, that is a deeper wound on the body politic because the cancer is the American Judeo-Christian ideal and that has to be fought.
It's really bad.
So you wonder why there is this vast gap in pride in America?
Maybe it's because a lot of people are actually proud of the founding principles of the country.
Left, right, and center.
And then, there's a rather large segment of the country that is not proud of those founding principles, and believe that those founding principles need to go away.
And that's why Mitt Romney has a piece today, over at the Atlantic, talking about the lack of American unity.
And it's so surface.
Now, I've defended Senator Romney multiple times.
I voted for Senator Romney in 2012.
I think that the 2012 election may have turned the country dramatically in the wrong direction for at least a decade.
I think it was the most important election of my lifetime, 2012.
More than 2016 even, more than 2020 in many ways.
I think that the 2012 election in which Barack Obama basically polarized the country along racial lines in order to win re-election and then got away with it.
I think that was a dramatic moment in American history and you can see the inflection point in race relations in the United States by polling data around 2011, 2012, 2013.
Okay, but put all that aside.
Mitt Romney's very surface approach to politics, which seems to be if we're nice to everybody, then we'll all come back together, as opposed to what are the fundamental principles we hold in common?
This is why the Republic is in real trouble here.
Because if you cannot state the foundational principles we're supposed to hold in common, how do you fight for them exactly?
So here's what Mitt Romney writes in the Atlantic, and it's getting all sorts of traffic today because he's mean to Trump.
And of course, anytime a Republican says bad things about Trump, that means that they're a good Republican, at least for the moment, or until they run for president when we decide that they are evil, terrible people who forcibly cut the hair of gay kids and strap dogs to the top of their car and might want to put y'all back in chains, as Joe Biden once said about Mitt Romney.
Here's what Mitt Romney writes in the Atlanta quote, even as we watch the reservoirs and lakes of the West go dry, we keep watering our lawns, soaking our golf courses and growing water thirsty crops.
Wait, this is this is the one this is where the, as inflation mounts and the national debt balloons, progressive politicians vote for every more spending.
As the ice caps melt and record temperatures make the evening news, we figure that buying a Prius and recycling the boxes from our daily Amazon deliveries will suffice.
When TV news outlets broadcast video after video of people illegally crossing the nation's southern border, many of us change the channel.
And when a renowned conservative former federal appellate judge testifies we are already in a war for our democracy and that January 6th was a genuine constitutional crisis, mag a loyalist snicker that he speaks slowly and celebrate that most people aren't watching.
What accounts for the blithe dismissal of potentially cataclysmic threats?
The left thinks the right is at fault for ignoring climate change and the attacks on our political system.
The right thinks the left is the problem for ignoring illegal immigration and the national debt.
But wishful thinking happens across the political spectrum.
More and more, we are a nation in denial, says Mitt Romney.
I have witnessed time and again, in myself and in others, a powerful impulse to believe what we hope to be the case.
We don't need to cut back on watering because the drought is part of a cycle that will reverse.
With economic growth, the debt will take care of itself.
January 6th was a false flag operation.
A classic example of denial, says Mitt Romney, comes from Donald Trump.
I won in a landslide.
Perhaps this is a branch of the same delusion that leads people to feed money into slot machines.
Because I really want to win, I believe that I will win.
When entire countries fail to confront serious challenges, it doesn't end well, says Mitt Romney.
During the past half century, we Americans have lived in a very forgiving time.
Seeing the world through rose-colored glasses had limited consequences.
The climate was stable.
Our economy dwarfed the competition.
Democracy was on the rise.
Our military strength made the U.S.
the sole global hyperpower.
Today, every one of those things has changed.
If we continue to ignore the real threats we face, America will suffer serious consequences.
What clears the scales from the eyes of the nation?
Pearl Harbor did.
9-11 did.
A crisis can shake the public consciousness, but a crisis may come too late for a course correction that can prevent tragedy.
The only cure for wishful thinking is leadership, says Mitt Romney.
And then he cites, as examples of leadership, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Lake Wallace, Martin Luther King Jr., and Vladimir Zelensky.
And then he says this, President Joe Biden is a genuinely good man, but he has yet been unable to break through our national malady of denial, deceit and distrust.
A return of Donald Trump would feed the sickness, probably rendering it incurable.
So first of all, just a point here, Joe Biden literally said that Mitt Romney wanted to enslave black people.
So he seems like a very nice person, a very good man, a genuinely good man.
And the idea that Trump is what renders America's national sickness incurable?
Trump is?
It seems like the national sickness goes deeper than Trump.
Again, he wants to play here on the surface.
That is not where this battle is going on.
Too often, Washington demonstrates the maxim that for evil to thrive only requires good men to do nothing.
I hope for a president who can rise above the din to unite us behind the truth.
Several contenders with experience and smarts stand in the wings.
We intently watch to see if they also possess the requisite character and ability to bring the nation together in confronting our common reality.
While we wait, leadership must come from fathers and mothers, teachers and nurses, priests and rabbis, businessmen and businesswomen, journalists and pundits.
That will require us all to rise above ourselves, above our grievances and resentments, and grasp the mantle of leadership our country so badly needs.
I'm not sure I've read a more platitudinous column in my life.
This is from Mitt Romney.
What are the centralizing principles around which we are supposed to gather?
Can you name them?
Can you explain what the left and right hold in common anymore?
And if not, how do they come together again?
Mitt Romney has no answers for that, because here is the reality.
The polarization in our country is not about just issues like abortion.
It is not about just issues like uncontrol.
It is about the very vision of what the country is, whether the promises of the Declaration and the Constitution are correct, whether the basic idea of localism before statism before federalism is right.
It is about the idea of checks and balances that prevent the government from being overweening on the federal level, but the ability to form communities of like interest with your friends and neighbors.
Those are the questions on the table.
And the question is to whether California can agree to that when Florida is still in the nation or whether Texas can agree to that when New York is still, that's going to decide whether the United States returns to an Articles of Confederation model or whether we are actually a United States.
The simple fact of the matter is.
That the only way to celebrate July 4th is if we actually think July 4th is a good, if a body politic that includes all of these things is a good thing.
And there's open question right now in the United States as to whether that is the case.
And there's one side much more than another, by polling data and by reality, that believes that it is not such a good thing.
That the fundamental principles upon which the country were founded are deeply flawed and need to be completely revamped or destroyed entirely.
Until that ideological question is answered, America will continue to fray.
All right, we'll be back here later today with additional content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Molls show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by Bradford Carrington, Executive Producer Jeremy Boren, Supervising Producer Mathis Glover, Production Manager Pavel Wydowski, Associate Producer Savannah Dominguez-Morris, Editor Adam Ciewiec, Audio Mixer Mike Coromina, Hair and Makeup Artist in Wardrobe Fabiola Cristina, Production Coordinator Jessica Kranz.
The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2022.
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