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July 29, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
15:01
The Left Wants To Raise Your Children | Ep. 1545
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A Chicago mother has her daughter removed from her by the government all because she believes her daughter is a girl.
Plus, we discuss the latest from my trip to Israel.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro, this is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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President of the Heritage Foundation.
Kevin Roberts is now fighting back against some of the more libertarian-oriented members of the conservative movement and pointing out that traditional marriage is still a pretty damned important thing in society.
And it is incredible that we have now reached the point that the controversies about whether men and women exist, but it's not that incredible when you understand that the entire basis Of fundamental civilization growth is human reproductive capacity which relies on males and females being distinct and society having an interest in their mating habits and how they raise children we have tossed all of that out for the sense of sexual satisfaction we are that is to be found within.
It's a part of the same broader rubric traditional values must die so i feel satisfied with my sexual life within.
All the spurs from the same source so good for kevin roberts is the new head of heritage foundation.
He put out a statement saying, quote, marriage is a foundational bedrock of human society, one that many on the radical left are seeking to undermine and ultimately sweep away.
The concept of marriage between a man and a woman is and must remain non-negotiable.
It is a concept foundational to human flourishing and inherent to men and women as image bearers of our creator.
Now more than ever, we need leaders who will stand up for these basic truths.
The bad faith effort in Congress to weaponize marriage disrespects our fundamental institutions and divides Americans in a quest to score cheap political points no matter the social consequences.
I recognize there are some, including those on the right, who'd rather see the marriage issue just disappear.
I want to be clear.
I and my colleagues at the Heritage Foundation firmly disagree with that view.
We do so with kindness and respect.
We should not let the left divide us or weaken our shared interest in blocking this politicized stunt." He's talking about the fact that Congress is now taking up a bill that would enshrine same-sex marriage in law, regardless of Obergefell.
He says, to self-describe conservatives voicing support for this legislation or assenting with a shrug in a sure why not response, I offer this advice. We will remember how you respond to this moment. The left's attacks on the nuclear family and marriage are tearing at the soul of our country. Their efforts to silence and punish those who hold different beliefs is the opposite of tolerance, respect, or individual liberty. You do have to recognize that the movement that we have seen on the left from leave us alone in the privacy of our bedrooms to we need all of our activities celebrated by law and our perspectives must be ingrained in every legal institution to the point
that we can sever every bond between human beings, including the closest bond that exists between mother and child?
That is all part of the same concerted push against traditional values and pushing back against that push is going to require revival of an understanding of traditional wisdom.
And one of the great realities of life that we refuse to acknowledge here in the post-Enlightenment West is that many of the things that we do, we do because tradition says we should do them.
And if they've improved over time, by thousands of years of practice, maybe I don't need some pointy head professor at a major Ivy League university to give me a rationale for why the thing works.
If a thing works, you use it.
And the simple fact is that if it works, you don't break it.
And yet the entire premise of the left is that if you can't explain it, they break it.
And even if you can explain it, they break it, is the reality.
Because all that matters to them is the end outcome.
Which again, is this perversely narcissistic notion that the only thing that matters in life is how you identify to the world, and the rest of the world is forced to comply, up to and including your parents, against actual biology.
Alrighty, in just one second, I've been traveling throughout Israel.
I want to give you the updates on how that is going, because it really is quite fascinating.
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Debunk store-bought meat with me.
Okay, so as you may have noticed from our filming setting, I'm actually filming from Israel last week, this week, next week.
And I gotta say, it's been pretty incredible to see the progress That has been made in Israel over the course of time.
There are a lot of things that Israel needs to learn from America, and there are some things that America really needs to learn from Israel.
So there are certain things that crop up, obviously, when you travel around Israel.
The first thing is that Israel has a bunch of bureaucratic legislation.
A lot of regulation.
Israel has an extraordinary amount of red tape.
To build a house in Israel, two years, three years, five years.
That's just the regulations.
Israel has extraordinarily high tax rates.
In the United States, the overall tax burden is about 24.5% of total domestic income.
In Israel, it's like 31%.
The top tax rate in Israel is 50% and it kicks in way lower than the top tax rate in the United States.
In America, it's 37%.
In Israel, the top corporate tax rate is 23%.
Top corporate tax rate in America is 21%.
In Israel, capital gains tax rate is like 25% for non-controlling shareholders, 30% for the actual controlling shareholders.
In the US, it's 15%.
In other words, it's hard to do business in Israel.
And yet Israel has somehow, against all odds and against bad policy, exploded economically speaking.
It is known as startup nation.
It is the place on earth with the most startups per capita.
Israel is a very small country.
Territorially, it's tiny.
It take you about 45 minutes to drive the width of the entire land of Israel in certain parts of Israel.
Maybe less.
In certain parts of Israel, it's more like 20 minutes.
The entire territory of the state of Israel is about half the size of New Jersey.
You don't really understand the Israeli-Arab conflict until you come here and you spend some time in Jerusalem.
Everybody lives cheek by jowl.
You can actually visibly see Ramallah from Jerusalem.
The parts of Jerusalem that you hear the left talk about dividing Jerusalem, that is not possible.
It's like taking your house and saying, during a divorce case, you should just divide the house down the middle.
You take this bathroom, I'll take this bedroom.
It's not going to work.
It's very, very foolish.
But in spite of all this, Israel has been able to achieve phenomenal economic success.
You know, Israel is burdened with a terrible bureaucratic system.
It is dominated by public sector unions.
Israel has a terrible judicial system in which the judiciary... You heard about judicial activism in the United States.
At least in the United States, there's a written constitution.
There is no written constitution in Israel.
So the Supreme Court of Israel basically just writes whatever it wants and everybody is expected to comply.
The Supreme Court in Israel actually even appoints its own successors.
So imagine Ruth Bader Ginsburg appointing her own successor.
That's essentially how it works in the state of Israel.
These folks are not answerable to the actual legislature of the state of Israel, the Knesset.
Despite all these problems, Israel has seen a lot of success.
So what Israel needs to learn from America is obviously how to run their government better, free markets, allowing people to keep more of what they earn, building more, less regulation, right?
All those things are necessary.
America is actually, you don't realize how well run a country America is, particularly in red states like Florida, where I live, until you come to a place like Israel, which is not particularly well run.
You can always tell the difference between, you know, how well run a country is by how many people you have to know to get something done.
Israel is still, because it's a small country, and because it's still relatively new, it's only 74 years old.
Because of that...
You still sometimes have to call the brother-in-law who knows somebody over at one of the ministries in order to get something done.
But in spite of that, Israel has grown at an extraordinary pace.
And more than that, Israel has a healthy and vibrant social fabric.
So there are lots of divisions in the state of Israel between the religious and the non-religious, between the people who live in Judea and Samaria and the people who live in Tel Aviv, between Arab and Israeli, right?
These are all real divisions.
But the reproduction rate in Israel is way higher than any place else In the Western world.
The reproduction rate in Israel, including in the secular areas, is well above replacement rates.
Like, kids are a priority in the state of Israel.
The reproduction rate in Judea and Samaria, which are the most biblically historic parts of Israel, that'd be like Hebron, Ephrat, all those areas.
Hundreds of thousands of Jews live over there.
Supposedly outside quote-unquote Green Line Israel, the disputed territories.
The reproduction rate there is 4.6 kids per family.
Which is extraordinary.
In the United States, the number is 1.6.
In Tel Aviv, which is the most secular area of Israel, Tel Aviv has a reproduction rate of 2.4.
2.5.
Overall, the state of Israel has a reproduction rate of well over 3.
The fertility rate in Haifa, which again is a very secular area, is 2.4.
So, Israel is a growing nation-state, and the reason it's a growing nation-state is because it recognizes something that the United States needs to remind itself of today, which is that a nation has to be the key component in a nation-state.
A state is just a formalization of a pre-existing political arrangement.
There has to be a sense of national unity in order for a state to survive.
There has to be a sense of common national purpose and common national destiny.
Israel does this right.
That is because Israel, obviously the Jews in Israel, have a common history.
They understand the 2,000 year exile.
They understand persecution ranging from the Spanish Inquisition to the Holocaust.
They understand that they are living on the biblical soil where their forefathers once roamed, where Abraham and Isaac walked the land.
They understand that they are walking the exact same sites where David slew Goliath.
They get all of that, right?
There's a real solidarity about all of that.
Even secular Jews, people who don't believe in the biblical origins of the Torah, still understand what the holidays are.
In the same way that, you know, people who are left in America, they should still understand what July 4th is all about.
They should still celebrate July 4th in a real way as opposed to protesting the flag.
You don't see secular Israelis protesting the flag of the State of Israel.
It's just not a thing here.
And the reason for that is, again, because there's a certain level of social fabric and solidarity that exists.
Now, it exists because of common religion, obviously.
And there's a sort of traditional aspect to religion that used to exist in the United States among people who considered themselves more secular.
And people would still say that they believed in God, they still believed in general Judeo-Christian principles.
That has sort of fallen apart.
In Israel, that has not fallen apart in nearly the same way.
It may fall apart because Israel tends to adopt all the bad policies of the West at a certain point.
Hopefully, it does not.
But there's something else too, and that is that Israel is threatened existentially on all of its borders, and that means solidarity.
So if you go back to the 1990s in Israel, so the first time I visited Israel was 2000.
2000 happened to be the beginning of the second intifada.
So we were in Israel when the Sparrows pizzeria was bombed, killing a couple of Americans.
Actually, no, the father of one of the people was killed in that bombing.
The second Intifada period, like right before that, there was a serious post-Zionist movement in Israel that's very similar to the sort of post-American movement in America.
The idea that America has no reason to exist, America is historically bad, there's no reason for it to continue, it should fall apart, that'd be better for the world.
There was that movement on the left in Israel.
And then it turns out that an implacable foe that wants your destruction has a good way of clarifying the mind.
Suddenly you realize, wait a second, the people who I thought were my enemies are actually my friends.
Those people are actually my brothers and sisters.
Americans have stopped thinking about each other that way because we haven't had an existential threat really since the Soviet Union.
But the truth is that history will always provide an existential threat to a country that weakens itself from within.
In Israel, that reflected itself in a radical shift toward the center-right in Israel.
Right now, the Israeli Knesset, the parliament here, 80 of 120 seats should be considered center to center-right.
And if they're slightly left of center, it's only on religious policy.
It is certainly not on matters of military defense, for example.
Now, that sort of solidarity is really, really important for a country, and America lacks that level of solidarity.
We used to have it.
I think we can have it again.
Now, that solidarity in American history very often left out, marginalized, and preyed upon groups, most obviously black Americans.
But the whole promise of the civil rights movement is that black Americans were now part of the bargain.
And then the left has said that they can't be part of the bargain, that nobody can be part of the bargain because the bargain's a lie.
That's not true.
The bargain is there for all Americans to take advantage of.
It's why Hispanics are shifting in a more Republican, conservative direction.
Because they don't believe the lie that the left is selling.
America needs to find the sort of social solidarity, the reason for national existence that Israel has.
Israel understands its purpose.
It's to preserve the Jewish people.
It's to preserve a future for a people that has been historically persecuted.
It is to provide freedom for all of its citizens, including Arab citizens.
That is its goal.
And there's a reason for it to exist.
And it needs to exist.
If Americans can't explain why America needs to exist, needs to, not should, needs to, then America is going to fall apart.
And what that means is we need to rediscover our national purpose.
That national purpose is embedded in the Declaration of Independence.
It's the idea that there are rights that pre-exist governments and are guaranteed by the government.
It's the idea that there is a tradition common to the vast majority of Americans rooted in Judeo-Christian virtue.
Doesn't require you to go to church, but you have to understand where those virtues came from.
That you have more in common with your neighbor than you have that differentiates you from your neighbor.
As the left pushes, this is why I think the final battle in the United States has to be over social policy.
Really, not even economic or foreign policy.
Because the things that bind us are going to be things like how we view the nuclear family.
How we view male and female.
How we view the basic institutions necessary for a free society.
The little platoons Edmund Burke talked about.
America can still get that together.
I think that the backlash is coming.
I think America will get that together.
When you visit a country like Israel, you realize that all anew.
And I think it is well worthwhile for people to take note of what Israel is doing right and what it's doing wrong because it has a lot of lessons for places like the United States.
Alrighty, we'll be back here next week with much, much more content.
In the meantime, rest up over the weekend.
Enjoy it.
We'll be back here on Monday.
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