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Aug. 12, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
26:13
The Social Policy Madness Breaking The Country | Ep. 1555
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The Biden administration's embrace of critical theory on both race and gender undermines fundamental American principles and divides Americans from each other.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Oh, this week on the show, we've discussed a bunch of areas where the Biden administration is radically out of touch with the American public, ranging from energy prices to inflation to immigration.
There's one area where the Biden administration is extraordinarily radically out of touch, and that is because, once again, as always, Joe Biden reflects the center of the Democratic Party, and the center of the Democratic Party has meant engagement with radical theory when it comes to race and gender.
You have to understand their philosophy in order to understand sort of the ramifications of that philosophy.
We'll see sort of occasional stories bubble up in the news, and those are the tip of the iceberg stories, but they represent a far broader ideological shift that's taken place inside the Democratic Party over time, and that's a shift from Government as sort of the do-something government of the 1960s or even the 1930s to a government that combines two forces.
One is, yes, do something, do something.
And we need an LBJ, FDR-type government.
But on the other hand, a consistent campaign against the systems of the United States.
This really started under Barack Obama.
There's sort of a merger of the idea that you should trust me to fix everything, but you can't trust the government.
But you can trust me, but you can't trust the government.
Don't trust the system, but trust me to change and break and mold the system.
This new Democratic Party is a transformative Democratic Party.
Not all of them, not Joe Manchin, not Kyrsten Sinema.
But Joe Biden and his administration are a reflection of a movement that has taken over the Democratic Party that says that America is inherently, in her bones, a problem.
And that America must be fundamentally changed.
I mean, not you're tinkering around the edges, not you're redirecting the stream of American politics, not you're shaving off the rough corners, not any of that.
It's a complete replacement of the systems of the United States because those systems are so poisoned.
And you see this in a couple of areas, particularly race and gender.
And those happen to be the areas in which the Biden administration is wildly outside the realm of what most Americans think.
To understand what they believe about race and gender, you have to understand something called critical theory.
Not critical race theory, we'll get to that in a moment, but critical theory more generally.
So, at the beginning of the 20th century, Marxists had a real problem.
The problem that Marxists had is that they were making all sorts of inroads and strides in the first couple of decades, and the idea was going to be that there was a worldwide revolution of class consciousness in which the lower classes overthrew the bourgeois hierarchy, and world revolution occurred.
That didn't happen.
Instead you got World War I, in which it turns out that societal ties, like nationalism, Societal ties with regard to governmental loyalty.
These actually united people across class lines.
And so Marxists were left with a real problem because Marxist theory had suggested that the inevitable breakdown of capitalism, the contradictions inherent in capitalism, would cause a class consciousness revolution which would eventually emerge in a world revolution.
That didn't happen.
So they had to shift their approach.
What they said instead was, well, here's the problem.
These systems of capitalism have so infiltrated the minds of people that there is no way for this revolution in class consciousness to occur.
So we have to break the machinery.
It's important to break all of the systems.
If we don't break the systems, how can we ever have the class consciousness that we require in order to overthrow these patriarchal and viciously capitalistic classist systems?
There are a bunch of Marxists who started proposing this in the 1920s, in terms of sort of cultural Marxism.
This is what they were talking about.
An early form of this particular type of cultural Marxism was pushed by members of the so-called Frankfurt School.
You've probably heard of them.
Max Horkheimer is one of their leaders.
He suggested that because all human beings were products of their environment, all the evils in America were attributable to capitalist, democratic environments.
He said, there's a direct quote, the wretchedness of our own time is connected with the structure of society.
All of your misery, is because the system is failing you.
And the system has shaped you, so you can't even escape the system.
So we have to break the system.
Eric Fromm, who's another member of the Frankfurt School, said that American freedoms actually were fascist.
He said the right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.
And the way that he could tell that you weren't having thoughts of your own is you disagreed with him.
Because if you had thoughts of your own, you would agree with him.
So it must be that the system was forcing you to have thoughts that were not your own.
So if we could break the system, you would totally agree with him.
Which is pretty Catch-22 logic.
If you disagree with him, it's because you're brainwashed.
If you agree with him, it's because you're not brainwashed.
Pretty convenient.
American consumerism, according to Fromm, had deprived Americans of the ability to think and made them ripe for what he called proto-fascism.
Proto-fascism just meant anything that was not Marxism.
So what this meant is that systems of power had to be destroyed.
One of the big thinkers in the Frankfurt School was a guy named Eberhard Marcuse.
He was one of the founders of the anti-war movement in the 1960s.
He was the make love not war guy.
He said that the only way that you could totally have freedom was to crush dissent.
Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.
It would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda of deed as well as of word.
This was especially true for minority groups who could assert their power only by striking back against the system.
If you're a minority group in the United States, you didn't have the power through majoritarian politics to actually get your voice heard.
And so we had to give you the power so you could crush the system, particularly people from the right.
And then you would have a blooming of thought.
I mean, everyone would agree with Herbert Markewitz, of course, but that's the idea.
That's the true mark of freedom is that you agree with the hive mind, the Marxist hive mind.
And so this took a couple of different forms.
Normally, in economic terms, the idea would be we have to crush the capitalist system so as to awaken class consciousness.
The problem was that wasn't going to work in America because there's incredible class mobility in the United States.
See, the Marxism of class consciousness makes a lot more sense in a society in which societal birth Basically guarantees your status.
If you live in Great Britain in 1850 and you have essentially lords and ladies and then you have people who are the bourgeois merchant class and then you have people who are the laborers and these are very hard and fast classes and it's very difficult for you to gain social status.
Like if you are a bourgeois person who becomes very wealthy you're still looked at a scant because you got your wealth as opposed to you inherited your wealth.
When you have hard and fast classes Distinction's that way.
Resistance to the class distinction makes some sort of sense.
When you have high levels of societal income mobility, when you can be born in America and you can become very, very wealthy, when you can be a middle class person and you can get rich, very difficult to make the case that the system is stacked against you.
So the left had to come up with another way to ram their cultural Marxism through.
And what they came up with was race.
Because while the United States historically has not had massive class distinctions that are hard and fast, it has had race distinctions that were hard and fast for the vast majority of America's lifetime, right?
Until the 1960s.
So from 1776 to the 1960s, you had hard and fast racial distinctions in law in many parts of the country.
And that was a serious problem.
So what the Marxists did is they glommed onto this and they said, aha, what we need to do is make Americans understand that the systems are racist and you need to tear down the systems so you can have essentially racial mobility.
That is the only way to do this.
So that was the argument that was made by critical race theory.
So critical race theory arrives in the 1960s.
Stokely Carmichael, who's then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he makes the argument on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1965, right?
The first real movement in America to undercut this argument.
Because the argument is now, okay, we're going to get rid of those race distinctions in federal law.
So we've reached the end of the road, right?
I mean, we've now gotten rid of any excuse you have for some sort of Revolution based on class.
Stokely Carmichael says, no, no, no, that's not good enough.
The systems are already stacked based on class.
It's not that the systems are fair, but they were excluding people.
And so if you include the people in the systems, now things are good.
The entire system is racist and bad.
And we can tell because there's inequality in outcome.
So any system that has an inequality, like, we can look at the systems, we can see that the system itself says you can't be discriminatory.
That's not enough.
Because so long as there's an inequality of outcome, this means that the system is stacked against you.
This is the notion of critical race theory.
So Stokely Carmichael's intellectual heirs launched the actual critical race theory project in the late 70s, early 80s.
I've talked about this before.
Some of the expositors, people like Richard Delgado and Gene Stefanchik, they set out the basic principles of critical race theory.
First, that racism is ordinary, not aberrational.
It's just present in American society.
It's everywhere.
It's the ordinary.
It's not that there's a bad guy over there who's racist, so we tell him to stop being racist.
No, everyone is racist.
And also that the system of, quote, white over color ascendancy serves important purposes, both psychic and material.
So the system is stacked because white people want it to be stacked.
And what this means is that even parts of the system that seem like they are cutting against racism, they're actually just cover for racism.
So the Civil Rights Act itself is cover for deeper underlying racism.
Attempts to fight back against racism in law, that's just perpetuating the racist system.
In order to fix this, of course, what you need is exactly what the Frankfurt School said, right?
In order to fix this, what you need is to destroy all the systems.
Capitalism is a racist system.
Not a classist system, a racist system.
So Derek Bell, who was very warm with Barack Obama back in the day, he wrote, quote, the whole liberal worldview of private rights and public sovereignty mediated by the rule of law needs to be exploded.
A worldview premised upon the public and private spheres is an attractive mirage that masks the reality of the economic and political power.
So this led Bell to the peculiar conclusion that again, even the laws that protect black people are specifically designed in order to cover for a system that hurts black people.
.
Bell actually wrote a short story in 1992 saying that white Americans would sell black Americans to space aliens if they could, if they could alleviate the national debt.
And he said in 1992, not 1970, that black Americans were more oppressed than at any time since the end of slavery.
So you have to understand that this is what lies at the root of the Joe Biden equity agenda.
Equity is not the same as equality.
Equality suggests that everybody should be treated the same under the law.
Equity suggests that the systems are so corrupt that they have to be completely remade by people like Joe Biden, elderly white gentlemen.
They need to be completely remade and they need to be remade so that the results are equal.
So he announced at the very beginning of his administration, like right away on his first day in office, he signs an executive order, quote, advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities throughout the federal government.
And here's what Joe Biden had to say.
When I became president, one of the first things I did, I signed an executive order to advance equality and racial justice throughout our federal policies and all our institutions.
That's because delivering the promise of America is not the work of one department.
It has to be the business of the whole of the federal government.
The bottom line, advancing equity is not a one-year project.
It's a generational commitment.
These plans are an important step forward, reflecting the Biden-Harris administration's work to make the promised America real for every American.
And I mean every American.
So what does that mean?
What does that mean?
So here is what his executive order says, quote, This is the White House.
The President's order emphasized the enormous human cost of systemic racism.
Systemic racism is exactly the sort of language used by CRT.
Persistent poverty and other disparities.
And directed the federal government to advance an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the challenges we face as a country.
Again, whenever they talk about disparities, understand, they're not talking about one person is richer and one person is poorer because they made different decisions and therefore they have different outcomes.
What they mean is that no matter what decisions you made, any disparity is evidence of discrimination.
According to the White House, over 90 federal agencies across the federal government, including all cabinet-level agencies, as well as over 50 independent agencies, mobilized quickly and effectively to implement the executive order.
Agencies conducted equity assessments of three to five of their agencies' high-impact services for the American people to uncover where systemic barriers to access may exist.
And of course, he included in this rubric, not just black Americans, he included in this rubric all intersectional identities.
Quote, These plans are an important step forward reflecting the Biden-Harris administration work to make the promise of America real for every American, including communities of color, tribal communities, rural communities, LGBTQI plus divided by sign, minus sign, happy face emoji, people with disabilities, women and girls, and communities impacted by persistent poverty.
They are part of a broader equity agenda, which also includes implementing the first-ever national strategy on gender equity and equality.
Gender equity, we'll get to that in just one second, because it's, again, part and parcel of critical theory.
Working to ensure the federal government is a model for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the workplace.
Advancing LGBTQ plus I, divided by sign, civil rights.
In releasing these action plans across the interagency, as well as snapshots of the largest agency's plans, the administration commits to deepening the conversation with community advocates and all stakeholders.
And what this means is that they're going to promote, for example, crackdowns on the police by the Department of Justice.
This means, for example, that they're going to pursue quote-unquote economic justice, which is economic redistributionism.
That they are going to actively discriminate in government jobs between members of different races.
That they're going to support educational affirmative action programs and force the teaching of critical race theory in public schools if they can.
All the most divisive racial components of President Biden's agenda have very, very deep roots.
And part of this is strategic because the Democratic Party has been under the severe misimpression since 2012 when Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney despite losing about 3 million votes from 2008.
They're under the misimpression that the future Democratic coalition is an intersectional coalition of white college-educated women and minority groups.
Now what they're learning is that a lot of minorities are not particularly interested in this very racialized pursuit of American politics.
But this is what they're rooting for.
And they're not particularly shy about this.
About three weeks after the 2020 election, there's a professor named Cheryl Cash of Georgetown University.
And what she said is that they shouldn't reach out to Trump voters, they shouldn't reach out to blue-collar white voters.
is quote, a more viable strategy for progressives than trying to win over Trump's supporters right away would be to continue to win elections powered by energized majority of black Americans in critical states in coalition with other energized people of color rightfully taking their place in American politics and the critical mass of whites willing to see and resist racism.
So add the big government policies of the left to their anti-racist priorities and there's the winning coalition.
So this is, it's not just theory, it's also their political strategy.
Okay, well, add to this gender theory and you have basically the Democratic Party on social politics, well outside the mainstream of what most Americans think.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so, The Biden administration is a believer that the systems of America are corrupt and need to be overthrown.
This is an outgrowth, again, of critical theory.
That has manifested as critical race theory.
It's also manifested as radical gender theory.
So radical gender theory makes essentially the same claim as critical theory.
That men and women are androgynous widgets.
The only reason that we think of men and women as different is because of evil patriarchal systems that have been embedded over time.
And so all inequities, all inequalities between men and women, disparities between men and women, that's not an outgrowth of biology.
It's not an outgrowth of choice.
It's an outgrowth of our evil, horrible, patriarchal system.
And so if you just tear away that system, then magically everybody becomes a free-floating gender androgynous widget who can choose their own path in life and all sorts of happiness will break out.
And in ancillary fashion, when we break down the systems, we also get to break down the capitalist system and property ownership and all of the rest of this.
All of this is part and parcel of a broader overarching philosophy that sees the systems at work in American life and across the West more broadly as bad.
So to understand how gender theory ties in with critical theory, you have to understand that the earliest roots of gender theory begin with the idea that men and women are artificial categories.
And just like the critical theory posits the class as an artificial category that will eventually be obliterated by class revolution, gender is an artificial category that will be obliterated by the future gender revolution.
So in 1953, Simone de Boivier, who was a Marxist, wrote a book called The Second Sex.
She argued that femininity was utterly disconnected from biology.
Here's what she wrote, quote, the female is a woman insofar as she feels herself as such, right, it's a feeling.
It's not about the biology, it's about the feeling.
Some essential biological givens are not part of her lived situation.
For example, the structure of the ovum is not reflected in it.
So womanhood is not having babies.
That's not important to womanhood.
The thing that's most important is your sexual pleasure.
Nature does not define woman.
It is she who defines herself by reclaiming nature for herself in her affectivity.
So to the obvious question, so why do so many women like getting married and having babies?
She then said the same thing that essentially the critical theorist said, right?
You disagree with Simone de Bovillier because you've been indoctrinated.
So we have to get rid of the system that indoctrinates you and then you will agree with Simone de Bovillier.
So she says, quote, everything helps to confirm this hierarchy in the eyes of the little girl.
The historical and literary culture to which she belongs, the songs and legends with which she is lulled to sleep are one long exaltation of man.
Children's books, mythology, stories, tales all reflect the myths born of the pride and desires of men.
Thus, it is through the eyes of men, the little girl discovers the world and reads therein her destiny.
Du Boisvilliers, in order to obliterate the systems, actually advocated for barring women from becoming mothers entirely.
She actually wrote, no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.
Society should be totally different.
Women should not have that choice.
Precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
Right, so if we just, we have to deprogram people by destroying all cultural hallmarks of femininity.
Okay, by 1963, this perspective is being much more mainstreamed by Betty Friedan.
She writes The Feminine Mystique.
She says that motherhood and marriage are, quote, a comfortable concentration camp, which is, it's unbelievable that this sort of language was considered okay.
That, like, you being in the home with your kids is similar to, you know, a concentration camp where Jews were being murdered by the millions.
No, but she's a very famous person.
She suggested that gender roles turned women into walking corpses.
So the separation between sex and gender has already begun, right?
Because once you separate sex and gender, then you can make people into whatever you want to be.
Two years later, you get John Money.
In 1965, he founds the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.
His basic theory is, of course, that you could make a boy a girl and a girl a boy.
He was most famous for mutilating the victim of a botched circumcision, telling the parents to raise the kid as a girl.
Money argued, quote, gender identity gate is open at birth for a normal child, no less for one born with unfinished sex organs.
So all kids can either be a boy or a girl.
It stays open for at least something over a year after birth.
And that's a lie.
It is not true.
But it has become the basis for gender theory.
By 1968, there's an author named Robert Stoller.
He wrote a book called Sex and Gender, arguing that sex and gender were entirely distinct.
And by 1970, you can hear the entire transgender movement being laid out by Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist.
She was arguing, quote, the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself.
Genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.
Male-female sex would no longer be a standard.
Instead, you would have a reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality.
Freud's polymorphous perversity would probably supersede hetero-homo-bisexuality.
You'd just be gender-fluid, and you'd be sex-queer, and all the rest of the things that we see today.
Firestone foresaw a time of artificial reproduction, where children were born of both sexes, motherhood would be replaced, all to end the tyranny of the biological family.
In 1970, Kate Millett was writing the same thing.
She said that sexual revolution was dependent on, quote, an end to traditional sexual inhibitions and taboos, particularly those that most threatened patriarchal monogamous marriage, homosexuality, illegitimacy, adolescent and pre and extramarital sexuality.
Judith Butler would move in the same direction.
She relied that transgenderism relies on the gender binary, so she was anti-transgenderism.
She said instead, basically, you should just be able to define yourself however you want.
She argued that there is total gender fluidity, which is why you see the bizarre stuff you see today where like a fully physical male will suddenly declare he's a female and all of the leftists will be like, yeah, he is a female.
No, he's not.
But the idea from Butler was this.
She said, we are not carving out a place for autonomy if by autonomy we mean a state of individuation taken as a self-persistent, self-persisting state prior to and apart from any relations of dependency on the world of others.
In other words, the rest of the world has to mirror what you think of you.
So all of this is part and parcel of an attempt to tear down systems.
And Joe Biden is fully in line with this because the Democratic Party has decided to embrace this wholesale.
Here is Joe Biden on Transgender Day of Visibility announcing his fealty to this ideology.
To everyone celebrating Transgender Day of Visibility, I want you to know that your president sees you.
Jill, Kamala, Doug, our entire administration sees you for who you are.
Made an image of God and deserving of dignity, respect, and support.
To parents of transgender children, Affirming your child's identity is one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.
To any transgender American who's struggling, please know you're not alone.
Total insanity, right?
But this is part and parcel of a broader ideology.
So first of all, the idea that Joe Biden sees you, what he means is that he's just going to pretend that you are a member of the sex to which you claim membership.
He's saying that he doesn't see you, right?
He can see what you are, but he's going to ignore that.
He's just going to say you are what you say you are.
Because again, all of the structures of the patriarchal society have placed boundaries on you.
We have to obliterate them.
And we have to focus on kids.
We have to pretend that kids, who are being sexually confused by their parents and the society around them in many cases, that those kids actually are members of the opposite sex.
And then he's sticking his justice department on states that bar the mutilation of kids.
I mean, the DOJ is literally warning states at this point that they are not allowed to prevent mutilation surgeries and shooting little girls full of testosterone.
You're not allowed to prevent that, according to Joe Biden's DOJ.
And you have the Undersecretary for Health and Human Services, Rachel Levine, who is a dude, saying that we need to empower kids to go on puberty blockers.
This is part of this administration's pitch.
That it's gender-affirming healthcare.
That if you say that a boy is a girl and then you start pumping the boy full of estrogen, that this is gender-affirming healthcare.
It's being recommended by the top of this administration.
This is part of a broader ideological push.
It is not rooted in science.
It is not rooted in social data.
It is not rooted in any of this.
It is rooted in a fealty to an ideology that says that the systems of power in the United States are corrupt and have to be torn away.
Now they're suffering politically motivated attacks through state actions against these vulnerable transgender youth.
This is not based upon data.
These actions are politically motivated.
And so we really want to base our treatment and to affirm and to support and empower these youth, not to limit their participation in activities and sports, and even limit their ability to get gender affirmation treatment in their state.
Okay, so the HHS is openly saying right there.
A man who believes he is a woman, Rachel Levine, is saying that it is important that children be, quote-unquote, empowered to take cross-sex hormones.
That's the result of ideology.
That is not the result of anything remotely resembling science.
The White House put out a statement, quote, Today, the Department of Health and Human Services has announced several actions to keep transgender children in Texas and their families safe.
These announcements make clear that rather than weaponizing child protective services against loving families, child welfare agencies should instead expand access to gender-affirming care for transgender children.
By the way, the way this is going to manifest is the taking away of kids who go to school and say that they're a member of the opposite sex from parents who say, no, you're not.
That is the way this is going to manifest.
Now, the American people are not in line with any of this.
It turns out the vast majority of Americans, including Hispanic Americans, who are moving away from the Democratic Party in droves, disagree with the fundamental idea here, which is that America's systems are inherently corrupt and evil and need to be torn away.
Whether we're talking about race or whether we're talking about gender, the idea that the systems of America, which have provided more freedom and prosperity for more human beings than any other systems in the history of mankind, That those systems are inherently bad and need to be wrecked from the inside in favor of gender-fluid silliness or racial tribalism.
Most Americans are not on board with this.
But the Biden administration is.
And the Democratic Party is.
And that's why you're seeing the country driven apart.
Because, I mean, these are fundamental issues.
If you believe that the system of America is inherently bad, if you believe that men and women, any system that perpetuates the belief that men and women exist is inherently bad, if you believe That any system that promotes free markets and free speech and individual rights is inherently bad?
That is not a country that can hold together if half the country doesn't believe that.
But that is what Joe Biden and the Democrats have been pushing.
It is apparent in all of their policy proposals, and it's extraordinarily dangerous.
Alrighty, we've reached the end of the show.
We'll be back here on Monday with much, much more.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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