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Sept. 9, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
43:19
Why The Hard Left Is Cheering Queen Elizabeth II's Death | Ep. 1571
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Queen Elizabeth II dies at the age of 96.
Radical leftists take the opportunity to tear into her life and her legacy.
Plus, podcast movement apologized for apologizing for my existence.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment.
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Every time a historic figure in the West passes away, it seems like it's a chance for a lot of people to dance on that person's grave.
Not particularly because they hate that person, but because they don't like the West very much.
That is the only reason I can cite for why there are so many people on blue-checked Twitter, so many big thinkers out there, who are using Queen Elizabeth II's death as an opportunity to talk about the evils of the British Empire, to talk about the evils of England, to talk about the evils of Western civilization.
The reality is that when a historic figure like Elizabeth II passes away, It reminds us all that there are some pretty stellar things about Western civilization.
It reminds us that the link in the chain that we represent in history.
Are we going to pass on important eternal values to our children?
Or are we going to let those things fade away?
Are we going to let those things be ripped apart by forces that don't like the things that make the West unique?
The thing that made Elizabeth II a unique figure in world history is not only her tenure.
I mean, she presided over the British Empire for 70 years in symbolic fashion, right?
Because that was her job.
She didn't actually have political power.
She was a person who was expected to be a symbol of British unity, which meant really a symbol of Western civilization.
The fact that she presided over the dissolution of the British Empire, the fact that she presided over all of these radical changes that happened in British society, but always held fast to certain principles, both religious and secular, that characterized British society, her death is going to leave a lasting imprint on Britain.
Because now we've moved into a new era in the West in which you are not expected to perform your duty, in which you are not expected to represent, say, Judeo-Christian values to your nation, in which the symbolism of having a person who unites the realm, that sort of thing is seen as passé.
Instead, we are just an agglomeration of various folks who have been sort of thrust together by the vicissitudes of history.
Queen Elizabeth II represented a rebuttal to that.
That's what her life was about.
Her life was about assuming the crown at the grand old age of 25.
When her father passed away prematurely, she already had several children at the time, and she stepped up and her life was really about duty.
In 1947, when she was 21, she made a public radio statement dedicating herself to the realm.
This is in her birthday address at the age of 21.
I'd like you to imagine a 21-year-old today in any Western country making this sort of move.
21-year-olds in America today, to take an example, are some of the most immature human beings who have ever walked the planet.
They're not even expected to be as mature as, in many cases, 15 or 16-year-olds, 21-year-olds.
This is when you are supposed to be living out your truth.
You're not supposed to be assuming duty.
It's a reminder of a time in Western civilization when 21-year-olds were expected to actually be adults, to watch then-Princess Elizabeth dedicating herself and her life to the English people.
I can make my solemn act of dedication with a Herald Empire listening.
I should like to make that dedication now.
It is very simple.
I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family, to which we all belong.
But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone, unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do.
I know that your support will be unfailingly given.
God help me to make good my vow, and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
This is in the immediate aftermath of World War II, obviously.
It also happened to be in the quasi-immediate aftermath of the complete abdication of the crown by the older brother of her father, right?
Her father was the younger son of King George V. His older brother, the queen's uncle, was actually supposed to be the king, but you recall your British history.
In 1936, Edward abdicated to marry a divorcee who happened to be kind of a Nazi sympathizer named Wallace Simpson.
His abdication after less than a year, according to the UK Sun, elevated Prince Albert to King George VI.
Ten-year-old Elizabeth was now heir to the throne.
So, she was only 21 years old when she made this statement.
This was after, by the way, during World War II, she actually drove ambulances on behalf of the British military.
It was a pretty funny story.
Much later in her life, apparently, a Saudi king visited Great Britain, and she arrived.
He got in a car to be driven around, and she was behind the wheel, and she was making a statement that women can drive Because in Saudi Arabia, women were not and still are not allowed to drive.
And she then proceeded to take him on, apparently, an extremely exciting car tour where she was driving at high rates of speed just to freak out the Saudi monarch and demonstrate that women actually were capable of driving.
All right, we'll get to more on the death of Queen Elizabeth II in just one second.
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She was coronated in 1953 in Westminster, Abby.
It was obviously a historic moment because she would then proceed to guide the realm, at least in symbolic fashion, all the way from 1953 to 2022, which makes her the longest-serving British monarch in the history of the empire.
So here was a little bit of the coronation.
You can see the film.
For those who can't see, there's that crown.
That crown weighs just an enormous amount being placed on her head.
According to the UK Sun, the Queen spent her first 10 years in charge overhauling the stuffy, unapproachable image of the royals that Brits were used to, transforming them into a more modern and relatable family.
She also had to deal with the fact that her sister, Margaret, was a rather difficult person.
She televised her annual Christmas broadcast for the first time in 1957.
That is an annual tradition that is now watched by millions of people.
And she obviously became an incredibly popular monarch.
She was very sympathetic.
She got married in 1947, the same year that she made that address talking about how she was dedicating herself to the realm.
And there's all sorts of wonderful film of her.
The Silver Jubilee in 1977, in which she gave a bit of a speech to the British people.
In the same golden fairytale coats that carried her to the coronation in June 1953, Her Majesty and Prince Philip.
to the thunderous cheers of hundreds of thousands of her subjects lining the room.
She goes on a walkabout among her people.
The simple but heartfelt... If you fast forward all the way to 1991, Elizabeth was really the glue that held the royal family together, because obviously her kids were very, very difficult.
Prince Charles, who is now King Charles III, he obviously had an extraordinarily fraught relationship with Princess Diana and with the new queen consort, Camilla.
He had been in love with Camilla.
Camilla was now married to a different man.
He ended up marrying Princess Diana when he was 31.
Diana, I believe, was 19 years old.
And then they had just a very difficult relationship.
Diana was apparently cheating on him.
He was cheating on her.
It was a complete mess.
Princess Diana went into the public eye with the problems in her marriage, which was considered really not what royals do.
Again, if you're a person like Elizabeth II and you're defined by your duty to your country, the idea of spilling all of your dirty marital secrets, which actually have national implications in public to people like Martin Bashir, is something that you are not very much in favor of.
Again, she was an emissary from a time when people were expected to keep their marital problems in-house rather than blasting those out on the front pages of the Daily Mail.
In any case, in 1991, here was Queen Elizabeth II speaking before Congress.
I know what a rare privilege it is to address a joint meeting of your two houses.
Thank you for inviting me.
The concept so simply described by Abraham Lincoln, as government by the people, of the people, for the people, is fundamental to our two nations.
Your Congress and our Parliament are the twin pillars of our civilizations and the chief among the many treasures that we have inherited from our predecessors.
Okay, so that right there, by the way, we should just keep that in mind what she says right there because that is the reason why so many people are deeply upset about, you know, the reaction to Princess, to Queen Elizabeth II's death.
There are a bunch of people on the left who hate Queen Elizabeth because of that.
Because of that.
Because of the idea that there's an Anglo-American tradition of parliamentary rule and democracy and these things are bad.
And we're going to get to the left's reaction to her death because it really is quite astonishing that this historic human being dies and the first reaction of a lot of people is, well, the British Empire was bad.
And colonialism was bad.
And democracy and free trade, apparently, were bad.
These things, historically speaking, came as a package.
That does not dim the evils of colonialism.
It does not mean that imperialism is a good thing.
But as we'll discuss in just a second, trying to pretend that the legacy of the British Empire, or of Queen Elizabeth II, is somehow an evil, just overall it's bad and evil, Because I guess Western civilization is bad.
That is a fool's errand.
As we were talking about with regards to the internal family struggles in 1992, that was the big year, right?
The year after this address to Congress.
That is when the marriage between Diana And Prince Charles started to break up.
That is the same time that there's a biography on Diana that talked about how Diana had sort of been abandoned by the royal family.
Now, the truth is that Diana was, again, not a super easy person.
Diana was, she came into the royal family under kind of dim circumstances, given the fact that Charles had originally dated her older sister.
She'd come in, she was considered the people's princess, but then she also, you know, was not a particularly stable figure.
In any case, when Princess Diana was killed in the car crash in 1997, that sort of historic moment, there was a lot of anger at the royal family because it seemed like they weren't in proper levels of mourning.
She was already divorced from Prince Charles by this time, of course, and the Queen had to make a public statement about the death of Princess Diana.
Here's a little bit of that.
Since last Sunday's dreadful news, we have seen throughout Britain and around the world An overwhelming expression of sadness at Diana's death.
So what I say to you now, as your queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.
First, I want to pay tribute to Diana myself.
She was an exceptional and gifted human being.
In good times and bad, she never lost her capacity to smile and laugh, nor to inspire others with her warmth and kindness.
I admired and respected her for her energy and commitment to others.
Okay, so again, this is sort of Elizabeth II's role is that whenever there is a problem, it was her job to sort of patch everything back together.
We'll get to more of Queen Elizabeth II's life in just one second.
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She famously in 2011 visited Ireland.
The Ireland Independent today has a good piece about this.
Says she will long be remembered for wowing the entire Irish nation with a simple head bow at the Garden of Remembrance in May 2011 to heroes who died fighting her country's army.
That moment of symbolism was enhanced by some superbly well-chosen words later at Dublin Castle.
And then, of course, she gave a speech in the middle of COVID that was, I think, really comforting to a huge number of people across the world, not just in Great Britain in the middle of a time of global turmoil.
Here was the Queen of England talking about COVID and its impact on her country.
I'm speaking to you at what I know is an increasingly challenging time.
A time of disruption in the life of our country.
A disruption that has brought grief to some, financial difficulties to many, and enormous changes to the daily lives of us all.
I hope in the years to come, everyone will be able to take pride in how they responded to this challenge.
And those who come after us will say the Britons of this generation were as strong as any.
That the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet, good-humoured resolve and of fellow-feeling still characterise this country.
The pride in who we are is not a part of our past.
It defines our present and our future.
We should take comfort... Okay, so I mean, it was those sorts of values that she represented, right?
The sort of quiet, solid...
Believe in eternal values over the course of time.
The British stiff upper lip, the idea that you can take on challenge, all those things are what she symbolized.
Now, the backlash to her death materialized immediately.
I mean, not people who were anti her dying, people who were very pro her dying, as it turns out, which is just insane.
I'm sorry, that is an extraordinary response to the death of a woman who literally had a symbolic role, and that symbolic role involved things like telling people to buck up under pressure, to understand their heritage, to believe in the values of democracy.
So it came in a couple forms.
One was the, OK, well, she's a queen.
Who cares?
Whatever.
You know, we're American.
We fought the crown just so we wouldn't have to care about stuff like this.
OK, I get it.
The reality is that the monarchy of Britain right now is not anything remotely resembling the monarchy of Britain in the time of King George III.
She had no political power.
And this is something people ought to remind themselves, is that when they're yelling at Queen Elizabeth II, They're yelling at a person whose role is entirely symbolic.
She had no political power in Britain.
The United States fought King George III and Parliament in order to be free of the political power of King George III.
But the truth is that apparently people have a need for royalty.
In the United States, we've supplanted the idea of a symbolic leader who is Who's like Queen Elizabeth II.
We've supplanted that with a celebrity culture that is filled with babbling idiots who repeat whatever lines are put in front of them and apparently take their cultural cues and political cues from other television writers.
And those are our royalty.
Over here, our royalty is like Kim Kardashian and Jennifer Lawrence.
Over in Britain, the royalty was, you know, Queen Elizabeth II.
That's sort of a difference in kind.
The human desire to look to symbolic leadership, it's still there.
It doesn't disappear just because you get rid of the monarchy.
The danger in the United States is when you actually start to identify the symbolic leadership with actual political power.
That's how you end up with dictators.
That's scary stuff.
But, again, her role was more like that of the American flag, almost, than it was like that of a political leader like a Joe Biden or a Donald Trump or something like that.
So that was form number one that the backlash to her took, which is, ah, she's the queen, who cares?
The other form that the backlash to her took was the British Empire was bad, and she was bad because the British Empire was bad.
Understand that the folks who are saying this are people who are generally historically ignorant or people who fail the easy test of understanding context.
People who seem to believe that the evils of the West are unique, but that its goods are universal, which is precisely the opposite of the truth.
The opposite of the truth is that the evils that the British Empire visited upon the world, which were not insignificant, they're very real to literally millions of human beings, were accompanied by goods.
That were extraordinarily unique to billions of people around the world.
And that those evils that the British Empire visited upon people were certainly not unique to the British Empire.
They're unique human evils.
Those are universal human evils that exist in the human heart.
Pretending that the Brits were the only people who were attempting to expand empire at the time of the British Empire is idiotic.
It's historically ignorant.
The Dutch Empire existed at the exact same time.
The Spanish Empire existed at the exact same time.
The French Empire existed at the exact same time.
There were colonial attempts within Africa.
There were colonial attempts from China.
There were colonial attempts all over the world.
The question is, what distinguished the British Empire from, say, the Russian Empire?
What distinguished the British Empire from the other empires on Earth that were competing with the British Empire?
And there, you have to say that the overwhelming legacy of the British Empire is good.
I know these are difficult words for people to hear.
This does not mean that colonialism overall is a good.
It does not mean there are no costs to colonialism.
It does not mean that countries should seek colonies.
It does not mean it was a good thing for Great Britain to have started implanting forms of government that were in many cases discriminatory and terrible in places like Africa.
It does mean that if you're going to rip on the British Empire wholeheartedly, then you at least ought to acknowledge some of the benefits of the British Empire.
The things that... I'm always just amused to watch people who are living off the legacy of Western institutions, like the British Crown, then turn around and say, well, they're universally terrible.
That's not the way this goes.
So, for example, there's a professor named Uju Anya, who tweeted out, I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire is finally dying.
May her pain be excruciating.
Which is just a delightful sentiment.
This person's tweet was deleted by Twitter, which shouldn't have happened, by the way.
Twitter shouldn't be deleting tweets.
In fact, I think it's good that people leave tweets like that up so we can all stare agog at their stupidity.
This person is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Quote, that wretched woman and her bloodthirsty throne have effed generations of my ancestors on both sides of the family.
She supervised the government that sponsored the genocide.
My parents and siblings survived.
May she die in agony.
She'd eff you and your deaf friends to genocidal colonizers.
Really, really nice stuff there.
Carnegie Mellon sent out a statement saying, I mean, honestly, back your lady.
You're the ones who hired her.
messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account.
Free expression is core to the mission of higher education.
The views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution or the standards of discourse we seek to foster.
I mean, honestly, back your lady. You're the ones who hired her.
But, those sentiments are worth discussing for a second.
Well, it's always concerning when the geniuses at our university are just saying the worst possible things about people who have just died.
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Again, this deep-seated hatred.
For Queen Elizabeth II, which is really deep-seated hatred for the British Empire.
There's a piece in the New York Times that makes sort of the same point.
There's a person named Maya Jasanoff, a professor of history at Harvard.
She has a piece titled, Mourn the Queen and Not Her Empire.
And here's what she says, quote, the end of an era will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution.
She had a different birthday for each role, the actual anniversary of her birth in April plus an official one in June.
And though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles depending on where in her domains she stood.
She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys, and phone.
Of her inner life, we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs.
Well, maybe that's because she actually fulfilled her duty.
Her personal life was simply secondary.
The Queen embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties.
Her final public act was to appoint her 15th Prime Minister.
That's an amazing tenure, by the way.
The first Prime Minister she appointed was Winston Churchill.
And for her unflagging performance of them, she will be rightly mourned.
She has been a fixture of stability and her death in already turbulent times will send ripples of sadness around the world.
But we should not romanticize her era.
For the Queen was also an image, the face of a nation that during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence.
By design, as much as by accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval.
As such, the Queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization, whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.
So you blame her for colonization, you also blame her for decolonization.
This columnist says Elizabeth became queen of a post-war Britain where sugar was still rationed and rubble from bomb damage still being cleared away.
Journalists and commentators promptly cast the 25-year-old as a phoenix rising into a new Elizabethan age.
An inevitable analogy, perhaps an appointed one, the first Elizabethan age in the second half of the 16th century marked England's emergence from a second-tier European state to an ambitious overseas power.
Elizabeth II grew up in a royal family whose significance in the British Empire had swollen even as its political authority shrank at home.
The monarchy ruled an ever-lengthening list of crown colonies, including Hong Kong, India, and Jamaica.
By the way, how's Hong Kong doing now that Britain is no longer involved?
Has that been a real boon for the people of Hong Kong?
I haven't seen it.
Queen Victoria, proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, presided over flamboyant celebrations of imperial patriotism.
Her birthday was enshrined from 1902 as Empire Day.
In 1947, then Princess Elizabeth celebrated her 21st birthday on a royal tour in South Africa.
That's that speech that we quoted earlier.
She was on tour in Kenya when she learned of her father's death.
She presided again over a very long period of time, but the idea here from this columnist is that the British Empire was almost an unalloyed bad.
She says what you never know from the pictures is the violence that lies behind them.
In 1948, the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam.
Well, yeah, it turns out that communist guerrillas are bad.
In 1952, the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to suppress an anti-colonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal systematized torture.
The Mau Mau Revolution was quite a bad thing.
That does not justify human rights violations, but can we not pretend that the people of the British were fighting were just wonderful, liberty-minded folks?
In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden in Yemen in 1963, British governors again declared states of emergency to contend with anti-colonial attacks.
Again, they tortured civilians again.
You can't pretend that colonialism was an unalloyed good, but stop pretending that the British Empire was an unalloyed bad.
The only reason why there are so many people on the left who are apparently sanguine about the death of Queen Elizabeth II is because this is the way they see civilization.
This is what Jamel Hill, who can be counted on for any form of foolishness, she tweeted out yesterday, quote, journalists are tasked with putting legacies into full context, so it's entirely appropriate to examine the Queen and her role in the devastating impact of continued colonialism.
Continued, like as in today.
Is it possible that maybe countries that were decolonized in the 1960s at a certain point should take credit for, you know, the way that they are being run right now?
Meanwhile, Richard Stengel over on MSNBC was doing the same routine.
He was talking about how we need to examine the failings of the British Empire, etc.
I have to say, to your earlier question, why are American news networks dedicating all of this time to Queen Elizabeth's funeral?
I think it's a good question.
I mean, I think it's something, there's a weakness in the American character that still yearns for that era of hereditary privilege, which is the very thing that we escaped from.
I was hereditary privileged.
Or, alternatively, she was a person who stood, again, for things that many Westerners would like to see restored and emulated.
And I don't mean colonialism.
I mean the simple fact that you are supposed to brave struggles, that you have to look to Judeo-Christian values as your guide.
She was a religious person, Queen Elizabeth II.
He also added, by the way, you played a clip of her speaking in Cape Town in 1947.
That's the year apartheid took effect.
British colonialism, which she presided over, had a terrible effect on much of the world.
Okay, this is the core argument.
The core argument that's made by Richard Stengel.
That British colonialism was, again, an unalloyed bad.
Let's just be real about this.
Without the British Empire, the idea of liberty does not exist.
It was the British Empire that ended slavery in the Western Hemisphere.
It was the British Empire that fought the transatlantic slave trade.
That was not happening in Africa.
There's still slave trading happening in Africa and the Middle East right now.
It was the British Empire that actively put resources behind the ending of slavery.
It was the British Empire that instituted democratic protocols in virtually all of its subject lands.
It was the British Empire that spread the idea of political pluralism.
It was the British Empire that spread the idea of capitalism and free markets.
These things did not exist.
I'm pretending.
This was one of the questions that was asked sort of frivolously.
The movie Black Panther, which has come up because it's come up in the context of colonialism.
Ah, this is what Africa would look like if there had been no colonialism.
Would it though?
I mean really like these are serious.
That's a serious question.
There's this sort of countervailing history that the left likes to portray in which if Western foot had never set.
If Western people had never set meaning like Europeans had never set foot in other places on the globe, all the institutions of the West would just naturally have grown up there.
Technology would have just appeared there like extraordinary, extraordinary levels of political unity would have just happened.
Is there a lot of evidence that this is the case?
So historian Neil Ferguson, who I quoted earlier this week, he wrote an entire book about the British Empire in which he goes through all of the vicious brutalities of the British Empire.
And again, there were many.
The British Empire, as I say, was a mixed bag because everything in life is a mixed bag.
But here's what Neil Ferguson points out.
Quote, without the spread of British rule around the world, it's hard to believe the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world.
Those empires that adopted alternative models, again, this is the thing, you can look and see that the rest of the world exists.
When people look at the British Empire and British values, when they look at those in a vacuum, when you look at anything in a vacuum, it looks bad.
This is true of individual human beings, as it is of countries, as it is of empires.
When you look at anything in a vacuum, it looks bad because it has bad things in it.
But all politics, all of life is comparative.
So when you look at the British Empire, you also have to say, okay, what are the alternatives?
The Ottoman Empire, was that, was that a wonderful place?
How about the Russian Empire?
Was that really awesome?
Is today's Chinese Empire really a great thing?
Like, how's this?
The German attempted empire multiple times.
Was that wonderful?
How about the Austro-Hungarian?
Like, how were these empires going?
Were they really that excellent?
As Neil Ferguson says, those empires that adopted alternative models, the Russian and the Chinese, imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples.
Without the influence of British imperial rule, it's hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world as they are today.
India, the world's largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule.
Which, by the way, is why the Indian government paid tribute to Elizabeth II.
After her death, its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press, and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models.
Of course, no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished.
On the contrary, says Neil Ferguson, I've tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation, and the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples.
Yet the 19th century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements, and with the abolition of slavery, free labor, invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications.
It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.
Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since.
In the 20th century, too, it more than justified its own existence for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse.
Without its empire, it is inconceivable Britain could have withstood them.
Again, seeing politics in all of its shades of gray is something that people are simply incapable of doing.
It's very difficult for folks to do that, to accept the bad along with the good.
But even put all that aside, in the end, Elizabeth II was not a person responsible for either colonialism or decolonization.
Elizabeth II was a symbolic figure, and it's precisely that symbol that people don't like.
She was a symbol of a Western civilization that stands up for its own values and its own heritage, that sees all the goods that it has produced over the course of time, and it celebrates those goods.
That is what Elizabeth II represented.
And so with her goes a chain in that A link in that long chain of history.
And what's taking over for it?
I think a lot more drama.
I don't know what King Charles III is going to be like.
According to the BBC, he'll be known as King Charles III.
That was the first decision of the new King's reign.
He could have chosen from any of his foreign names.
He could have been Charles Philip Arthur or George.
Prince William will not be automatically Prince of Wales.
That will have to be conferred on him by his father.
That, of course, is what is going to happen.
William is going to be heir to the throne now.
Apparently Charles will be officially proclaimed King on Saturday.
That's going to happen at St.
James Palace in London.
The King attends a second meeting of the Accession Council along with the Privy Council.
It's not a swearing-in at the start of a British monarch's reign in the style of some other heads of state like the President.
Instead, there's a declaration made by the new King that he'll make an oath to preserve the Church of Scotland.
And what is he actually going to be like as King?
Nobody really knows.
A lot of people have been dreading this because obviously Charles has led a rather interesting personal life.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Aids to King Charles, formerly Prince of Wales, have said the new monarch envisions a slimmed-down, lower-cost royal family that remains at the center of Britain's national life.
To do that, he must unite his family, as the House of Windsor is grappling with strained relationships.
Well, yeah, it's now Queen Elizabeth II.
The reason people liked her is because she wasn't Meghan Markle.
It's because she wasn't using the royal throne as a sort of prop in her own political ambitions or her own attempt to build some sort of public-facing image.
His first task will be to lead a country in mourning as it comes to terms with the death of Queen Elizabeth.
He's expected to address the nation on Friday and then later tour it.
King Charles only has a 42% approval rating.
Palisades said they expect his popularity to rise as the country grows accustomed to him in the role of king.
He is the oldest person to ascend to the British throne because he is taking over well into his... How old is he at this point?
King Charles III.
He's 73 and he's taking over for his mom, which demonstrates how long his mom was the monarch.
As Prince, Charles was more than willing to use his status to push for change, particularly on issues related to the environment and climate.
In the past, he's written to British government ministers to lobby on subjects ranging from the plight of the Patagonian toothfish to the dominance of big chain supermarkets.
He has designed his own town and launched a brand of organic food.
Officials say that King Charles will step back but not totally abandon those campaigning ways.
He will be a convener of kings, said an aide who added the king intends to use his contacts to bring people together to solve problems.
Some say the prince was right to use his time waiting to become king to push for change.
Some of his campaigns have proven farsighted, according to others, because of course he's been big in the green movement.
But again, this is not really his job, right?
His job is to be symbolically uniting the nation.
Again, the West needs more symbols that unite and fewer Sort of cheap political leaders who divide.
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Meanwhile, as I say, you know, we here in the United States, we like to flatter ourselves.
We don't have monarchs.
We don't do this Elizabeth II thing.
No, we do.
We just elect them and then we treat them like monarchs.
I've been railing for years against, for example, the idiotic spectacle of the State of the Union Address.
I hate the State of the Union Address.
It's monarchic.
It's more lavish than anything the royal family does.
I mean, we spend more money on the president's vacations than the Brits spend on the royal family.
In fact, you know, our presidents aren't supposed to be like regular people.
We elect dullards to the highest offices in the land, and then we treat them like monarchs.
Which is why I suppose Corine Jean-Pierre spent yesterday defending the fact that Joe Biden has been taking like eight vacations every month.
17% of Americans have, according to this Gallup poll, have canceled vacations or traveled less.
The president's been to his beach house six times this year.
He's been in North and South Carolina on vacation.
Has the president himself considered personally reducing his spending because of inflation or had the administration reduced spending?
So can I say, I'll say this, the times that the president has gone to Delaware, not including and we were very clear that when he went to South Carolina in August, And Rehoboth, he was going to go spend time with his family, which every president does.
That is not unusual.
That is not uncommon to do.
And the president has a right to spend time with his family, just like every other American across the country.
Well, is every other American taking this many vacations from their job where you're the most powerful person on the planet?
Didn't know that.
But again, the way that Americans see their politicians is essentially like royalty.
We have a couple of royalty sort of oriented things that we in America like to do.
We have our celebrity class, those are royalty.
And then we have our politicians, who we treat like royalty.
Both of these things are unbelievably stupid.
The biggest problem is with treating our politicians like royalty, because when you do that, they actually start to act like kings, like old school kings.
So the thing about the monarchy that used to be that is the monarchy used to have actual power.
Now the monarchy has no power in Britain.
But when you unite celebrity worship, With political power, what you end up with is the possibility of people using that extraordinary power in order to crack down on their political opponents.
Today's perfect example of this, and it really is quite frightening actually, is Kathy Hochul.
So Kathy Hochul is the governor of New York, and she tweeted out a couple of days ago, quote, Everyone needs to do their part to combat gun violence.
American Express, MasterCard, and Visa should categorize firearm purchases and flag as suspicious activity, just like they do for millions of other transactions.
Together, we can help stop gun trafficking and keep New Yorkers safe.
So again, the idea here is that now your credit card company is supposed to keep tabs on you if you exercise your Second Amendment rights.
And this is part and parcel of a broader left-wing attempt to basically cudgel corporate America into doing their bidding.
Using ESG to tell energy companies that they need to stop drilling for oil and natural gas, for example.
Attempting to get credit card companies to remove NRA giveaways and breaks that you get on your credit card because the NRA is super, super bad.
Unbanking of large swaths of the American public that the left would really, really like to see.
That sort of stuff is scary.
Again, when you unite worship of government with powerful government figures, you end up with some really negative stuff.
And if you're talking about things that are capable of splitting apart a polity, that would be it.
Once politicians start using the auspices of private business in order to shut down their political opposition, that's truly frightening stuff.
By the way, this applies on the left as well as the right.
I mentioned before that there's this idiot professor from Carnegie Mellon University who was putting out this tweet about how she hoped that Queen Elizabeth II suffered on her deathbed.
Well, that tweet was taken down by Twitter.
That's not something Twitter should be doing.
When you have private corporations that are basically acting as censors, that is not a good thing.
It's not good when Mark Zuckerberg goes on Joe Rogan and admits that the FBI basically asked him to quash the Hunter Biden story.
That sort of stuff is not worthy of a great republic.
But more and more, we don't have a great republic so much.
In order to sort of restore that, we're going to have to restore some of the common bonds and common vision that made America unique.
So actually, I do have one piece of good news today.
So, you know, remember a couple of weeks ago, I went over to Podcast Movement in Dallas.
It's a sort of personal piece of good news, but I think it has some larger I think it has some larger consequences for the American public debate.
So you'll remember that it was a national news story because I went over to this conference called Podcast Movement.
We had bought a booth over there and I just walked the floor.
I happened to be in town for actually another event and my people were like, do you want to come in?
Do you want to say hello?
I went, I walked the floor a little bit and Podcast Movement then put out this abject apology for my presence.
They said that my very presence, my very existence was threatening to some people and they couldn't and they regretted the harm that it had caused.
Well, yesterday, finally, they decided that they were going to back off of that.
So, they put out a statement suggesting that they were apologizing for that.
They said, quote, as we stated, we're continuing to evaluate our policies and guiding social media and events with inclusivity, diversity, and respect for all.
We have to start by sincerely apologizing to Mr. Shapiro for our reaction when he visited a booth we sold his company.
That wasn't right.
So that is a good sign.
That's a good sign for America.
When people back off of censorious viewpoints, that is a very good.
In fact, this may be the first time I've actually seen.
And so good for podcast movement.
Again, no hard feelings.
That's the way this works.
If you do the right thing, then we praise you.
Not just on the right, but in the center.
People who said this is ridiculous, you can't do this.
You can't just call yourself a sort of pro-free speech, pro-diversity of viewpoint event, and then ban the biggest podcaster on the political right, and the biggest political podcast in the country.
You can't do that.
And so good for podcast movement.
Again, no hard feelings.
That's the way this works.
If you do the right thing, then we praise you.
And if you do the wrong thing, then we smack you.
And podcast movement backed off.
And I think that that actually is a good sign for the country because again, if we're going to have any shared values, one of those values has to be the ability of people to speak freely on a variety of political topics, even if we disagree with them.
I know that that's a hard one for many people on the left, but it also happens to be incredibly valuable.
So whenever there's a victory in the business sphere about that.
As we just saw with Podcast Movement, that is worthy of praise.
And thanks also to our allies and our business partners over at Cumulus who had essentially told Podcast Movement they continued along these lines.
They were going to pull their money and they would stop sponsoring Podcast Movement.
Good for Podcast Movement for recognizing the failure of the principles that they had suggested they actually believed in.
And I'm glad that they've reverted back to a more free speech appropriate attitude.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it because we're going to be getting into The continued energy failures in California plus the hilarity of DC council members now complaining about illegal immigration.
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