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Nov. 17, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
55:20
Chuck Schumer’s Great Replacement Theory | Ep. 1613
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says America isn't producing enough kids, so we have to amnesty 11 million illegal immigrants, 12 Republican senators vote to enshrine same-sex marriage in federal law, and the fallout from Trump's 2024 announcement continues.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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There's something that folks call online the Celebration Paradox.
The Celebration Paradox is essentially when a person on the left says a thing, and they say it in celebratory fashion, and it's good.
It's a good thing.
And then you say, well, you know, I don't like that thing so much.
And they say, how dare you even notice this thing?
You're not celebrating.
And if you're not celebrating it, this means that you're super bad.
If you even mention that it's happening, this means that you are super bad.
There's a great example of this yesterday.
Chuck Schumer, who is going to maintain his majority leader status thanks to Republican underperformance in the last midterm election.
Chuck Schumer yesterday, he was talking about why there needs to be an amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants.
And the case that essentially he made was the Great Replacement Theory.
So the Great Replacement Theory is this theory that basically there are people who are purposefully bringing in folks from south of the border to replace people who are not being born in the United States in an attempt to change the demographics of the country.
And that's considered a racist theory, because after all, the idea that there are people who are being shipped into the country of different races and ethnicities, and that that's going to change the demographic makeup of the country and therefore the voting base of the country, if you oppose this, this means that you are a racist.
Now, here's the reality.
As somebody who believes that ethnicity is not destiny, that demography is not destiny, I don't really care where people come from, so long as they actually reflect the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
And as we've seen throughout American history, there are populations that come here, and they come in seeking welfare benefits, or they come in seeking democratic policies, and then they shift over to the Republican side of the aisle, then we're evenly split.
You're seeing this happening right now, for example, in the American Hispanic community.
And the American Hispanic community voted much more evenly Republican Democrat in the last midterm election than they did a couple of election cycles ago.
So populations change.
But the theory that was put out there by people on the right was originally promoted by people on the left.
And we talked about this, that Roy Tishera, John Giudice, they wrote an entire book called The New Emerging Democratic Coalition.
No emerging Democratic majority that suggested this was the future of the Democratic Party.
That for about 20 years, this was the line from the Democratic Party.
That there was going to be a rising coalition of minorities, and they were going to vote heavily Democrat, and they were going to replace the white voters of the United States.
The white voters were going to decrease in the size and scope, and therefore there would be an everlasting Democratic majority.
And people on the right, some people on the right were like, well, that's bad.
And the answer to that is to restrict immigration.
There were some people who were racially tinged, were like, well, it's about race, right?
The Democrats are talking in terms of race.
And so we will also talk in terms of race.
Neither of those two things are good.
But you were labeled a crazy person if you suggested that there were Democrats who in fact are seeking to change the demographic of the electorate.
to promote particular purposes. Well, Chuck Schumer, who is the Senate Majority Leader, just said it out loud yesterday. It's kind of amazing. Now, if you say it and you're smiling about it, then it's good. If you say it and you're not smiling about it, then this means that you're evil and Hitlerian. So here is Chuck Schumer saying just the Great Replacement Theory yesterday.
Now more than ever, we're short of workers. We have a population that is not reproducing it on its own with the same level that it used to.
The only way we're going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants, the dreamers, and all of them.
Because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers, but get a path to citizenship.
I mean, it's an amazing statement.
He says the birth rate part right out loud.
There are people on the other side of the aisle say, well, you know, declining American birth rates are actually a really, really bad thing.
That if you wish to have a durable civilization, you need to actually reproduce within that civilization.
You can't just keep bringing in people from other civilizations, and then, especially if you're the Democrats and you have no interest in actually assimilating people to American traditions, American ways of life, you don't actually like those ways of life, you think the Constitution and Declaration are kind of bad, that they're systemically racist or whatever.
And when you bring people in from other civilizations who don't actually have any history with those particular documents or those particular ideas, then that's a bad thing.
But if you're Chuck Schumer and you say it's a good thing, then it's totally, totally fine.
Well, this speaks to something broader.
And what this speaks to is an underlying question.
And that question came up in the U.S.
Senate yesterday.
What this speaks to, the part that, you know, we can talk about the immigration, the fact that Chuck Schumer's immigration policy is ridiculous, that you leave a wide open border and you propose to amnesty 11 million illegal immigrants, but what you're really doing is you're creating a giant sucking sound north.
Essentially, you're saying that anyone who crosses the border illegally will eventually become an American citizen.
We're already having, month on month, 240,000, 240,000 Border encounters between border police and people attempting to get across the border.
That's not including the gotaways.
And the number of people who are immigrating to the country illegally right now is extraordinarily high.
We're talking millions of people every single year.
Two, three million people every single year.
These are big, big numbers.
But put aside the immigration issue.
The issue that he sort of states and then just blows right past is the fact that Americans are not having babies.
The fact that in the West, people have just stopped having babies.
The declining birth rates are actually a problem.
Now, we on the right say, yes, declining birth rates are a problem.
They're a moral problem.
They, by the way, are also a logistical problem.
The fact is that if you are on the left and you wish to support a massive inverted pyramid of a social structure in which a few people are supporting a lot of people on welfare, and then the demographic base of that inverted pyramid is getting smaller and smaller because fewer and fewer babies are going to be born, what you need to do is ship in a bunch of cheap labor in order to prop up that demographic base.
That's essentially the case that he's making, Chuck Schumer.
It's a bad case.
It's a bad moral case.
The answer would be, theoretically, maybe people in America should have more babies.
Maybe if you wish to preserve a civilization and certain institutions, it's important that parents who have a history with those institutions actually have kids.
But folks on the left don't actually want people to have kids, apparently.
Right?
That's not... One of the solutions he proposes is not, maybe we should have more babies.
Maybe we should encourage people to get married and have babies.
That's not one of the solutions.
The solution is, what if we bring people from different parts of the world who may or may not share our values?
And frankly, we don't care if they share our values.
And actually, we kind of hope they don't share our values because we don't even share our values.
That's Chuck Schumer's proposal.
And that's an amazing proposal.
And it blows right past the problem at the core of our civilization, which is that we are a civilization that does not have a future.
We have taken all the fundamental elements of a civilization and we have carved them away in the name of radical individual autonomy.
This is not a call for fascism.
This is not a call for restricting people by force of law.
What this is a call for is encouraging the durability of social institutions that undergird every fundamental civilizational good.
And one of those happens to be marriage.
I know that we in this country, we've redefined marriage, we've decided that marriage doesn't matter anymore.
But it turns out that when you get rid of marriage and people are getting married at 28 and 30, if they even get married at all, and when they're having one kid instead of four kids, and when the number of people who are getting married at all is declining markedly, What you end up with is a population that doesn't reproduce and a population that doesn't actually pass on values to its kids because it doesn't have any kids.
And this is a major problem.
This is why I've been talking a lot over the past week about the issue of same-sex marriage.
And a lot of folks are like, well, you know, it's a dead issue.
I mean, the Supreme Court decided in Obergefell.
Well, yes, it is a legally dead issue because it has been decided in Obergefell.
But any society that redefines marriage itself It's making an enormous mistake.
It's making an enormous mistake.
So yesterday, the Senate of the United States voted to push forward same-sex marriage legislation that they are calling the Respect for Marriage Act, which is absurd.
It is not a Respect for Marriage Act because when you fundamentally change the definition of the word marriage, that is not respect for marriage.
You can call it a lot of things.
You can't call it respect for marriage.
You can suggest that it is an enshrinement of same-sex marriage.
You can call it the broadening of rights, if that's the rubric you wish to use.
What you can't suggest is that it's respect for marriage.
It's as though you are changing the definition of the color blue to yellow, and then you call the act the respect for blue act.
That's not what it is.
When you fundamentally change the definition of a thing, that is not respect for the thing, that is changing the thing.
Let's at least acknowledge what is happening here.
Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, landmark legislation that would cement same-sex marriage rights into federal law cleared a decisive hurdle in the Senate on Wednesday, with lawmakers aiming to get the measure to President Biden's desk in the coming weeks.
The 62-37 vote underscored how a once politically divisive issue now draws bipartisan support, despite opposition from some social conservatives, less than a decade after same-sex marriage became legal nationwide under a 2015 Supreme Court ruling.
Okay, so it is 2022.
It has been seven years.
In seven short years, the Republican Party, like one-third of the senators in the Republican Party, actually supported a bill that defines marriage in federal law as man-man, female-female.
Which is an amazing, amazing thing.
I mean, that is a social transformation on a massive scale.
The Respect for Marriage Act, if signed into law, would codify the ability of same-sex as well as interracial couples to get married.
Okay, so the reason that the left added interracial couples is because nobody's had a problem with that for literally decades in the United States.
Like no one.
If you look at the rates in polls of people who approve of interracial relationships, the answer is nearly 100%.
The Democrats threw that in there so that they can say that if you voted against this, it's because you don't like interracial marriage, right?
It's just one of these stupid legislative tricks that people play all the time with omnibus packages, as I mentioned yesterday.
They basically have a crap sandwich of a bill, and you add in one provision that's good, and then people vote against the crap sandwich and say, oh, well.
You oppose the provision that's good.
You pass a trillion dollar boondoggle, but in there you say, and also, we wish to give a million dollars to women who have disabled babies.
And you're like, I'm not going to vote for that bill.
You hate women with disabled babies.
This is the stupid game that we play in American legislative politics.
It's not about interracial marriage.
That's not what this bill is about at all.
It is about Same-sex marriage, obviously.
The bill needed 60 votes to proceed under Senate rules, and it got, apparently, 62.
The proposal faces at least one more vote in the Senate would need approval by the House by the end of the year to become law.
So they're gonna try and ram this thing through before Republicans take over the House of Representatives.
Joe Biden reiterated Wednesday he backed the legislation the House is expected to pass it after approving a similar bill earlier this year.
So, what exactly happened here?
Well, what is in the bill?
It basically says that even if Obergefell were to be overturned in the future, the federal definition of marriage would still include male, male, female, female.
Also, it does not require states to issue licenses to same-sex couples, but it does require states to essentially assume full faith and credit For marriages that happen in other states.
So let's say Texas does not have same-sex marriage, but California does.
Okay, so you get on a plane, you get married in California, you come back to Texas, and now Texas has to treat your same-sex marriage the same way under law it would treat a male-female dyad.
That's what this says.
What it also says is it says that if you have a sincere religious belief, and it's within the context of your religious institution, then the law cannot force you to cater to same-sex couples.
So, for example, you are a church.
The law, under the federal law, can't force you to participate in a same-sex marriage.
The non-profit status shall not be endangered if you are a church.
Now, first of all, the reality is that the Supreme Court would be very likely to rule that way anyway, so you're not actually adding any additional rights for religious people.
So that's been the sort of fig leaf for the Republicans.
Well, we're broadening religious rights.
We're just acknowledging the reality and then we are broadening religious rights.
That's not what this is doing.
You're not broadening one single thing in this bill.
You're also complete neglecting the fact that religious people don't just, they're not just religious at church or synagogue.
I'm not just a religious person at my church or synagogue.
I'm a religious person throughout my life.
It dominates my behavior.
This is true for literally all religious people.
If you ask a Christian, are you only Christian at church or in your home?
They would say, no, I'm Christian throughout my life.
I'm Christian in how I run my business.
And I bring those principles to how I run my business.
For example, which is why you've seen cases that have arisen in places like Colorado with Masterpiece Cake Shop, where a baker has now been dragged into court repeatedly told that by the Civil Rights Commission in Colorado that he has to bake a cake for a gay couple, that he has to bake a cake for a transgender person's gender coming out, that he has to bake a cake for the Satanists, right?
The idea here is that even though he is a Christian in his life, he doesn't get to be a Christian when he's a baker.
Now, the Supreme Court has ruled in his favor, but they did so under the artistic license sort of notion.
Now, what this bill really does, what it really does, is it establishes a social standard.
The social standard is The same as the Supreme Court tried to argue, Justice Kennedy tried to argue in Oberstfell itself, which is the only reason that you would think that society should treat same-sex couples differently than male-female couples.
The only reason you would think that is because you are a bigot.
That's what this bill actually does.
What this bill actually does is it says the only reason that we are going to allow you to avoid the consequences of our belief that same-sex marriage is a wonderful moral good is because you're one of those hackneyed, ridiculous religious people who believe in that silly book.
And if you can show that you seriously believe in that silly book, then we will allow you to believe in that silly book, but only in the building that has a cross on top of it.
Only in the building that has like a Magen David, that has a Jewish star on the side of it.
Those are the only buildings where you can actually believe the things you believe.
And by the way, the only reason you would believe that is because of the stupid book.
If it were not for the stupid book, you would totally agree with us.
There is no rational reason why you would believe that society requires preference for male-female dyads as opposed to male-male or female-female.
And this of course has now been ensconced in our public education system.
There are consequences.
On the state level, where Obergefell has already been in play for a long time, these consequences include the idea that you're supposed to start teaching same-sex marriage to kids at the same time that you're teaching them about marriage, you're also teaching them about male-male, female-female, and Jackie has two mommies, or whatever.
The idea is to treat natural law as bigotry.
That's what this bill does.
And this is why it's absurd that Republicans are voting for it.
It's a silliness.
It's not just a silliness.
It's actually an egregious wrong.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that this actual issue is about same-sex marriage, because it's not.
Same-sex marriage, as I've said before, is merely the tip of the iceberg.
It's sort of the last step in recognizing that marriage itself, definitionally, has been destroyed over the course of the last half century in the United States, because it has.
Marriage used to be recognized as about family formation.
Family was the essential unit of society.
Historically speaking, it was not the individual who was the central unit of society, it was families.
Families, you were born into one.
You're not born as an individual in a forest somewhere.
You're born into a family, into a family structure, with a mom and a dad, historically speaking.
With brothers and sisters, usually grandparents were part of this broader family structure.
You were born, in essence, into institutions that pre-existed you, and you were expected to perpetuate new institutions that would exist for your children.
And society was dependent on this.
These little platoons, as Edmund Burke suggested, you have loyalty to them, then you have loyalty to the local community that's made up of a bunch of families who think similarly, and then you have loyalty to a broader social structure that encompasses those families.
But the family was key to society.
And the assumption is that when you got married, the key constituent, the key element of marriage was not, in fact, what we would call romantic love.
The key element of marriage was what we would call duty.
It was duty to your wife, if you're a man.
Duty to your husband, if you are a woman.
Duty to your children, for both.
This is what marriage was about.
And this is why marriage, when you were looking for somebody to marry, typically you didn't do it in rom-com fashion.
The way that you found somebody to marry is you did it through your church, you did it through your synagogue, you tried to find someone who shared values with you, which is why durable marriages tend to share values.
Now, of course, the idea is that you're only supposed to get married if you get married at all.
Basically, on a whim.
But essentially, you have sex first before you fall in love with somebody.
Then maybe you fall in love with them, and then maybe if you're like one of those old-fashioned people, for old-fashioned reasons, maybe you get married.
Because marriage is no longer about the generation of a new family unit.
Instead, what marriage really is about is about your mutual pleasure with somebody else.
That's all marriage.
But once that happens, same-sex marriage is the natural coda to that.
Same-sex marriage is not really the issue that we're talking about here.
What we're actually talking about is the enshrinement in American law of the idea that marriage is no longer about family formation.
Because it's not about family formation.
Because family is not about voluntary formation.
The idea of the voluntaristic family is a very new idea in all of human history.
Before that, it was just a thing that happened.
It was a thing you were born into.
You didn't volunteer yourself into a family, you're born into one.
You didn't even volunteer yourself in human history into a family formation in terms of marriage sometimes.
Like 40% of all marriages in about 1940 were shotgun weddings, where somebody would get pregnant and then the baby was early, right?
The idea was that family formation was a natural part of humanity, and it was something that society had to prop up.
It was something that society had to foment.
Society had to have social standards, not even by law, but just socially.
You had to have social standards that promoted things like monogamy, that promoted things like sex within marriage, that promoted things like have babies.
These were all social standards that were considered societal goods and necessities, not just goods, necessities.
Very, very important stuff.
And then we decided that we were essentially going to discard all of that.
We decided that it was no longer necessary in a prosperous society that we had substitutes for things like the institution of family.
And this came about for a variety of reasons.
Birth control is a big one because it turned out that nature cut very much against the idea that voluntaristic romantic association was the key to life because usually that resulted in a baby and then somebody had to take care of a baby and so the family would automatically form around the baby.
Birth control severed that connection, so that was one thing.
And then welfare came about.
Welfare completely severed the connection because now the idea was even if you had a baby, daddy doesn't have to be around.
Government will be the daddy and government will pay for everything.
And so marriage basically became sort of an evolutionary holdover.
It was essentially a vestigial organ.
It was like your appendix.
It was a vestigial organ in institutional life.
Well, the problem is marriage is not vestigial.
Marriage remains essential.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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So I'm not going to blame people today who support same-sex marriage and who think that same-sex marriage is Because, again, when we talk about traditional marriage, you have to understand that traditional marriage was lost 50 years ago, 60 years ago.
So, the idea that the marriage was a vestigial organ in public life, that has bleed-over effect, right?
We're talking about no-fault divorce, which leads to tremendous levels of singlehood.
We're talking about rising levels of people never getting married, rising levels of cohabitation.
So, the natural outcome of that is that any people who love each other should be able to get married because, after all, that's what marriage is.
Marriage is love.
Marriage is not duty.
Marriage is not family formation.
Marriage is none of those things.
Okay, but society has no interest in any of that stuff.
This is the whole point about marriage as a societal institution, which is what we are talking about when we are talking about law.
If the law is a teacher.
If the law has impact on culture.
Then, of course, the laws are now going to change to reflect a cultural mood that suggests that marriage is no longer valuable or important.
That's what we're watching in the United States Senate.
That's why you're seeing so... There are many people of traditional bent who can't even explain to themselves or their kids why it is important that marriage be between a man and a woman.
But it's actually a very easy thing to explain.
Because historically speaking, for literally all of human history, there was an understanding that man-woman-child was the definition of family formation, and that marriage lay at the root of that.
That's what marriage was designed to do, societally speaking.
Everyone understood this.
This was not even a question.
But now, when you carve out the heart of marriage, and you say, well, that's not what marriage is.
Marriage is just love.
Is it any wonder that people have a hard time defending the idea of traditional marriage when it's been carved out decades ago?
So that's what's happening.
And then we have declining birth rates.
We have skyrocketing rates of single motherhood in American society.
40% of all babies in the United States are born out of wedlock in the United States.
People aren't even having babies.
The reproduction rate in the United States has dropped from approximately 3.
The fertility rate has dropped from approximately 3 in the 1950s all the way down to about 1.7 today.
This is true, by the way, not just in the United States.
It's happening throughout Western civilization.
And so, of course, as a natural corollary of that, what you're going to end up with is that societies who continue to actually see family formation as an important thing and baby-making as an important thing, they're going to continue to produce babies.
And we're going to ship those babies in, right?
That's how you end up with Chuck Schumer's apparently almost bizarrely paternalistic notion that there should be a group of people, this cadre of elites, who don't value marriage, who don't value children, who don't have children, who don't think that this is the purpose of life, that at best, if you have a kid, you should have maybe one.
If you're like crazy, you have two.
If you're nuts, you have two.
No one has four.
Four is nuts.
If you have four, five, six kids, this is because you're a crazy religious bigot.
And so that society can only survive by shipping in kids from other societies that actually value still having kids.
This is Chuck Schumer's idea.
It's part of a broader societal breakdown.
Again, when you get rid of large-scale societal institutions, that has consequences.
Now, you can think that those consequences are good for human freedom.
This is what people say about same-sex marriage because it puts at the very heart of who you are, your sexual identity, and who you wish to sleep with, and who you wish to have romantic relations with.
And society's job is to apparently just validate and green light and rubber stamp all of your particular predilections and goals and like that.
That is society's job.
Society's job is not to reinforce societal institutions that allow for the continuation of that society.
That's not society's job.
Society's job is to make you feel good about yourself.
And that's what the government is here to do.
This is what Justice Kennedy actually writes in Obergefell.
He says that petitioners are entitled to respect and honor by the government.
Since when?
The government's job is not to grant you respect or honor.
The government's job is to provide you basic services under the Constitution of the United States and to protect basic civil institutions that allow for the propagation of the society.
But again, we've changed our entire mindset around this.
And the natural outcome of this is no babies, no marriage.
You gotta fill that gap somehow, so you ship in literally tens of millions of immigrants, legally or illegally, in order to fill that gap.
You validate abortion as a wonderful thing.
Abortion is not just A thing that is safe, legal, and rare, right?
A moral negative.
Abortion is actually a societal positive because that allows us to continue to express our sexual identities and freedoms in the way that we so choose.
It allows romantic love to lie at the center of our life as opposed to family formation.
Family formation is seen as an actual bad.
Accidental family formation is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you, is that you and a person who you're having sex with actually make a baby.
By accident.
And I say by accident in quotation marks there because, again, A foreseeable consequence of having sex is the possibility of having children.
This has been true for all of mammalian propagation.
But abortion is now seen as an actual act of good.
I mean, this is what AOC says, right?
AOC says abortion is a class struggle.
Abortion is a necessity.
Abortion is a wonderful, validating thing.
It makes life better.
Here's AOC.
Forcing poor and working class people to give birth against their will, against their consent, against their ability to provide for themselves or a child is a profound economic issue and it's certainly a way to keep a workforce
This is the last part, by the way.
Even within her own rubric, what she's saying at the very end there is totally crazy.
I mean, if you actually want to keep people in the workforce, what you do is prevent them from having babies.
Because it turns out that women who have kids tend to work less than women who don't have kids.
So that last part is just stupid on its face.
But what she's actually saying there, the sort of flip in logic, which is that having babies is a bad.
And you can't force people.
See, what society used to say is, we will actually help create institutions around women who have babies because they are doing important things, like the most important thing that any species can do, which is reproduce the species and then raise the young of that species.
We will actually propagate and create institutions That are excellent for the woman and for the child.
And we've gotten away with that.
Marriage doesn't matter anymore.
Marriage is bad.
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and all of that.
And so the natural corollary of that is we have to get rid of the baby because babies are burdens.
Babies are a problem.
Babies are an obstacle to the individual human happiness that I seek.
Again, when you get rid of marriage, it has all sorts of consequences.
It leads to the idea that kids are completely irrelevant.
It also leads to the idea, by the way, that human beings are completely androgynous.
Because after all, if the suggestion is that women are burdened by babies, that the chief biological function of female of a species is no longer relevant, That, by the way, from an evolutionary biology perspective, put the morality aside, from an evolutionary biological perspective, the chief purpose of having sexual dichotomy in any species is the propagation of the species.
That is the purpose of the thing.
It is why women have ovaries.
The fact that this even has to be explained demonstrates how far we have sunk as a society in terms of basic logic and reason and basic biology.
But what this means is that women can be men and men can be women, because after all, that is the goal, right?
I mean, the goal is to androgynize everyone.
Everything is just about romantic love feeling.
Marriage is about romantic love feeling.
And your gender is about romantic love feeling.
And that can't be obscured by such basic human realities as biology.
I mean, biology itself is an obstacle.
Which is why you see AOC and the rest of her cadre promoting this notion that men can be women and women can be men.
And that's what the science says.
The science does not say that, by the way.
I think another thing that I'd like to address is that the same folks who tell us and told us that COVID's just a flu, that climate change isn't real, that January 6th was nothing but a tourist visit, are now trying to tell us that transgender people are not real.
And I would say that their claim is probably just as legitimate as all their others, which is to say, not very much at all.
Okay, I mean, I'm sorry.
This sort of ridiculous lumping together of everyone is a stupid way of avoiding a reality, which is that the same people who are telling you that marriage is not important, that abortion is an act of good, are the same people who are telling you that men can be women and women can be men, because those ideas are deeply tied together.
They're deeply tied together.
If marriage is rooted in the idea of man, woman, child, and if abortion is rooted in the idea that that should not be the case, and if the idea behind all of that is that androgynous sexual identity is the thing that matters more than anything, that you can identify as anything you want to be, of course that's all tied together.
That is part of the same basic philosophy.
By the way, you can see how the left is now trying to prop up social institutions, alternative social institutions.
So what are the alternative social institutions to family?
Family was designed for economic reasons.
And when I say designed, I mean evolutionarily arose for basic economic reasons as well as basic biological reasons, right?
Consanguinity, the idea that you share blood with your children is a very important thing, but it also meant that you are now an economic unit.
You had to support that economic unit.
Family was the structure for support for the people who are related to you.
That's what family was.
It was an economic unit.
Which is why Joseph Schumpeter, the advocate of capitalism, suggested that capitalism, in atomizing individuals into work units, might actually break down the family.
Now, it didn't have to necessarily do that, because families could also be seen as units, economically speaking.
When you had dad working and mom part-time working, or dad working and mom not working, and they were doing it to bring home the bacon for family.
Which, by the way, is in fact how families generally operate.
It's why married men make more money than single men.
If you have a substitute for the family unit, what's it going to be?
It's going to look like something like what San Francisco is doing, the logical outcome of this in policy terms.
According to KRON4 in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed has announced the launch of a new guaranteed income program for San Francisco's trans community.
The Guaranteed Income for Trans People program will provide low-income transgender San Franciscans With $1,200 every month for up to 18 months to help address financial insecurity within the trans community.
So now if you're a man who identifies as a woman, you're going to get a guaranteed income in San Francisco.
By the way, if you actually look at the form to file for this thing, according to our friends over at Libs of TikTok, there are 96 genders you can pick from.
Isn't that exciting?
So if you just want $1,200 a year or $1,200 a month, if you want $1,200 a month, all you have to do as a man is say that you are gender non-binary.
Or say that you are two-spirit, or whatever you decide to call yourself.
The pilot program is the first guaranteed income initiative to focus solely on trans people.
Which, by the way, is apparently non-discriminatory.
It's non-discriminatory to specifically pick people of a particular gender identity and then just give them money.
It will provide regular, unconditional cash transfers to individuals or households who qualify, according to the mayor's office.
This differs from other social safety net practices by providing a steady, predictable stream of cash to recipients to spend as they see fit, without limitations.
Ah, the substitution.
The beautiful end product of left-wing utopia.
We've reached the end point.
Marriage is not important.
Family formation is not important.
Gender is not important.
The only thing that's important is that the government support you as an atomistic individual without any tie to reality.
It's very, very exciting stuff.
Alright, well we're going to talk about another aspect of the moral breakdown of society.
You know, things that we used to take for granted that we have now broken down.
We'll get to that in just one moment.
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Well folks, last week we released a brand new episode of The Search, innit?
I sat down with newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Jordan B. Peterson in Tel Aviv.
It is a fantastic and unique conversation.
You're not going to be able to see it anywhere else.
This episode is available exclusively at DailyWare+.
So if you're not yet a member, Head on over to dailywire.com slash ben and join us.
That's dailywire.com slash ben.
Okay, so if we're talking about the destruction of institutions in our society, that comes complete with the destruction of sort of basic moral standards in our society because, of course, morality is an institution.
And there's a notion that has become very prevalent in our society that morality does not have absolutes.
There's no such thing as an absolute good or an absolute right or an absolute wrong.
And in any given situation, there are multiple points of view, which is why, in the end, the only thing that we can rely on is radical subjectivism.
This is what we have decided upon when it comes to marriage.
Radical subjectivism is now a substitute for the basic idea of an Aristotelian good when it comes to how we act vis-a-vis members of the opposite sex and kids.
And none of that matters.
The only thing that matters is how we feel about it in the end.
Well, the same thing holds true if you like that sort of thing.
The same thing is going to hold true in business.
And this is what we are seeing right now.
It's fascinating to watch with Sam Bankman-Fried.
So if you've been following the meltdown of FTX, We've covered it on the show.
FTX was the world's second largest crypto exchange market.
And Sam Bankman Freed basically was engaged in what looks very much like fraud.
It looks as though he was essentially taking assets of users over at FTX, they're being held in the exchange, and he was lending them out to Alameda Research, which was an associated hedge fund.
Alameda Research was then using that money in order to prop up FTT, which was the Bitcoin version.
It was the cryptocurrency of FTX, which was used in order to sort of prop up the enterprise value of FTX.
And then they were lending against that stuff.
They were taking that asset base in FTX and they were taking out money and they were borrowing from it and then they were just going and buying themselves really, really nice condos in the Bahamas and having polycules and sex with one another and all of this.
All the people who are involved.
Okay, that's sort of the basic story of what was happening over at FTX.
There's a moral component to this that everybody is going to ignore because we're no longer allowed to talk about morality unless it is left-wing morality.
You can be as immoral and fraudulent as you want to be so long as you are parroting woke nonsense slogans.
So, Fascinating stuff.
There's a new CEO named John Ray who just took over at FTX.
Now he also took over at Enron after Enron started to collapse because he's sort of a cleanup guy.
And here is his first day declaration quote.
I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience.
I've been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history.
I've supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance at Enron.
I've supervised situations involving novel financial structures, Enron and residential capital, and cross-border asset recovery and maximization, Nortel and overseas shipholding.
Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources, and systems integrity.
Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.
Never!
So this is worse than Enron.
So the question is, how did this happen?
How did nobody see this coming?
There are only a million red flags.
Sam Bankman-Fried is a weirdo, the guy who was running FTX.
He was showing up to major conferences wearing gym shorts and a t-shirt and sitting next to Bill Clinton, jabbering about crypto.
He was a person who in his interviews was explicitly talking about the necessity to sort of ignore morality so long as you're using the money for left-wing political causes.
And this was his thing.
He called it effective altruism.
Effective altruism is basically the idea that you should get as rich as you can and then use the money for whatever you want to use it for, the moral causes.
And the left apparently is okay with this, however you get the money, so long as you use that money for moral causes, which is why the Washington Post has a headline about Sam Beckman Freed today, saying that him going down is really going to hurt the fight against the pandemic.
Because he's used some of that money and he's given it to groups that fight the pandemic.
Which is pretty incredible.
Basically, the idea is that prostitution is totally okay so long as you give the money to the church at the end.
That seems to be the idea of effective altruism as practiced by the left.
There's no actual moral standard here except for, do you back the woke projects of the left?
And if you do, then we'll look the other way.
Because here's the thing, Sam Bankman Freed, not only was he funded by an enormous number of hedge funds and big capital, Players in the markets.
He was also being ushered into the halls of respectability by all of the best people and all the best people were not only looking the other way on what he was doing.
They were championing him and talking about how wonderful he was.
I mean, literally today, we find out that the New York Times was supposed to, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, which is a big pusher of effective altruism, they call it something else.
They call it stakeholder capitalism, which we've talked about on the show before.
Shareholder capitalism is the idea that if you're a CEO, you're answerable to the people who own the company, the shareholders.
Stakeholder capitalism is the idea that you're answerable to no one except your own conscience.
Which is Sam Bankman-Friede's idea of effective altruism.
Well, WEF, partner Accenture, and the New York Times were hosting a live event with Sam Bankman-Friede as of next week.
Sitting next to him were supposed to be, I kid you not, Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine, Mark Zuckerberg of MEDA, and the current U.S.
Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen.
Janet Yellen, like the highest ranking people in public life internationally were going to sit next to this guy.
So the question is, how did he get away with it?
And what was the moral system that allowed him to lie to himself and to everybody else?
So he's been... One of the things about Sam Bankman, Freed, is that the guy obviously has some sort of mental issue.
Because just any sane and rational person at this point, given the fact that he's likely to go to jail for a very long time, would shut the hell up and talk to his lawyer.
But he's not doing that, apparently.
Instead, he's texting with a reporter from Vox.
I kid you not.
And these texts are so telling.
They really are.
They're fascinating.
According to Vox, before his empire collapsed, Bankman Freed was actively engaged in lobbying in Washington for a regulatory framework for crypto.
While many crypto CEOs, like Bankman Freed's nemesis, Binance CEO Changpin Zhao of CZ, are openly skeptical of government regulation, Bankman Freed has largely avoided criticizing regulators.
But in our conversation, he dismissed their role.
He characterized his past conciliatory statements, like when he said just last month that some amount of crypto regulation would be definitively good, as little more than PR.
In doing so, he all but confirmed the view of critics who have argued his overtures for Washington were much more about image than substance.
Well, they were about substance.
He wanted his competitors regulated and he wanted himself monopolized.
So he's texting with this reporter.
And the reporter said, you said a lot of stuff about how you wanted to make regulations, just good ones.
Was that pretty much just PR?
And he said, there's no one out there really making sure good things happen and bad things don't.
Yeah, just PR, F regulators.
They make everything worse.
They don't protect customers at all.
And the reporter says, it does seem like some sort of consumer protection would be good though.
Like maybe regulators can't deliver it, but sure does look like consumers lose their shirts a bunch.
He said, it would be good, but regulators can't do it.
Now he's not wrong about this.
You know who could do it?
People acting morally within the purview of social institutions.
But SPF feels no allegiance to that idea.
This is the part of the text interview that is just fantastic.
It's really fantastic, okay?
And I say fantastic in the most cynical way, because he's just saying the quiet part out loud.
Hey, here's the conversation.
He said, the reporter says, I was just re-listening to that conversation we had this summer about whether you should do unethical stuff for the greater good.
And Bank Manfred says, what did I say?
He says, you were like, nah, don't do unethical stuff.
Like if you're running Philip Morris, no one's going to want to work with you on philanthropy.
And there's a risk of doing more harm than good, but even if you subtract that out, pretty not worth it.
I was trying to figure out if that was kind of PR off the cuff answer.
He said, it's not true, really.
Not really.
Everyone goes around pretending perception reflects reality.
It doesn't.
Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known.
Some of his most beloved people are basically shams.
So the reporter asks, the ethics stuff, mostly a front.
People will like you if you win and hate you if you lose.
And that's how it all really works.
And SPF says this.
Yeah.
I mean, that's not all of it, but it's a lot.
The worst quadrant is being sketchy and losing.
The best is win and who cares?
Clean plus lose is bad, but not terrible.
And the reporter says, you're really good at talking about ethics.
For someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers, he said, yeah, he he, I had to be.
It's what reputations are made of to some extent.
I feel bad for those who get effed by it, by this dumb game we woke Westerners play, where we say all the right shibboleths, and so everyone likes us.
Isn't that, I mean, that's kind of riveting stuff, isn't it?
It's kind of fascinating.
So this guy, who is going to be one of the great con men of all time, He was basically covering up for the con by just parroting the woke shibboleths.
So we've set up a new morality.
It's just that our morality is garbage.
And the new morality that we've set up is basically pay off a couple of environmental causes and jabber about the pandemic and throw some money at Democrats and everybody will look the other way.
And in fact, they'll treat you with kid gloves.
You'll have 3,000 word stories in the New York Times talking about how you blew it on crypto with nary a mention of the fact that you gave $40 million to Democrats.
It's amazing.
I mean, the Wall Street Journal is pointing out the relationship between SPF and Democrats.
While cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried's Icarus-like crash could make compelling Netflix material, one storyline that deserves more attention is how the FTX founder tried to buy influence with Democrats in Washington.
Bankman-Fried became a celebrity and spokesman for the cryptocurrency industry by embracing progressive causes and giving liberally.
Literally.
Last year, FTX committed to making its trading platform carbon neutral and promised millions of dollars to climate causes.
He also supported a nonprofit that gave to progressive media outlets like ProPublica, Vox, and The Intercept.
So he was actively funding a bunch of left-wing media outlets.
In an interview with the New York Times last month, he said he planned to give away most of his fortune over the next couple of decades to effective altruistic causes.
After FTX's collapse, he might not have any to give.
His net value is now zero, apparently.
The media loved the 30-year-old, but reports that he leveraged customer funds to make risky bets.
By making his bankrolling of liberal causes inconvenient, Bankman Freed was Democrats' second biggest donor this election cycle after George Soros.
Democrats accounted for more than 90% of his nearly $40 million in political giving.
During a September interview on NBC, he said his goal was to support great public servants, apparently his code for Democrats.
He said his top issue was COVID.
No doubt lockdowns and pandemic transfer payments helped boost trading on his platform.
Bankman Freed's individual donations, mainly went to Democrats, will be crucial to enacting crypto legislation that would affect his company, including Senate Agriculture Committee members Debbie Stabenow, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, and Tina Smith.
He also gave to ranking Republican John Boozman.
FTX backed legislation by Stabenow and Boozman that would assign primary jurisdiction over crypto, brokers, and exchanges to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
That is the legislation.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler is seeking to regulate cryptocurrency as securities, which would have limited Bankman Freed's profit-making activities.
And it is widely suspected that, essentially, Bankman Freed was befriending Democrats in order to keep Gensler off his back.
Plus, his parents, it turns out, have very close personal associations with Gary Gensler.
So, what does all this say?
You know, the idea of cryptocurrency was always that it was a trustless system.
And it is, in the sense that you actually have a blockchain that is designed in order to verify every transaction.
What happens?
Who do you trust with the money?
The fundamental aspect of any functional economy is going to be, as Adam Smith said very long ago in The Theory of Moral Sentiment, which was written before Wealth of Nations.
He talked about the idea that unless you actually had a moral gridwork that undergirded society, there wouldn't be enough social fabric to support functional markets because eventually people are going to have to take heuristic shortcuts.
You can say as much as you want caveat emptor, buyer beware, but the truth is that the way that you function in the world is by finding people you trust and then doing business with them.
What happens if those people don't share a moral system with you?
Or what happens if the ersatz morality that has replaced traditional morality is a morality that is mostly about social causes and political giving?
You don't actually have to share a moral system with somebody who believes in a higher moral precept, doesn't believe in morality at all, who just believes and can cynically use the way that Sam Bankman Freed did.
These systems vote capital in order to escape scrutiny.
This is the thing about economic success.
Very often people will look at the Jews, look at their economic success, the Jews, their economic success.
Well, there are a few reasons for the economic success of the Jews.
One is very, very strong social fabric over the course of time.
The Jews, historically speaking, have had very strong family structures.
This is a point that's been made by the sociologist and historian Robert Nisbet.
And those strong family structures also extend to kinship networks, which is why you see, for example, in the diamond business, right, if you want to use a stereotypical Jewish trade, in the diamond business, a Jew in New York has a cousin in Israel, and they call each other up on the phone without a contract, and they know each other, and they trust each other, and they have the same moral structure, and so they know that they can trade with one another.
It's not restricted to the Jews, by the way.
This is what we would call the marginalized middlemen, as Thomas Sowell discusses.
So ethnic Chinese people in places like Taiwan, in places like South Korea, ethnic Chinese people in places like Singapore.
They tend to be disproportionately successful.
Why?
Because they have these moral and kinship networks that have been built up over time.
Because the basis is the family, and then you extend that morality out more broadly.
So you destroy the family, and then you destroy the broader moral system, and then you have a bunch of people who are sort of wandering around wondering how they can use each other.
And the only way that you can show solidarity is not by a buy-in to any moral system other than the virtue signaling about woke politics or environmentalism.
That is supposed to fill the gap.
And you know what's going to happen?
People are going to exploit that, which is exactly what Sam Bankman Frey did.
He is openly admitting that he exploited that.
Let me read that again.
The reporter says, you were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game of winners and losers.
And he said, it's what reputations are made of to some extent.
This dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.
Right?
This is ESG, environmental social governance systems.
That have been put in place for corporate America and the international corporate sphere.
The idea is we don't actually have to have an old school moral system where people are held to account for their moral breaches.
We'll have a new system and the way that we tell if you're moral is how much money you spend on solar panels.
The way we tell that you're moral is whether there is a great pay imbalance between your female employees and your male employees or how many black people work for a company.
That's the way we tell if you're moral or not.
We don't actually look to Does that person maybe go to church?
Does that person maybe have a solid family structure?
Does that person maybe have a social institution that he is a part of and that is interested in upholding a higher morality?
All that has gone away.
And so what you end up with is atomized individuals who are attempting to form Ersatz social fabric on the basis of political sensibilities.
That is not going to work.
It is going to fail dramatically.
And Sam Bankman-Fried is an excellent example.
And you're going to see a lot more of this.
By the way, he's not the first.
Elizabeth Holmes did the exact same thing with Theranos.
She made all of her inroads based on the idea she was young female exec.
This is how you knew that she was good.
It didn't matter that she was completely defrauding people.
And by the way, harming actual human beings in the process.
Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos was a good one and the way you knew she was good is she she mouthed woke virtue signaling nonsense and she was a young woman and we knew that because she was a young woman this meant that she was just an example of our beautiful societal morality.
That meant she was a deeply immoral con person who's going to go to jail for a very long time now as she should.
Moral fabric requires institutions because morality undergirds those institutions.
When you obliterate the institutions that preserve morality, it is not a short road.
I mean, it's not a long road to the obliteration of the underlying morality itself.
When the underlying morality itself goes, the social fabric goes.
And when the social fabric goes, what you end up with is a bunch of con men who are out there attempting to grab as much cash as possible from one another.
By the way, government is not going to fix this.
The idea that legislation is going to fix this, that the same sort of con men don't exist in the government is a lie.
What do you think most of your politicians are more like?
You think they are more like old school, moral people, wonderful people?
Or do you think they're more like Sam Bankman Freed?
People who are grasping for power and using whatever tool is at their disposal in order to grab that power.
Which do you think?
According to the left, the same people who have essentially sidelined marriage, sidelined traditional morality, suggested all of it is religious bigotry, that we can form an ersatz morality around political causes.
Those same people are like, wow, probably the government can regulate us into this irresistible morality.
If we just use enough compulsion, then things will magically be okay.
It turns out that compulsion is no substitute for baseline moral behavior.
It's amazing.
In the editorial board at the Washington Post, they have a piece talking about how we can just regulate the crypto industry into compliance.
Because as it turns out, did you know the financial industry has never been regulated?
I didn't know that because it's not true.
It's not true.
It turns out that bad people break laws all the time.
It turns out that Bernie Madoff was a lawbreaker.
And he absconded with literally billions of other people's dollars.
So then the notion that you're just going to legislate morality into people is wrong.
Now you can legislate morality out of people.
You can train them using the law that morality is no longer relevant.
We've basically done this with marriage over the course of time with things like no-fault divorce.
But it turns out that you can't legislate people directly into morality.
You have to rebuild a social fabric.
But The idea here is that we are going to not even operate off the basis of thousands of years of morality.
Instead, we're just going to build new legal structures and these creative legal structures will hem people in and fix all of our problems.
This is what the Washington Post says.
Legalism is no substitute for actual morality.
But the Washington Post thinks it is.
They say Sam Bankman Freed's empire died young last week when his cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy.
The details remain scarce.
The bottom line is this.
FTX was supposed to act as a custodian of the funds that customers traded via the service.
Instead, it took billions of dollars of that money and lent it out, including to the trading firm Alameda Research, also owned by Bankman Freed.
To make matters worse, Alameda's assets were largely tied up in FTT, FTX's own digital currency.
Alameda then used this FTT as collateral for a boatload of loans, possibly including the customer funds it received from FTX.
When a CoinDesk report revealed some of this, what ensued was a death spiral.
Investors worried about FTX's solvency scrambled to redeem their assets, sending FTT's value plummeting.
But FTX didn't have their assets.
It had the digital currency FTT and a massive loan to Alameda that the company couldn't return because it too mostly had FTT.
This could classically be called a run on the bank.
The trouble is FTX wasn't supposed to be operating like a bank at all.
The Justice Department, SEC, and Commodities Future Trading Commission are reportedly all now investigating FTX.
The SEC claims it had already begun before the scandal erupted.
They should pursue these cases more vigorously.
What's perplexing is that the SEC and CFTC have done so little, so far.
Even as Bankman Freed wooed them and everyone else in Washington with proposals that would supposedly bring the crypto industry to heel.
That's not a mystery.
We know why.
He was giving them all money.
That would be the reason, guys.
Because he had all of the best friends.
He was hanging out with Bill Clinton.
He was hanging out with Joe Biden.
He was hanging out with all these guys.
That is why they weren't looking at him.
The reason they weren't looking at him is because he was part of the moral core, don't you understand?
The Washington Post says, The entire cryptocurrency industry has proved itself vulnerable to liquidity crisis, if not full-on solvency collapse like the one FTX appears to have suffered.
These catastrophes might have landed Alameda in a hole from which it will never manage to climb out, yet for all the conversation about the need for new laws to regulate cryptocurrency, there are existing rules authorities could have and didn't use.
That, by the way, is true.
The laws are already on the books, so what are they calling for?
You guessed it.
More laws.
That'll fix the problem, guys.
Everybody should be able to spot that this was lawbreaking.
Doesn't matter.
None of it matters.
We need more laws.
Regulators and lawmakers, says the Washington Post, crafting any crypto rules cannot allow consumers to believe their money is safer than it really is or lead businesses to believe they're entitled to bailouts.
Mr. Bankman Freed created an illusion that the cryptocurrency market might actually be a place.
Where ordinary people could safely and responsibly invest their assets.
The truth might be that it will never be.
Either way, investors deserve a regime stricter and more transparent than what they have gotten.
Or maybe what they deserve is a class of people who actively pursue a moral goal that is beyond how much money you give to Greenpeace.
Maybe they ought to pursue a moral goal beyond how much money you give to PFLAG.
Maybe they might pursue the idea that a moral system undergirds all of Western civilization, that when you rip away all the institutions of that, and then when you rip away the morality, there is nothing left except a bunch of Sam Bankman freeds.
Maybe that's the idea.
Alrighty guys, the rest of the show is continuing now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We'll be getting into all the reaction to Donald Trump's 2024 announcement, plus the Wall Street Journal interviews some single people who are discovering that being single isn't all that great.
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