All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 21, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
44:07
The 1,000 Words You Can’t Say At Stanford | Ep. 1635
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Stanford University ceased to change its websites to ban particularly dangerous words.
Evidence mounts that the left's push for economic change truly amounts to a push for economic stagnation.
And the Twitter files continue to provide shocking surprises.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
I talk about them every single show.
Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
Get ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVPN.com slash Ben.
Well, college is a weird place these days.
It has become weirder and weirder since I left college, which was approximately 2004.
I was in law school until 2007.
So I left full campus time about 2007.
So it's been 15 years since I was full time at a college campus.
Things were strange then.
I wrote an entire book about indoctrination on college campuses circa about 2004.
This is going back a ways, but the reality remains that college is getting weirder and weirder.
And now here's the thing.
All of the wokest and most foolish ideas have been mainstreamed into the algorithmic world.
And since we all live in a virtual world, this means that all the stuff that we never thought was going to bleed over into the real world has bled over into the world that we actually live in, the virtual world.
It was very easy back in 2004 when I wrote my book, Brainwashed, about indoctrination on college campuses, for people to say, okay, well, you know, that's just kids in college, who cares?
They're gonna grow up, they'll pay taxes, they'll have kids, they'll buy property, and then they'll move into the real world.
But what if your real world is online?
And what if the people who are defining the online space, the virtual space, are people who believe all of this nonsense?
Well, the pedal is hitting the metal when it comes to Stanford University.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Stanford University administrators in May published an index of forbidden words to be eliminated from the school's websites and computer code, and provided inclusive replacements to help re-educate the benighted.
And they actually put out like a full list, it's a very long list, of words that you should no longer use.
They call it the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.
It's a multi-phase, multi-year project to address harmful language in IT at Stanford.
So you thought this was all just in the liberal arts programs?
Wrong!
It is now in the engineering programs.
Because again, there has to be some sort of content for the engineers to encode.
And if the left creates the content, then the coders are going to have to just encode that content.
And this is the big problem with things like chatbots and AI is that whatever are the premises of the technology, those matter an awful lot because the engineers are there just there to translate the ideas into workable code.
And so you have somebody in the back room saying that we can't use X word, then it just never enters the algorithm and that's what's happening right here.
The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, which sounds about as Orwellian as it's possible to be, is one of the actions prioritized in the Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council and the People of Color and Technology Affinity Group in December of 2020.
The goal, according to Stanford, of the Elimination of Harmful Language initiative is to eliminate many forms of harmful language, including racist, violent and biased language in Stanford websites and code.
The purpose of the website they put up is to educate people about the possible impact of the words we use.
Language affects different people in different ways.
We're not attempting to assign levels of harm to the terms on the site.
We're not attempting to address all informal uses of language.
This website focused on potentially harmful terms used in the United States, starting with a list of everyday language and terminology, and then they provide possible Alternatives as well.
And then they have a giant content warning on the front of this saying this website contains language that is offensive or harmful.
Please engage with this website at your own pace.
You have to take it slowly guys because you never know somebody could be offended.
So they break down the language that they would like to see banned at Stanford University on their websites and all of their tech into several categories.
They start with ableist language.
This would be language that is offensive to people who live with disabilities and or devalues people who lives with disabilities, who live with disabilities.
Some of the some of the things they would like to see banned are things like blind review.
So that'd be like a blind review of papers or a blind review of a study, meaning you don't know who created the study and so you have no bias in the study.
They say instead you should use anonymous review because it unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.
No, it literally means you can't see a thing.
That's what the word blind means.
They say that you shouldn't use the term blind study anymore.
You should use the term masked study.
Instead of saying that somebody committed suicide, you should say somebody died by suicide.
Because if you say somebody committed suicide, this implies that they killed themselves, whereas if they died by suicide, what?
Somebody else killed them?
That would defeat the purpose of it being a suicide.
You're not supposed to use the word crazy.
Instead, you should say surprising or wild, because this trivializes the experience of people living with mental health conditions.
They say that you're not supposed to use the word dumb because it was once used to describe a person who could not speak and implied that the person was incapable of expressing themselves.
Now, let me just ask you this.
When was the last time that you described somebody as a dummy?
And what you actually meant is the way that the word was originally used.
The use of words changes over time.
If you say something is insane, again, saying it like crazy, you're not supposed to use it.
You're also not supposed to say that someone is mentally ill.
Instead, you should say that someone is living with a mental health condition.
Which is, as they might say, wild.
Because, again, the problem is that some mental health conditions are illnesses and others are things like a concussion.
What exactly are we talking about right here?
And they say you shouldn't say paraplegic, you shouldn't say quadriplegic.
I don't even know what's supposed to be offensive about paraplegic or quadriplegic, but apparently this is now very offensive.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, what's playing out right now over at the big tech and social media companies is that it's a pretty dangerous precedent.
It doesn't matter what your politics are or who you voted for.
Everybody should have the right to express themselves freely, but the big tech monopolies, they're not all that interested in that.
Plus, they then monetize your data and make money off of you, which kind of sucks.
Instead of allowing them to do all that, you should do the same thing I do.
Use ExpressVPN.
Free social platforms make their cash by tracking your searches, video history, and everything you click on, and then selling that data to the advertisers.
When you use ExpressVPN on your computer or phone, however, you anonymize much of your online presence.
ExpressVPN hides your unique IP address, making your activity much more difficult to track.
The app encrypts 100% of your network data to protect you from eavesdroppers and cybercriminals.
What I like most about ExpressVPN, it's really easy to use.
One click protects all of your devices.
Secure your internet with the VPN I trust for online production.
Visit expressvpn.com slash ben.
That's e-x-p-r-e-s-s-vpn.com slash ben.
Get three extra months free with my exclusive link.
That's expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more.
Also!
We are reaching the end of the year.
A lot of sleepless nights leading up to Christmas and New Year's.
Well, when you are in your bed, you need to be sleeping.
This is why you need a mattress made just for you.
Helix Sleep makes the magic happen.
I've had my Helix Sleep mattress for years now.
I love it.
I sleep like a baby, even in the midst of a very busy season.
A mattress should never be a one-size-fits-all solution because why should you have to compromise on comfort?
Helix has a sleep quiz.
It matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you.
Because why would you buy a mattress made for somebody else?
I took that Helix quiz.
I was matched with a firm but breathable model because if it's too soft, I get back pain.
And if it doesn't breathe, I tend to heat up at night.
Helix knows that, and so they made me a mattress that is just for me.
Go to HelixSleep.com slash Ben.
Take their two-minute sleep quiz.
Find the perfect mattress for your body and sleep type.
Your mattress will come right to your door for free.
Helix has a 10-year warranty.
You can try it out for 100 nights risk-free.
They'll pick it up for you if you don't love it.
You're gonna love it.
It's not gonna happen.
For a limited time, Helix is offering up to $350 off all mattress orders, plus two free pillows for our listeners.
That's an amazing offer.
Take advantage of it right now at helixsleep.com.
Slash Ben with Helix.
Better sleep starts right now.
Hey, then there's ageism.
So instead of saying that somebody is senile, you're supposed to say that the person is suffering from senility, which doesn't actually change the meaning of the word senile.
You're not supposed to use colonialist language.
What is some colonialist language that's in constant use?
Apparently, some of that colonialist language is, uh, if you say the, um, if you say the Philippine islands, you're supposed to say the Philippines.
All right, culturally appropriative.
You're not supposed to use the word brave anymore.
Stop using the word brave, everybody, because brave was the originally the description of Native American, Native American warriors, because and so that apparently is bad.
So to use a term that people consider good that was originally appropriated from Native American culture, but you're using it for a good thing somehow is bad for Native Americans.
Chief.
That has to be changed.
Because if you call a non-Indigenous person chief, it trivializes both the hereditary and elected chiefs in Indigenous communities.
I'd just like to point out that the word chief has been long in use in the English language.
I'm not sure that it originated with Native American language.
Guru.
You're not supposed to call anybody a guru.
In the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the word is a sign of respect.
Using it casually negates its original value.
Does it?
If I say someone's a guru, again, that's a compliment.
This one is one of my favorites.
You're not supposed to say Pocahontas.
This one, clearly, Stanford just wrote this because Donald Trump kept calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas.
Which, of course, was him blowing the joke.
The joke was Focahontas, right?
So she's fake Pocahontas?
They say you're not supposed to call someone Pocahontas because this is a slur and should not be used to address an indigenous woman unless that is her actual name.
But what if you're addressing a woman who's pretending to be a Native American that way?
Is that also terrible?
You're not supposed to use the term spirit animal anymore.
There's gender-based words that you're not supposed to use either.
Remember, this is Stanford University, one of the top universities in the country, telling you that there's certain language you just should not use.
You're not supposed to use the term preferred for pronouns anymore.
This is amazing.
Amazing.
Just propaganda right here.
Instead of saying preferred pronouns, somebody's preferred pronoun is different than their biological pronoun, you're supposed to just say pronoun.
Their pronoun is X. Why?
Well, because the word preferred suggests non-binary gender identity is a choice and a preference.
It is a choice.
No one is born non-binary gender.
That doesn't exist.
There's no third category of human that is non-gender binary.
There are intersex people, but those are not the same.
The proof of this is that people routinely change their pronouns.
Again, this is part of the full-on leftist agibrop that suggests that your gender choices are entirely biological, but your biological sex is entirely arbitrary.
So apparently you choose your sex, but you don't choose your gender, which is absolutely nonsensical nonsense.
It's just crazy.
You're not supposed to use the term ballsy anymore, because that distributes personality traits to anatomy.
You're not supposed to use fireman or firemen.
You should say firefighters instead because you're implying that most firefighters are men.
Which they are.
Because, once again, sexual dichotomy exists.
You're not supposed to use the term he.
Unless you know the person you're addressing uses he as their pronoun, it is better to use they, or ask the person which pronouns they use.
Which makes every conversation insanely awkward, obviously.
You're not supposed to use the term ladies.
You're not supposed to use the term man.
At all.
Like ever.
You're not supposed to use mankind.
Because the term reinforces male-dominated language, even though everyone has understood for all of mankind's history that mankind refers to both men and women.
You shouldn't use she.
You shouldn't use transgendered like with the ED.
Instead you use transgender.
The term avoids connections that being transgender is something that is done to a person or that some kind of transition is required.
Because after all, they weren't transgendered.
They weren't changed in any way.
They are transgender in that they identify in a particular way.
You also shouldn't say you guys.
Imprecise language.
Imprecise language is terms that utilize euphemisms, vagueness, or inaccurate words to not say what one is trying to say.
So after spending all of this time trying to make your language more inexact, now they're saying you should no longer use inexact language.
You shouldn't use the term abort.
Instead, you should use the term cancel or end because the term could unintentionally raise religious or moral concerns over abortion.
You shouldn't, this one's one of my favorites, you shouldn't use the term American anymore, according to Stanford University.
You shouldn't use the term American.
The term often refers to people from the United States only, thereby insinuating that the U.S.
is the most important country in the Americas.
See, we've always said American to refer to members of the United States population.
And now they're saying American could refer to somebody from El Salvador because they're Central American or Latin American.
Mm-hmm.
Instead, they say you should consider using the term U.S.
citizen, which is gonna make language extraordinarily difficult to use.
Because, for example, if I say, if I'm a leftist and I say, the Dreamers are just as American as anyone else, now I have to say, the Dreamers are just as U.S.
citizen as everyone else.
Which they are not.
That's the entire issue.
You should no longer use the term Hispanic.
Latinx is what they suggest, obviously, because there's not a Latino person alive who uses the term Latinx.
It's made up by a bunch of Karens.
Sorry, another term you're not supposed to use.
You should not use the term straight, because the term implies that anyone who is not heterosexual is bent or not normal.
You should also not use the term thug.
Although the term refers to a violent person or criminal, it often takes on a racist connotation when used in certain circles.
Oh, so it's only sometimes racist, and it depends who says it.
So if a Democrat says the word thug, then it's okay.
If a Republican says the word thug, we're supposed to read black person in there.
I'll leave it to your imagination who's more racist, the person who immediately flashes to a black person when you say thug or the person who just used the words thug to describe a violent person.
Now, the reason that I'm pointing all this out is because all of this stuff, it starts off on the fringes of society and then it is mainstreamed into the rest of society.
And what it amounts to is a flattening of communication.
It amounts to a new code that we all must use in order to appear in well Groomed public circles.
We must all abide by these imaginary rules and we must flatten out the language to be less descriptive in more areas and significantly more descriptive in other areas.
We wouldn't want to use the term cakewalk.
We wouldn't want to use the term black box.
We wouldn't want to use the term ghetto anymore.
None of these the word master is no longer useful because obviously it's about masters and slavery.
Even though the word master, again, has been used in a wide variety of contexts.
If you're a master at a particular craft, this does not mean that you have slaves.
You're no longer supposed to use the term white paper because it assigns racial value connotations based on color.
White as in good.
We're talking about a white paper, like a position paper.
Would you call it a black paper?
How could you even print text on a black paper?
What the hell are you talking about?
Again, the attempt to change language is in essence an attempt to change the way that people think.
And this is part and parcel of a broader left-wing agenda about changing how people think.
So this happens to be with regard to changing sort of the way in which we communicate with each other so as to foreclose the ability for us to contribute clear and cohesive ideas to one another and then have conversations about them, which by the way is the predicate to having a functioning Republican, a functioning Republic.
But that is not the only way in which the left wishes to change things dramatically.
So, I've been spotting over the course of the last month or so, a massive uptick since the Democrats won the last election cycle, or at least did better than expected.
A massive uptick in the number of posts that are coming out from people on the left, encouraging us to think differently about our expectations.
The idea being that as we shift, as we move, as we transition into new eras, we should become more accepting of less.
We should be looking to live with less.
We should look for a less rich language, for example.
We should try to cleanse the language of all implications.
We can speak in binary code, presumably, but only binary code that has been pre-approved by gender diverse counsel.
And then when it comes to the economy, we're supposed to live with less.
We're supposed to adjust our expectations to a better world.
What defines that better world?
Well, the left defines that better world, a fairer world.
Now, there's no actual gauge of fairness in life.
Your fairness may be somebody else's unfairness.
Your version of fairness may include actually oppressing somebody else.
But the idea is that if prosperity has to be put by the wayside for the sake of the better world, that is exactly what we will do.
And this is why you see, for example, the dramatic drive on the left, policy-wise, to pay people for not working.
To increase welfare benefits, to spend up the wazoo, to inflate the currency.
All this creates the conditions for mediocrity.
We talked about linguistic mediocrity, but economic mediocrity is something else that the left prefers.
See, the thing about this is, the thing about the state and state redistribution, the state can only redistribute resources created by somebody else.
Elizabeth Warren always likes to say, you didn't do it on your own, which in a technical sense is true.
Nobody succeeds economically on their own.
They're born into a particular system.
They have particular resources.
They're educated in a particular way.
We are all part of a giant social fabric.
However, the reverse is also true.
The government has no money of its own.
The government does not magically have the ability to create and innovate.
In fact, what government typically does is it redistributes the innovation and creativity of others.
And the more redistribution it does, the more it changes the incentive structure, the less innovation gets done.
The less actual creativity happens, the more things stall out, the more mediocrity you have to redistribute.
When government is particularly heavy, what you end up with is something like the Soviet Union.
No innovation, no growth.
No creativity.
Redistribution of the seven potatoes left in the country so everybody is equal in their misery.
Well, that seems to be the agenda more and more of the Democratic left in the United States.
The New York Post has a good piece by Steve Moore, Casey Mulligan, and E.J.
Antoni talking about the extent to which we are expending extraordinary amounts of money on people who refuse to work in the United States.
Most Americans believe, they say, in a reliable government safety net in America so that when people fall on tough times or lose their jobs, their families will not go hungry, lose their homes, or suffer deprivation.
But most Americans also believe that government assistance should be short-term and aimed at quickly getting people back on their feet, into a job, and on the roads, being financially self-sufficient and a contributor to our economy.
Today's welfare programs are failing to accomplish that goal.
Did you know that families earning half a million dollars a year can receive Obamacare subsidies?
Or that in some states, unemployment insurance benefits can be equivalent to a job with an annual pay of $100,000?
It's shocking, but true, and it might explain why so many businesses can't get workers back on the job almost three years after COVID-19 hit these shores.
Today, there are still at least 3 million fewer Americans working than there were in 2019.
There are many reasons for the worker shortage.
One is that in many states, welfare actually pays you more or nearly as much as respectable middle-class jobs.
Under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, many of the highly effective work requirements which were instituted in the 1996 Bipartisan Welfare Reforms have been eviscerated.
Often, limits for public benefits have also disappeared, while Congress and states have made benefits more generous.
Many programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Food Stamps, are means-tested, so only low-income people qualify for them, but other handouts are not.
Which means that in 24 states, unemployment benefits and Obamacare subsidies for a family of four with no one working are the annualized equivalent of at least the national median household standard.
In 24 states, in other words, you get paid as much to stay at home as you do to make the median in the United States.
In a dozen states, the value of unemployment benefits and Obamacare subsidies exceeds the salary and benefits of the average teacher, construction worker, electrician, firefighter, truck driver, machinist, or retail associate In New Jersey, a family of four can receive benefits equal to an annualized earned income of $108,000 with no one working.
In Connecticut, New Jersey, a family earning $300,000 a year can receive Obamacare subsidies.
New Jersey is a state where a family can earn the equivalent of $100,000 a year if both parents are collecting unemployment and Obamacare subsidies for health care.
In Connecticut, the benefits reach $80,000.
Now, unemployment insurance is at least time-limited to six months in most states.
But while Americans are receiving those benefits, the financial incentive to jump into the job market is low.
And again, a lot of this has to do with a restructuring of how work is supposed to work.
About how life is supposed to work.
The job, in the view of much of the Democratic Party now, is radical redistributionism with the goal of mediocrity for everyone.
Equality and mediocrity.
This apparently is the case of Jamal Bowie over at the New York Times.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
First, it is very difficult to find good employees.
I mean, really, really rough.
We've had a labor shortage in this country for a long time.
There are 3 million fewer people working now than there were in 2019.
A lot of people are just staying out of the workforce and that means that you really have to find the best people to fill that job opening.
This is why you need a Zip Recruiter.
A Zip Recruiter makes hiring during the holiday season a lot easier.
Now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com slash dailywire.
ZipRecruiter uses powerful technology to find and match the right candidates up with your job.
You can easily review these recommended candidates and set up personal invites to your top choices so they're much more likely to apply.
ZipRecruiter also has an easy-to-use dashboard with a complete suite of tools that lets you filter, review, and rate your candidates all from one place.
Discover the joy of hiring with ZipRecruiter.
Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within day one.
See for yourself.
Head on over to this exclusive web address.
Try ZipRecruiter for free.
ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire.
Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash D-A-I-L-Y-W-I-R-E.
ZipRecruiter is indeed the smartest way to hire.
Go check them out right now at ZipRecruiter.com slash DailyWire and try them out for free.
Also, are you paying too much for your cell phone coverage?
The answer, undoubtedly, is yes.
If you're using one of the big guys, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, you are paying for probably unlimited data.
Are you using unlimited data?
Has anyone ever used unlimited data?
Instead, why not get Talk, Text, and Blazing Fast data for $30 a month?
Pure Talk gives you the same network, the same towers, the same coverage as the other guys at half the price.
Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas.
Pure Talk's U.S.-based customer service team makes the switch incredibly easy.
It can feel good knowing you're supporting a veteran-owned business as well.
When you go to puretalk.com and enter code SHAPIRO, you'll save an additional 50% off your very first month of coverage.
There's no reason to pay Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile over $80 a month for wireless services when you can get the exact same service on the same network at Pure Talk for half the price.
They literally use the same tower network as one of the big guys.
Head on over to puretalk.com, enter code SHAPIRO, save 50% off your very first month of coverage.
That's puretalk.com.
Promo code SHAPIRO for 50% off your very first month of coverage.
Pure Talk is simply smarter wireless.
I've made the switch.
It's super simple.
You'll be saving money right from the get-go.
And again, head over to puretalk.com.
When you use code SHAPIRO, you get 50% off your very first month of coverage in the first place.
So Jamal Bowie has a piece at the New York Times today, titled a 200-year-old argument on behalf of the many against the few.
And the argument that Jamal Bowie makes is that individual rights ought to be completely curbed in favor of a majoritarian mobocracy that crams down redistribution of all wealth in the United States.
Jamila Bui says, In my column this year, I've tried to emphasize the extent to which there are competing traditions, competing notions, of American freedom and Republican democracy.
One says that freedom is a matter of non-interference and limited government, that we are free when the state steps aside and individuals are left to flourish or fail of their own accord.
It says that government, or at least the national government, has no real role to play in shaping our social and economic order, and that as the aphorism goes, the best government is that which governs the least.
The other tradition takes a more activist view of government and a more expansive view of democracy.
Ah, it's more democratic.
See, the most democratic is where you have no individual rights, but the people, writ large, can decide what you ought to have and what you ought not to have.
It says that economic domination by wealthy entrenched interests is just as dangerous to liberty as an overbearing government, and that majoritarian democracy is the necessary and essential safeguard against the narrow interests of an otherwise unaccountable elite.
Now, of course, that's true, that democracy is supposed to counter the tendency of oligarchy.
However, if the oligarchy is creating rules in which the government does not interfere to steal people's property and redistribute it, the oligarchy is not acting on its own behalf in that.
Everybody is still playing by the same rules.
Oligarchies typically centralize resources to themselves.
They do not seek to divest power from the centralized government.
Oligarchies want more power in the centralized government.
They don't wish to spread it down to the lowest levels of American government.
Charles Beard tried to make this case, a very famous American economist in the early 20th century.
He tried to make the case that the founding fathers were essentially oligarchs trying to preserve their own private property.
His historical case has been widely debunked.
It is not true, but it still stands as sort of the high watermark for lefty economic thought when it comes to the American founding.
And Jamal Bowie is still echoing it.
He highlights in his column a treatise from a person named Thomas Skidmore, who you've not heard of because pretty much nobody has heard of Thomas Skidmore.
And he wrote a treatise called The Rights of Man to Property, being a proposition to make it equal among the adults of the present generation.
So what exactly does Skidmore say?
Skidmore was at the time of his writing a machinist who had taken a prominent role in the newly formed New York Working Men's Party.
He wrote the platform, which included a call for land redistribution to every man and unmarried woman over the age of 21, an end to commercial monopolies, and an end to the hereditary transfer of wealth.
So, in other words, what Jamal Bowie is calling for is for the great centralization of all property in the national government, and then a redistribution of the property on a per capita basis, but no hereditary passing down of the property.
So you build up your property over the course of your life and then your kids are left back at square one the minute that you die.
Now how that would work in actual operation makes no sense because obviously some people live longer than others.
So what do you redistribute the property every seven years?
Is it done on a time calendar?
Is it done on the basis of as each person dies we redistribute the property back into the general population?
And how exactly does property get added or subtracted along those bases?
But it's enough to suggest that equality is the motivating factor in American life for Jamel Bowie to be into this.
The plan was straightforward, says Jamel Bowie.
The people of New York, to whom he was primarily writing, would adopt a new constitution that would abolish all debts and renounce most private property.
Now, of course, abolishing all debts means that no one will ever lend again.
If you keep abolishing debts, it means that there is no purpose to lending because people can just avoid the debt.
If you renounce private property, it reduces all incentive for innovation and creativity.
But, Jamal Bowie says, all of this is good.
He says, nearly 200 years later, Skidmore's book still stands as a powerful rebuke to the twin ideas that some Americans are deserving, while others are not.
And that some are more equal than others, to coin a phrase.
Well, I mean, you didn't coin that phrase.
George Orwell coined that phrase in Animal Farm to refer to the treatment of people under communism.
And some animals are more equal than others.
In any case, He suggests that whatever you think of Skidmore's proposals, his vision of radical democratic equality resonates in the face of our deep and persistent material and political inequality.
Now this is what the left has to push because they cannot push the idea that there has not been radical increase in living standard for virtually everybody on earth over the course of the last 50 years.
There has.
Your living standard today in the United States is significantly better than it was 50 years ago.
Your living standard, no matter which bracket of income you actually live in now, is way better than it was 30 years ago.
Why?
Because of innovation, products and services.
No one had a cell phone in 1980.
Very few people had two TVs in 1980.
All of the things that we take for granted in modern life, like the fact that you can literally punch into a phone any product on earth and it will arrive at your door in three days or less for a price that you can probably afford.
That is a testament to freedom and innovation.
It's a testament to the basic notion that human creativity is a key to expressing not only the spirit of the individual, but to the prosperity of everyone.
But the left doesn't believe in that because it means some people are going to succeed more than others.
The byproduct of innovation is that some people succeed more than others.
Some people are better at innovation.
Some people are worse.
Some people get lucky.
Some people don't.
All of that can be true, but the byproduct of an innovative system is one where everybody does better.
The left's economic plan, however, is economic flattening.
And so the way that you convince people this is a good idea is by telling people to lower their standards.
If we all just lower our standards, everything would be better.
It's the same way they address education.
Sure, a lot of people are failing out.
Sure, a lot of people can't go to top-notch schools because they're not doing well in school.
Well, the best thing to get rid of the tests.
Get rid of the MCAT for medical school.
Get rid of the LSAT for law school.
Get rid of the SAT.
Just flatten out the standards and everyone will be better off, except everyone is worse off.
Because a society in which there are some people who succeed and some people who fail, but everybody generally moves up is better than a society where no one succeeds and no one fails.
But overall the society stagnates.
Now there's a very simple test that I've talked about before that I often use when distinguishing whether someone is a smart person or a stupid person.
The test is this.
Would you rather be the smartest person in a given society or would you rather be the stupidest person in a given society?
Most stupid people will say they would rather be the smartest person in a given society because this means that you dominate.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
You'd rather be the king of Afghanistan than to be a welfare case in the UK.
Well, the thing is that that's probably not true.
That's probably not true.
If you live in absolute primitive standards, That's not materially better.
That's why smart people will say, I'd rather live in a society of geniuses and be the dumbest guy on the line.
Because that means, in a world filled with geniuses, you know how amazing life is going to be?
As the world gets more innovative, as the world gets more creative, the world gets better.
Point made by Marion Toopey and Superabundance.
It's very clear, for example, that you can literally take any product on earth and it has gotten cheaper over the course of time.
The most obvious example is light.
The number of hours that you would have had to expend in the year 1700 to get a couple of hours of light at night.
Remember, the sun went down, nobody had an artificial source of light except for things like whale fat or seed oil or something.
The stuff that you used, wax, the stuff that you used in order to power your lamp.
was very expensive at the time.
Now, you flip on your lights, you leave them on all night, and you don't even think about it.
That is because of human innovation and human creativity.
So if you want to even everything out, what you have to do is make the actual case people should live worse lives.
This is how you end up with a piece, like this one over at the Atlantic, called The Home Ownership Society Was a Mistake.
By Jerusalem and Demsas, real estate should be treated as consumption, not investment.
So instead of aiming at buying your own home, we should, you know, go to the European model in which everybody rents your home and then you die.
Or you rent an apartment and then you die.
Because after all, if we get caught behind the real estate eight ball, then we may have to pay the price for that.
But of course, the basic idea of homeownership is independence.
That's the difference between owning and renting.
If you're renting, then you are subject to the whims of somebody else.
Your rent can be raised on you.
The rules can be changed on you.
Or maybe you're just not paying enough rent and you get tossed out.
You buy your own home and now you're in control of your fate.
That's always been an American ideal.
But we're supposed to lower our expectations now because of this stagnation to come.
Says Jerusalem's MSAS.
It's a truth universally acknowledged that an American in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a mortgage.
I don't know if you should buy a house nor am I inclined to give you personal financial advice, but I do think you should be wary of the mythos that accompanies the American institution of homeownership and of a political environment that touts its advantages while ignoring its many drawbacks.
Now listen, obviously there are costs to owning a home.
It's more expensive in many cases to own than to rent.
However, the independence that comes with owning a home and the wealth creation that occurs if you buy in a smart way obviously is good.
Says this columnist for The Atlantic, Renting is for the young or financially irresponsible, or so they say.
Home ownership is a guarantee against a lost job, against rising rents, against a medical emergency.
It's a promise to your children you can pay for a college or wedding or that you can help them one day join you in the vaunted halls of ownership society.
In America, home ownership is not just owning a dwelling in the land it resides on.
It is a piggy bank where the bottom 50% of the country stores most of its wealth.
It is not a natural market phenomenon.
It's propped up by numerous government interventions, including a 30-year fixed rate mortgage.
America's put a lot of weight on this one institution's shoulders.
Too much.
Now, it is true the government should be less involved in home ownership.
You should only buy a home if you can afford it.
But the answer here is to get the government less involved and to continue to push home ownership as like an actual value that is worth promulgating.
This person is saying we should all just get out of the home ownership mode and go back to renting.
Live in small apartments along the Champs-Élysées or something.
The consensus that homeownership is preferable to renting obscures quite a few rotten truths about when homeownership doesn't work out, about whom it doesn't work out for, that its gains for some are predicated on losses for others.
Speaking in averages masks the heterogeneity of the homeownership experience.
That's the key line.
That's the key line for all democratic policy proposals at this point.
If you speak in averages, you mask the heterogeneity of the homeownership experience.
Just get rid of the word homeownership and that is the whole deal.
Get rid of freedom.
Search for mediocrity instead.
Why?
Because if we speak in terms of averages, then what you're going to do, if I say, for example, as I have, that the average living standard in the United States has risen dramatically over the course of the last 30 years, this forgets the fact that some people win and some people lose.
No, it doesn't.
It speaks in terms of averages, because when you're making public policy, it's the greatest good for the greatest number.
That's why it's public policy.
When you're making the rules for the road, of course you're going to speak in terms of averages.
Because literally every system, including the quote-unquote most equal systems, have winners and losers.
As Stalin could have told you from his Dasha.
But the idea here is that when you remove all of the vicissitudes, the ups and downs of life, the winners and the losers, and by the way, most of us across the course of our life will in fact experience the winning and the losing.
People are wealthier at the age of 50 than they were at 20.
People go up and down in terms of income brackets.
When you remove all those vicissitudes, when you remove the idea of winners and losers, you end up with a middle.
But the middle happens to be a much lower middle than it would be if you averaged out the winners and losers in a free society.
In just a second, we'll see how this actually reflects itself in terms of the media pushing systems that are destined to fail with absolute alacrity and enthusiasm.
They're going to convince you that your life is going to be better off if it's more mediocre.
We'll get back to this in just one second.
But before I continue, I wanted to pay tribute to a person who's a continual source of positivity, inspiration in my day-to-day experience here at The Daily Wire.
One of the most emotionally knowing people out there.
One of the people who is most in touch with his inner being.
As the saying goes, hire people who are better than you are.
I helped hire Matt Walsh several years ago when he was changing the world from the driver's seat of his van.
Now he's not just changing the world at large, but he's changing my world by actually forcing me to read a one minute ad.
for Matt Walsh because I lost a dumb election bet to him that I never should have made.
I sincerely mean every single word of all the compliments I'm about to pay to Matt Walsh.
He was the kindest, gentlest, most wonderful person I've ever met.
Matt's documentary, What is a Woman?
Might be the best piece of journalism ever to appear on film.
His books are spectacular.
Perhaps the most extraordinary of all is the giant walrus plushie.
It is big, soft, and cuddly.
I didn't steal it.
I don't have it.
I don't know where it is.
It may have taken four grown men to carry it into the Daily Wire building, but on more than one occasion, I've seen Matt carry it around with just one hand.
And now that it's missing, Gotta say, wasn't me.
If there is one man who truly lives up to his pronouns of handsome and brilliant, even though that makes no sense because those are adjectives, it is THE Matt Walsh.
I'm eternally thankful to have the opportunity of working alongside this intellectual and emotional giant of our era.
One day, I hope to have a beard that is just as wonderful as Matt Walsh's.
And frankly, I hope that my wife allows me to have a beard.
Matt Walsh does need the beard, but it's not because he's really ugly underneath the beard.
It's because he's just so darn handsome that the beard festoons his face, that glorious visage with just the world's most lumberjacky, odd.
Anyway, The Matt Walsh Show streams every Monday through Friday.
Eastern on dailywire.com.
Also, my book club, Ben Shapiro's book club, is back tomorrow for our final episode of 2022 at 8, 7 Central, only on Daily Wire+.
This month's book is The Screwtape Letters by C.S.
Lewis.
It's a fantastic book.
It really is moving and it is brilliant.
It is witty.
It's funny.
You have to be an All Access member to join in on the fun.
Head on over to dailywire.com slash Ben and become a member today.
Join us tomorrow at 8, 7 Central as we discuss The Screwtape Letters.
That is dailywire.com slash Ben.
I will see you there.
All right.
So again, the push for the mediocre is something that the left has to push because the outcome of their programs is generally not widespread prosperity.
It is ever shrinking prosperity, but in equal measure.
This is why you see every so often, there's just an article in a mainstream publication talking about why you should eat bugs.
And most of us look at that like, I'm not eating a bug.
Why would I eat a bug?
And they're like, well, no, no, no.
You're going to eat bugs and you're going to like eating bugs.
You will love eating bugs.
For example, late November, the Washington Post runs an article called Salted Ants, Ground Crickets, Why You Should Try Edible Insects.
I'm gonna go no on that, Bob.
That sounds awful.
But no, you're gonna love it.
On a clear August morning in southeastern Pennsylvania, more than a dozen adults and children stood in a park pavilion listening to mealworms sizzling in a hot pan.
They were learning about entomophagy, the human consumption of insects, from Lisa Sanchez, a naturalist with the Lancaster County Department of Parks and Recreation, who has taught the practice for 25 years.
Suddenly, one mealworm sputtered out of the pan.
Six-year-old Adeline Welk popped it into her mouth.
The crowd cheered.
It's not bad, she explained.
It kind of tastes like kettle corn.
It's not that bad is the slogan of the left.
It's not that bad!
Well, maybe it is, and you're just convincing yourself it's not that bad.
Maybe it really does suck, like a lot, to eat bugs.
Maybe we've spent entire periods of human civilization trying to avoid eating the bugs.
And yet now you're trying to convince everybody that eating the bugs is like the best thing that you could do, apparently.
Again, this is a widespread notion that if we live a worse life, suddenly things will be better.
It's something that has been pushed by, for example, Klaus Schwab, The international supervillain who leads Davos and the World Economic Forum.
He literally writes in his book, The Great Reset, about how it might not be so bad if we actively lower living standards.
He argues that we should try to decrease global GDP in the name of priorities like climate action, sustainability, inclusivity, global cooperation, health and well-being.
This is a direct quote.
Quote, we might even find we can live with such a scenario quite happily, meaning a lower GDP, a worse economic life.
We can do all that in the name, not of the future, in the name of equality, in the name of fairness.
Now, the reality is, of course, that what you end up with is just garbage.
This is what's happened with the National Health Service in Britain.
So, remember that the left would love a nationalized health system.
In fact, they make the argument explicit.
There's an entire article by a columnist over at the New York Times, Thomas Frank, the person who wrote What's the Matter with Kansas, in which he suggested that Kansans should get on board with socialism.
It didn't work out that well for him.
But in any case, he's been arguing for literally years that the left needs to push for more leftism, hard leftism.
The Democratic Party needs to push harder and harder and harder.
So, for example, when he talks about health care, he says that they need universal health care.
Right, sizable majorities of Americans definitely want universal health care.
But as I've talked about before, every policy comes with attendant drawbacks and benefits.
When you look at the National Health Service in Britain, it is a bleep show.
And it is a bleep show specifically because when you redistribute and change the innovation standards, when you change all of the incentive structures, what you end up with is a significantly worse world.
There's actually, believe it or not, a fabulous article in the New York Times about this, this week, titled, One Day with an Ambulance in Britain.
Long wait, rising frustration.
Rachel Perry and Wayne Jones, two paramedics with the Wrexham Ambulance Service, pulled up to a hospital in northern Wales with a patient just after 10 a.m.
one early December morning.
That's when their wait began.
It would be 4.30 p.m.
before their patient, a 47-year-old woman with agonizing back pain and numbness in both of her legs, would be handed over to the emergency department of Wrexham Mailer Hospital.
It was more than 12 hours since she had first called 999, the British equivalent of 911.
So imagine that in the United States, you fall down, you now have numbness in both of your legs and agonizing back pain, and it takes the ambulance 12 hours to reach you.
12 hours, not 12 minutes, 12 hours.
First of all, if it were 12 minutes in the United States, people would scream at you.
Now it's 12 hours in the UK.
Harry says we start with an apology now.
Every job is like they open the front door.
Hi, we're sorry we're late.
That has become the norm.
The sight of ambulances lined up for hours outside hospitals has become distressingly familiar in Wales, which last month recorded its worst wait times ever for life-threatening emergency calls.
But the problem is far from isolated.
Ambulance services in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland are also experiencing record high waits.
It's a near-crisis situation experts say signals a breakdown of the compact between Britain's and their revered National Health Service, that the government will provide responsible, efficient healthcare services, mostly free, across all income levels.
Inequality is the byword, and the result is 12-hour wait times for an ambulance.
The issue will be cast into sharp relief on Wednesday, when ambulance service staff in England and Wales staged the first of two strikes over low wages and deteriorating work conditions.
They're scheduled to walk out again next week.
So you have a nationalized health service in which the doctors, nurses, ambulance workers can strike against the public interest over low wages and bad work conditions.
Yeah, things are going great over there.
This will be the latest walkout in a period of intense labor strife in Britain, with a series of strikes planned across the country during the holidays.
Nurses are staging their second one-day strike on Tuesday.
Rail workers and border control workers at airports will begin several days of strikes later in the week.
Countless harrowing incidents have called attention to the ambulance problem in Britain, including that of an elderly man whose family covered him with a tarp as he waited seven hours after falling outdoors, and a 17-year-old soccer player who waited for four hours lying on a rainy field after suffering a neck injury.
Apparently, there's an acute lack of beds in the accident and emergency departments.
They're overcrowded because of an inability to find room for patients elsewhere in the hospital.
That's because patients ready to be discharged from the hospital often have nowhere else to go as a result of dwindling social care services, which have been hobbled by a lack of government funding and severe staffing shortages.
So now they're blaming it on lack of government funding.
We need more government funding.
That'll solve the problem.
Or maybe the problem is when you shifted all the incentive structures, you have now entered an infinite regress of government dependency.
We need the government to fund this.
How do you get the government to fund it?
You raise the taxes.
On whom?
On the businesses.
The businesses produce less.
How do we get them to produce more?
Gotta nationalize the businesses.
Now the nationalized businesses don't produce nearly as well as they did before.
What do we do?
We raise the taxes.
Well, you can't do that.
You spend more.
You spend more, and it turns out you've now debased the currency.
Well, what do you do now?
Well, maybe you try to borrow.
Well, nobody actually wants to borrow because they see that your industry is struggling.
So what do you do now?
Well, austerity measures.
You cut the services.
But if you cut the services, that's the whole problem in the first place.
Once you screw up the incentive structures, the mediocrity gets worse.
It is not as though you just freeze things in place.
You freeze things at the beginning.
Then things get worse, and they get worse, and they get worse, and they get worse.
So there's only one thing that advocates for this sort of policymaking can do.
And that is to get you used to the new normal.
The new normal in which they pay you to stay home if you're in the United States and you say that you're on disability even when you're not.
The new normal in which in Britain you wait 12 hours for an ambulance.
The new normal in which you think about eating bugs.
These are extreme examples, obviously, although the ambulance situation in Britain is an actual real crisis.
But if the left can convince you that a mediocre standard of living is what you should be shooting for, maybe you'll give them a little bit of a break when in fact their preferred policies result in a worse life for you materially and a worse life for future generations.
All in the name of some utopian goal of fairness that has never existed in heaven or on earth.
This belief system, Thomas Sowell called it the quest for cosmic justice, that you can create the curative for human inequality, that you can destroy innovation in the name of a better redistribution of intelligence, means, the world's resources.
Work ethic.
You can do all that?
You cannot.
You cannot, nor should you.
Because if you do, you make life worse for literally everyone.
Alrighty, folks, the rest of the show is continuing right now.
You're not going to want to miss it.
We will be getting into all of the latest on the Twitter files from reporter Michael Schellenberger, who broke some astonishing information about the collusion between the FBI and Twitter.
▲
Export Selection